Comic Strip free at Phoenix Arts Club

Comic Strip free at Phoenix Arts Club – Monday 2nd September 7.30 till 10.00pm.
1.  Four Men In A Plane 32 mins (2000)
2.  The Hunt for Tony Blair 46 mins (2011)  RARE SCREENING
3.  Red Top 46 mins  (2016) RARE SCREENING
4.  Four Men In Car 8 minutes (1998) Director’s Cut. A special sequence
Q&A with Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson & special Comic Strip guests to be announced.

Tickets are free and limited to 1 person + guest. Please arrive early to guarantee entry.

Peter Richardson, the founder creator of The Comic Strip Presents took his first six filmed Comic Strip  specials to Channel 4 TV for their opening night in the Autumn of 1982 with Five Go Mad In Dorset. He is a screenwriter, actor, and film director. In 1985 The Supergrass starring Peter Richardson and Alexei Sayle went large, theatrically, running for six weeks in London’s West End. This followed hard-on-the-heels of the success of their fictional filmed Rock group Bad News and two Comic Strip films about this group of musicians who later then actually made records and toured Rock Festivals. Peter’s Comic Strip Films have produced some 42 films for successful Cinema & TV Distribution across four decades. In 2011 The Hunt For Tony Blair was BAFTA Nominated for The Best TV Comedy Programme of 2012. In 2016 The Comic Strip produced Red Top about the phone tapping undertaken by the Sun newspaper.
The regular cast of Comic Strip notables featured the late Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, the late Robbie Coltrane, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Keith Allen, Alexei Sayle, Phil Cornwell, Stephen Mangan, Harry Enfield, and the late John Sessions.
Four Men In A Plane (2000) reprises 4 Salesmen from 1998’s Four Men In A Car, played by Comic Strip regulars, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson. Salesmen Alan, Ian, Tim, and the pushy Tony, are on a plane on their way to a sales conference. Alan joins the mile high club with a model in the toilet, but Tim is annoyed that he is two air miles short of joining the others in club class. On arrival in North Africa they decide to charter a plane rather than face a fifteen hour coach journey across the desert  to the conference. This is where things start to go badly wrong.

Comic Strip: The Hunt For Tony Blair (2011)

This film was nominated for a BAFTA as Best Comedy TV Programme of 2012, and for the British Comedy Awards, Best Comedy Drama 2011.The main cast features Robbie Coltrane as Inspector Hutton, Stephen Mangan as Tony Blair, Nigel Planer as Peter Mandelson, Harry Enfield as Alistair Campbell, Jennifer Saunders as Margaret Thatcher, Peter Richardson as George W Bush, James Buckley as the Police Sergeant, Rik Mayall as Professor Predictor, John Sessions as Donald Rumsfeld and Norman Tebbit, Ford Kiernan as Gordon Brown, Ross Noble as The Socialist, Catherine Shepherd as Cherie Blair, and Ronni Ancona as Barbara Windsor
Guardian Review by Sam Wollaston 14th October 2011 (Edited)

”It’s the 1950s, London. Cor blimey, there’s a right ol’ pea souper going on out there. The prime minister, Tony Blair, is at home in Downing Street saying goodnight to his children and signing copies of his memoirs … suddenly there’s a knock on the door. It’s the Feds, or the Old Bill as they were back then; they have a warrant for Blair’s arrest. The charge? Murder.
Blair makes a run for it and the boys in blue give chase, blowing their whistles. We’ve got a manhunt on our hands. And a strange political-satire-meets-50s-film-noir-pastiche hybrid.
Mangan’s got some of Blair’s speech inflections, the demonic grin, the all-round irritating twerpishness off perfectly. But he’s not simply trying to be Blair, as Michael Sheen has done so well in the past. He also leaves something of himself in there, and of course a fugitive in an old movie … the result, perhaps surprisingly, is a joy. I enjoyed Nigel Planer’s Peter Mandelson, too.
Another reason why it works is its inventiveness and imagination; there’s a lovely bonkers-ness about it. Like the whole black-and-white 50s thing – why? And what’s Barbara Windsor (Ronni Ancona) doing there? Who knows, you just have to relax and go along for the ride. it’s also rather beautiful. And George Bush (Peter Richardson) is not the usual redneck idiot cowboy, but … a mafia boss!
“Let me tell you something Tony, I’m gonna fuck Iraq,” he tells Blair in a smoke-filled basement casino, while chief henchman/whacker Donald Rumsfeld (John Sessions) stands by making threats.
Oh yes, that’s the other reason this film works: good lines, and good jokes. Blair-bashing may be tired and boring, but here they ramp it up to a new level. So he’s killing people, but not just unfortunate people in a far-off land. Now he’s killing them at home, close-up and personal – a policeman clairvoyant, his old friend Robin Cook (Tony Curran) a random old Labour bloke on the train. And the Tory thing. He’s not just a bit of a Thatcherite … he shags Thatcher! She is played, extraordinarily, as a Hollywood temptress, by Jennifer Saunders” (A Norma Desmond-like recluse, parodying the 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard), “Well, to be more accurate, she shags him. Ha-ha-ha. I mean vile, and sordid, and inappropriate, and verging on the downright wrong. But also very funny.

And when I wasn’t laughing I was wondering one thing – as surely everyone else was: is Tony watching?”

Comic Strip Presents … Red Top (2016).

“So funny, it’s uncanny: did the Comic Strip hack the Guardian?” said Guardian’s TV Reviewer Sam Wollaston on January 21st 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jan/21/comic-strip-presents-red-top-funny-uncanny-hack-guardian
Great turns come in the shape of  Maxine Peake as Rebekah Brooks, Russell Tovey as former Sun Newspaper Editor Andy Coulson. Comic Strip original Nigel Planer as Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Mangan as Tony Blair, again, Harry Enfield as Eastenders Ross “listen, slag” Kemp, Eleanor Matsuura as a dynamic Wendi Deng turned-Bond Girl-meets-Kill Bill-hybrid, plus Johnny Vegas as a phone tapping Sun Journalist, and Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson as TV host ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris.

Trailer – The Hunt For Tony Blair https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY97PQw3xps
Trailer – Red Top https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEbEIQnfF_Y
Trailer –  Four Men In A Plane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G30duNfx0mI