Article in Mid/West Hampshire Observer

Welcome to the world of The Boosh
A zoo-illogical study by Richard Williams

If you thought the only reason for having BBC3 was the blank screen before 7pm then think again, because this week saw the start of something slightly different, something that will capture hearts and minds like a big fishing net full of guts and brains. Yes ladies and gentlemen, after years of waiting, The Mighty Boosh are finally on TV.

Formed several hundreds of years ago, The Mighty Boosh consist of Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, two Œcomedians∂ who over the past six years have teamed up to produce some of the most surreal and funny moments ever seen on a stage.
Their first show, the aptly titled "Mighty Boosh", stormed the 1998 Edinburgh Festival winning the Perrier Best Newcomer Award. "Catch the vision, smell the dream." said an acceptant Noel. Featuring the zoo-keeping characters of Vince Noire (a squashed Elvis) and Howard Moon (a Leeds brute). The show originally ran in the upstairs theatre of the Hen & Chickens pub in Islington, then the world started to take notice and
Soon the boys were a global entity, jetting off to the Melbourne comedy festival and winning an Australian audience who remain fanatical to this day.

Without pausing for breath, they roped in Richard Herring (of Lee and Herring fame), paid him a directors fee and were off round the country with Artic Boosh, a show that featured Noire and Moon as bored postmen, sent on a mission to the frozen tundra to find the mythical egg of Mantumbi.
Along the way they encounter such characters as Uncle Pedro, a dancing Yetti and the terrifying Mr. Jiffy, described as a 10 foot mish mash of envelopes, bubble wrap and evil. More awards and more fans followed.

And then came Auto Boosh. In a previous life I used to work at The Tower Arts Centre in WInchester. We had booked the two previous shows and had loved them, so when the call came
asking us if we’d like a four night warm-up of the new piece, we jumped at the chance. It was quite some four nights.
Watching The Boosh spend hours working out ideas, changing characters and endlessly improvising was an amazing experience. On stage it looks effortless, but when you see the work they put in you can understand why Julian once said to me "Comedy... it ain’t f**king funny".

Later in the year when the show was at Edinburgh it had changed again, and it keeps changing, always by the seat of its pants. With The Boosh you never know quite where you are, and I doubt whether they do either. To those that give The Boosh a big thumbs up it was always a case of *when* rather than *if* they would get there own TV series. The only surprise is that it’s taken so long, but last year, buried away late at night was a half hour pilot show, which somehow captured the live Boosh experience and put a box round it. Inventive, funny, stupid and crazed, quite unlike anything
else you’ll see on your screens this year.

So first it’s BBC3, then it’ll transfer to BBC2 and by September Julian and Noel will be sitting on the Jonathan Ross sofa being hailed as geniuses. And, while it’s been a long hard slog, if The Boosh go supernova and end up
arrogant and drunk in a Las Vegas strip-joint then, frankly, no-one would have deserved it more. Two of the nicest guys you could ever wish to meet.

The Mighty Boosh are on BBC3 on Tueday nights at 11pm. Toffee Sock Scissor Bitch, as someone once said. Everything you ever wanted to know about The Boosh can be found at the
wonderful website: www.themightyboosh.co.uk

Boosh Radio petition

Following the great success of the double debut episode on Tuesday, we thought we'd give the BBC a little nudge to give the Boosh radio shows an official release. If you'd like the opportunity to listen again to the award winning Boosh radio shows, please sign the petition here -

http://www.petitiononline.com/booshcd/petition.html

The petition will only be on-line for a limited time before we submit it to the BBC, so please sign!


Also, check out the official Boosh site at http://www.themightyboosh.com - it is being updated every day. The Behind The Scenes section is now available for your perusal. Congratulations to everyone involved in this site, as it is absolutely spectacular!

Television Reviews for last night's shows

From The Times Online (scroll to the bottom):

Steve Coogan and Henry Normal’s Baby Cow production company seems to have landed the contract to deliver almost half the comedy shows on TV at the moment, from Marion and Geoff to the new I am Not An Animal. Their latest offering is The Mighty Boosh (BBC Three), in which Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt take off where their Perrier award-winning show left off. They play Vince Noir and Howard Moon, two unconventional zookeepers at the surreal Zoo-Niverse.

