56. 2001 & A Bit
26 October 1976
With highly honourable mentions to ‘Lips, or Almighty Cod’ and ‘It Might As Well Be String’, we come now to the undisputable[1] classic of Series 6. Taking the 1975 dystopian film Rollerball as inspiration, ‘2001 & A Bit’ gives us the quintessential 1970s future, held bookended in this moment at a 25-year remove both from the present-day that envisaged it and from the current present-day looking back! The distance of said future is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, the ‘& A Bit’ suggesting a distinct vagueness as to what would actually change and how many years it would take to do so.[2]
We’re given Bill’s metrosexual top-knot, pointless mechanical innovation (remote-control walking shoes), and a violence-seeped/inured boredom leading to a yearning for bygone years—specifically 1976!—as embodied by a long-forgotten game called cricket…
Charles is king. Margaret Thatcher fronts the five pound note. Old white men are still in charge: the agèd Tim, grown fat and affected and more Union-Jack-waistcoated than ever. But the youth, too, remain disaffected and a new social uprising awaits; two, in fact: Graeme Oddie’s nihilistic violence-beyond-Rollerball versus Tim Garden and Bill Brooke-Taylor’s ‘nostalgia punk’; ie. a doddering throwback to the ‘anything, anytime’ antics of their dads!
Unsurprisingly, this clash of ideologies brings about the end of the world… again.
Such, already, was the fodder for a top-flight Goodies episode; but then came the masterstroke: swapping identities. From their debut in 1970’s ‘Tower of London’ onwards, the Super Chaps had endeared themselves in no small way by using their own names—and to an extent their own personality traits—for their characters: Tim’s love of cricket, for instance, or Bill’s pop-star aspirations; Graeme’s ongoing dalliance with the banjo. Now, through the conceit of heteropaternal superfecundated triplets born to Raquel Welch(!), they had a stab at playing not merely themselves but each other.
The results are sublime. Tim is the best, I think, brilliantly capturing the essence of Graeme. Graeme, in turn, does an outstanding Bill; and Bill, though occasionally slipping into Bill-like habits, does a pretty good Tim! The episode is worth a few re-watches devoted solely to conscious appreciation of how well the three Goodies have observed and then absorbed each other’s personas over the years.
The generational take on body-swapping affords new scope for the lads to poke fun at themselves and each other, most gloriously through Graeme Oddie’s impassioned defence of his dad’s brainless propensity for violence…
…and in the meta-not-quite-awareness of Bill and Tim’s rousing-turned-hapless call to arms: ‘Goo-dies! Goodie-goodie thing, thing’.
What better shout-out to the majesty that was—and still is—the Goodies of 1976?
[Graeme: You think I’m mindless? Look into those eyes. Look into them! Nothing. Not one single, solitary thought ever crossed that mind except bashing. people’s. faces in… He was a great man.]
Jacob Edwards, 26 October 2026
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[1] And yes, I realise this is hyperbole. Dispute to your heart’s content!
[2] In 2007 Flight of the Conchords would casually reduce this notion so far into unquantified absurdum as to end up earlier than they started, dating the eponymous Distant Future (EP) to ‘the year 2000’.