It looks promising. Well, it looks different, certainly.

Joe Joseph


From The Guardian:

Knowing my taste in comedy, The Mighty Boosh (BBC3) will probably be the nation's favourite within six months, quoted in playground and parliament alike. I remained stonily unamused. Criticising a new comedy show is about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel, but in this case the fish had it coming. The Mighty Boosh tried to be surreal and weird, but kept tripping over its awkward writing style ("You're about as edgy as a satsuma") and its self-congratulatory performance tone. There was a promising pastiche of The Island of Lost Souls in the second of the two introductory episodes, but it quickly degenerated into a lame musical number with breakdancing mutants, which looks funnier on paper than it really was.

There was one good visual joke about a moving shrub, but one laugh in an hour doesn't do it for me. But what do I know about comedy? I can't stand Only Fools and Horses either.

Rupert Smith

Boosh in The Sunday Times

Comedy: A class menagerie
Fairy tales meet David Lynch in the surreal world of The Mighty Boosh, says Stephen Armstrong

A boxing lesson in the world of The Mighty Boosh: Julian Barratt is in full flow, jiving his floored opponent like a lanky white Ali: “I’m Howard Moon. I rain down the pain. I’m Monsoon Moon, comin’ atcha like a beam, like a ray, like a laser. Don’t try and stop me. I’m quick like lightning. I’m frightening.” His opponent lies unconscious in the centre of the ring: an eight-year-old boy with fake kangaroo ears. Switch to the big fight, and Barratt’s Moon is getting plastered by a fighting roo whose vast gloves are delivering his face a ferocious battering. He staggers into his corner, where his number two, Vince Noir (Noel Fielding), has bad news. “I’m not a boxing trainer,” he explains awkwardly. “I’m a French duke. That’s my uncle over there.” The camera pans to a pre-Revolutionary fop waving his handkerchief in polite acknowledgment.

Barratt and Fielding, The Mighty Boosh, are the latest team to sport British comedy’s glorious mantle of surreal tomfoolery. In the shadow of the Goons and Python, they have taken the silly, the beautiful and the strange and mixed them up for television viewers, kicking off on BBC3 on Tuesday, with a BBC2 transfer likely in the autumn. For the Boosh’s base of hip young fans, it’s about time.

The path to television seemed to start so well. Leeds-born Julian Barratt, 36, moved to London to become a comic in 1994. He met south Londoner Fielding, 30, after the latter started stalking his gigs in 1997. “My mate Liz said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this bloke,’” Fielding recalls. “She worded it quite nicely, ‘He talks absolute sh** like you do.’ I’d done a couple of gigs at college and was thinking, ‘What I’m doing, could it be anything?’ And I saw him and thought, ‘If he’s getting paid for that, I certainly can.’”

After spotting Fielding’s impressive barnet lurking at the back once too often, Barratt dared him to take the open-mike slot at his next gig. In true Hollywood fashion, Fielding’s act went down a storm, and Barratt, realising he had spawned a monster, promptly asked him if he wanted to write “the new Goodies”. “I gave him a lift home and asked to come in for a coffee,” Barratt recalls, “and he said, ‘You do know if you come in, you can never leave?’ I went, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’ And he said, ‘No, you can never leave.’ It turns out he was telling the truth.”

They picked up a Perrier best newcomer award for their first stage show in 1998, titled The Mighty Boosh, and a grown-up nomination the following year for Arctic Boosh. Then they returned to the Smoke after 2000’s Auto Boosh and vanished. They had entered development hell.

“It was a bumpy old mess to get here,” Fielding says cheerfully when we meet in the cafe of an east London studio during filming. “Post-Edinburgh, we gigged around — Melbourne, Montreal, lots of talk of TV, but nothing ever materialised. So we had a wonky patch. Julian did a bit of acting and I played bass in IMX and did a solo show in Edinburgh, but we were waiting for the TV people to give us the go-ahead. It all just dragged on.”

Even once the show was commissioned, the world of television found itself unsure about their oeuvre. The duo shatter television’s fourth wall as often as they did in their live show, breaking off and chatting to the audience at home. TV-land didn’t approve. “People see you on stage, say we’d like to put it on TV and then go off and interview a load of housewives about you,” grumbles Barratt. “Suddenly, you’re at the behest of focus groups who say middle-aged sailors like the word ‘coin’ more than they like the word ‘broccoli’, so you should try and do some coin stuff, but then bring in the broccoli later for the housewives. You spend all this time working things out, and then people don’t trust you to do your job.”

At last, however, the show is ready, and it’s genuinely delightful. Set in a bizarre zoo run by the insane Bob Fossil, it features Moon and Noir as zookeepers with a certain amount of frustrated ambition. Plots usually involve the boastful but hapless Moon embarking on misguided schemes — boxing a kangaroo, finding a mysterious stone in the Arctic, solving animal kidnaps — and having to be rescued by chirpy cockney Noir. While most surreal comedy comes from a dark place filled with the grotesque and unsettling (see The League of Gentlemen), The Mighty Boosh is like a fairy tale directed by David Lynch, and could almost pass muster for 10-year-olds.

“Television these days is just endless houses filled with people I’ve never seen before, chatting on in really harshly lit kitchens,” says Fielding, an art-college graduate, explaining how this vision came about. “It makes me feel a bit ill. I want people to watch us and then feel the need to go off and do something. Painters that make you want to paint, they’re the best painters.”

The show is unlikely to achieve the status of The Office, but may be seen as more significant by those who care about such things. If this current glorious time of comedy creativity is a gag-based version of the 1960s, with The Office as the Beatles and Nighty Night as the Stones, the Boosh are early Pink Floyd, with their pastoral dandy charm and unusual choices.

This analogy doesn’t impress the boys, however. “I hate those comedy clichés,” says Barratt. “Someone said Lee Evans was like Norman Wisdom on acid, but if you actually watched Norman Wisdom on acid, it would just be watching a man slowly turning in on himself.”

“It’s hard to say what we’re like, because we’re not like anything,” Fielding adds. “That’s what I’m most proud of. At least it’s its own thing. If we did do a sitcom about an office, it wouldn’t be like The Office. They’d find a hole in the back of a cupboard that would take them all to another land.” Then they have to leave. Today’s project is releasing Moon from Monkey Hell, where he went to be punished for unnatural relations with a fox after Mr Death took him by accident. Welcome to the world of the Boosh.



The Mighty Boosh, BBC3, Tuesdays at 10.30pm

Article in The Times today

A gentle wind of change
With a whimsical, family-friendly show, the boys from the Boosh are flying in the face of modern comedy. Bruce Dessau reports

Sometimes a comedy comes along that goes brilliantly against the flow. Reeves and Mortimer did it in the early 1990s, marking the end of the right-on era and the dawn of postmodern music hall surrealism. The Office did it a decade later, taking the gritty realism of the docusoap to its gloriously absurd conclusion. And now, with the small-screen grotesquerie of Nighty Night and Little Britain sweeping the nation, The Mighty Boosh arrives with a huge grin on its face, feeling like a veritable hurricane of fresh, uncynical air.

The creation of the Perrier-nominated performers Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, this picaresque oddity charts the adventures of two hapless zookeepers. This Tuesday, for instance, Howard Moon (Barratt) is railroaded into boxing with a kangaroo, with Vince Noir (Fielding) as his trainer. It might be in a late-night BBC Three slot, but you could just as easily screen the fun as Sunday afternoon family fare.

Fielding, all excitable pixie demeanour and primped rock’n’roll hair, is delighted with this suggestion. “It has childlike honesty and innocence.” Their phantasmagorical baby is the antithesis of the meta-realism of The Office. “It doesn’t look like a documentary, it doesn’t make you cringe. I love that stuff, too, but it’s not what the Boosh is about. I’m more into The Arabian Nights.”

The more languid Barratt, who has a moustache and a sideline as a straight actor, appearing in Lucky Break with James Nesbitt and The Reckoning with Willem Dafoe, thinks it has junior appeal, too: “I used to like watching The Goodies with my Dad when I was young. I like the idea of every generation being able to get something out of it. I think we have combined lots of different elements.“ Sometimes there is so much going on in the programme that it is hard to contextualise it. The Boosh are undeniably the children of Vic and Bob, but the lineage is more complex. The Leeds-born Barratt also loves Frank Zappa, jazz and Monty Python. “Zappa wrote a lot of music about the tundra and in one episode we go to the Arctic.”

Fielding wanted to be a footballer when he was growing up in South London, but then he discovered art and European cinema. “I wanted it to be a cross between Jean Cocteau and The Singing Ringing Tree.”

The duo got together in the mid-1990s, having heard about each other’s quirky activities on the stand-up circuit. Fielding popped up at a poetry night in Chalk Farm at which Barratt was performing and they bonded. At one point they were going to call themselves different names each week, splutters Fielding between bites of baguette: “Hot Lego Wolves, Swan Priests. Lovepopes. But then we stuck with The Mighty Boosh. My brother Michael used to have really big hair and his friend used to call it a mighty bush.”

After three acclaimed Edinburgh shows, their radio transition picked up a Douglas Adams Award for Innovative Writing, which was particularly flattering because Fielding and Barratt were big fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I like that overarching narrative going through various characters,” says Barratt. BBC Three commissioned a pilot that went out last May and spawned the series, produced by Baby Cow (Steve Coogan’s production company, outlined in THE EYE’s profile last week).

Their biggest challenge was cramming all their ideas into eight 28-minute episodes. The first yarn alone takes in the aforementioned kangaroo punch-up, a love interest for Howard, the safari-suited zoo manager Bob Fossil (Rich Fulcher) explaining how he doesn’t like cricket via a rendition of 10cc’s Dreadlock Holiday, an Aboriginal dream sequence and the kind of goofball whimsy that Hope and Crosby used to specialise in in their Road To . . . movies.

“The challenge was balancing the comedy and the story. We were interested in narrative and making the weirdness work within a storyline,” says Barratt. They considered using other writers, but nobody was quite on their wavelength. “We have certain rules about levels of wrongness and stupidity, although we don’t know what they are.”

They painstakingly piece everything together themselves. The quickfire Ali-style opening banter for instance (“I’ll come at you fast like a northen bullet . . . like being caressed by a natural yoghurt”) might sound spontaneous but it is all scripted, explains Fielding. It can sometimes be a struggle to come up with the perfect surreal one-liner. “The battle goes one way then another, like trying to get through a narrow gap. When we agree it’s like, ‘yes, we’re in!’” The result is deliriously funny but as difficult to pin down as a will-o’-the-wisp. Even its creators are not sure if they’ve come up with a sitcom. “That’s hard. Is Mr Benn a sitcom?” muses Fielding. “It is set in the same place and we play the same characters, but anything can happen. We’re not trapped, which is supposed to be a sitcom law. We weren’t that interested in the detailed lives of zookeepers.”

The Mighty Boosh, Tuesday, BBC Three, 10.30pm

1st & 2nd Episode Transmission Times

Tue 18 May at 22:30 on BBC Three
Tue 18 May at 23:00 on BBC Three

Wed 19 May at 01:20 on BBC Three

The Magical Mystery Tour

BBC3 has already delivered two classy and original comedies in Little Britain and Nighty Night. This week the channel scores a hat-trick with the arrival of The Mighty Boosh.
The series - which, like Little Britain, first aired on Radio 4 - follows the fortunes of Vince (Noel Fielding) and Howard (Julian Barratt), a pair of zookeepers at the run down Zoo-niverse. Vince, who dresses like a 1970 rocker and describes himself as 'Mowgli in flares', is the most upbeat of the two and connects intuitively with animals. Howard, meanwhile, has the gloomy demeanor of an old-school thespian, and believes he was born for better things.
Together they embark on a series of adventures in the Arctic, the jungle and even ‘Monkey Hell’, trying their hand at anything from playing electro-pop to boxing kangaroos along the way. If it sounds confusing, then who better to explain than the stars themselves – starting with that peculiar name…
‘We wanted to sound like a band,’ says Barratt, who writes the music for the show. ‘Most comedy double acts are known by their names, so we thought let’s just call ourselves something abstract and weird.’
‘It’s difficult to say what it is,’ Fielding chips in. ‘It’s sort of Morcambe and Wise meets Beck, Mr Benn with drum and bass.’
‘We like the idea of those old Road movies with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope; two mates getting into scrapes in a weird environment,’ Barratt continues. ‘They’re quite flippant and playful, they talk to camera – not like a sitcom where you stay with it and you can’t break the reality. We like the idea of mucking around a bit.’
And when these Edinburgh Festival award-winners muck around, brace yourself for some strange goings-on.
‘We’ll start a really simple episode and then five minutes later, there’s a door in someone’s afro which leads to a world of slap bass players or something,’ says Barratt. Fielding nods. ‘We’re not very good at keeping it simple,’ he smiles.
Thus in The Mighty Boosh, when the duo are lost in the desolate wastes of the Arctic tundra, they break into a rap routine (‘Ice – floe – nowhere to go!’) before dancing with a polar bear and thawing out the last words of a frozen explorer. Watch it and you’ll get the picture.
Still searching for the perfect definition, Fielding recalls, ‘The best way it was ever described was by an old black blues player in Philadelphia. His band was performing in the same venue as us, and they used to hang around and catch our show. He said, ‘Man, it’s like you’re from the 1920s one minute, and from the future the next.’
Sounds mighty like the Boosh to us.

(Ian MacEwan)

Heat Magazine Preview

BBC3, we love you and your comedy commissioning ways! After Little Britain and Nighty Night we are treated to this good-natured slice of surreal fun. It features lovely comics Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding as Howard and Vince; zoo keepers, poets, adventures and kangaroo-fighters. Think of it as a panto based on the inside of Rolf Harris' mind. Or a musical written by bewildered child geniuses.

Time Out article

Face to faces: Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt

Howard Moon is preparing for a bout with a killer kangaroo. He doesn't want to fight, but Bob Fossil, his boss at the zoo, is convinced it'll pull in the punters. And Fossil has pictures of Moon's freakish naked torso to ensure his minion cooperates. Moon's raffish apprentice Vince Noir volunteers to train him up. But it'll take grit, muscle, one of Carlos Santana's old tracksuits and a puff of magic dust from a lisping shaman for Howard to knock out the fearsome Killeroo.

After years of waiting, The Mighty Boosh have finally made their first TV series. And, as the above plot synopsis suggests, it's utter nonsense. Which is a long way from being slack, or random. Julian Barratt (Howard) and Noel Fielding (Vince) have been doing this stuff for seven years now, ever since they played King Don's penis and Moby Dick respectively in a Stewart Lee show at Edinburgh. Fans and foes alie have accused the pair of just mucking about. But both tall, regal Yorkshireman Barratt and cockney peacock Feilding, winner of last year's Time Out Live Award for his solo show, take their delusions very seriously.

"What we didn't want", says Barratt, 35, "is a weird world with weird people in weird hats doing weird things. That just becomes tedious."

"But because everything we do is odd," says Fielding, 29, "everyone we work with thinks they know what it's about. They'll go, 'Oh yeah, you can be a giant in one of the shows, great!' And we'll go, 'No, it really doesn't work like that.'"

"It's a specific kind of nonsense," says Barratt.

"Vic Reeves always said that because it's nonsense people think it's easier than writing normal jokes," says Fielding. "Everyone goes, yeah, you just say anything, don't you? And he'd say to them, 'Go on, then, try and say something funny.' And they'd go, 'Oh, there's a cat and he's got a bag!!!' And he'd go, it's not funny, is it? Vic and Bob's stuff is always well written, they don't just pluck it out of air."

Reeves and Mortimer's skilful gibberish has certainly been a liberating influence on the Boosh. Legend also has it that, after working separately on the circuit, Barratt asked Fielding to join him to become 'the new Goodies'. But today, istting in their manager's Soho offices, they're less interested in allying themselves to their forebears. Still, they will tolerate comparisons to Monty Python, The Goons, Tony Hancock and, yes, The Goodies. "We love old double acts," offers Fielding. "We're Frank Zappa meets 'Stepford and Son'", ventures Barratt cautiously.

Their relationship on screen seems an only slightly cartoonified version of their relationship off. The softer-spoken Barratt is contained but dangerously sharp. Fielding is more upfront, more discursive. But they clearly adore spending time together. They lock eyes, play deft conversational ping-pong, and occasionally roar with laughter at each other's throwaway lines.

It's this blurring of the line between friendly backchat and double-act banter that gives the Boosh such an unusual, effective shtick. Their stage shows - fantastical no-budget adventures studded with the odd-couple enmity of their barely altered alter egoes - were an immediate cult hit. Their first Edinburgh show, in which they played two unlikely zookeepers, won Perrier Best Newcomer Award in 1998. The following year's show, in which they played two unlikely postmen, was nominated for the main prize. When they came back for 2000's Autoboosh, their entire run was sold out before the festival started. They were expected to win the Perrier, then didn't even get nominated. Feted for their anything-goes unpredictability, they were starting to second-guess themselves.

"We got to the stage of thinking, 'What is it we do? Well, we'd better do that again'", says Barratt.

"When we started it was word of mouth, 'Have you see the Boosh?'," says Fielding. "By the third time it wasw 'Well, this had better be good.' Edinburgh's all about the hype, and if you get a really big hype, what do you do after that?"

They haven't been back (though Fielding's solo show got him nominated for the Perrier in 2002). But they kept touring. "One year we did seven months away," says Fielding. "It was great, like being in a band or something. But after a few years of that, you go, oh, it'd be nice to put some of this down." So they concentrated on getting on TV. A series looked like shoo-in after their Fringe dominance. But shifting from theatres - where the rough staging was half the fun - to the literal-minded small screen proved harder than expected. They wrote a pilot for Channel 4, 'Boyz N The Wood', which had them living in a house surrounded by fusion guitarists and tree dwelling Monkey Nanas - white-haired granny apes in cardis. "There was no way we could have done that!" cackles Fielding. "It was like 'Lord of the Rings' or something."

They had more luck with a radio series recorded for BBC London then snaffled by Radio 4. But it was TV they wanted. After several false starts, it was only after bumping into Steve Coogan's production partner Henry Normal in the street that they put their extravagant visual ideas into affordable form. "It's useful to be backed by people who've made good comedy themselves," says Fielding. "People think of Coogan and they think of Alan Partridge."

"And lap-dancers."

"I think that helps."

So now, after last year's pilot, they're back with an eight-part series. The format is that of the radio show: two unlikely zookeepers have adventures - Barratt's brooding 'jazz maverick' and Fileding's Rod Stewart-haired chancer rubbing up against boss Bob Fossil (Rich Fulcher), the mystical Naboo (Fielding's brother Michael) and Zoo-Niverse owner Dixon Bainbridge (Matt berry out of 'Garth Marenghi').

On the evidence of 'Killeroo', it really works. It's funny and fast, referential but endearingly innocent. Whatever weird hats are being worn, it's always about Barratt and Fielding's relationship. They write each line together, playing their parts as they work. In fact, they can discuss the minutiae of their mutual playworld with a fluency that verges on the scary.

"We do talk about it as if it's real," admits Fielding. "But what's good is that it's two people who have different opinions and fight all the time."

"Billy Wilder said that if writing partners are too similar, it's like two people pulling on the same end of a rope," says Barratt.

They've written the treatment for a Boosh film in which Moon and Noir would be two unlikely archaeologists. They'd like to do another series, maybe a tour. Whatever The Mighty Boosh do together, though, it's sure to be seriously deluded. "Well, we can't really write anything straight," says Fielding. "I try sometimes - I think it'd be really good to do something ordinary. And then within a second there's always a talking cushion or something."

The Mighty Boosh starts Tue on BBC3; see TV Digital Listings. It will be on BBC2 in the autumn.

Dominic Maxwell

Radio Times article: Keeping It Surreal

Gorillas, Arctic expeditions and men made of chamois leathers - prepare yourself for a weird new comedy world.

The first thing you notice when the Boosh walk in to the room is hair. Julian Barratt has multi-directional tendrils that writhe like snakes as he fiddles with them; his partner Noel Fielding has a fountain of blond, brown, purple and black stuff coming out of his head.

The second thing you notice is that they'd rather give a funny answer than a true one. "I'm a jazz fusion guitarist. I only ever listen to five albums by Weather Report. I dabble in comedy," Barratt says. He's actually an accomplished comic: the Boosh won the Perrier newcomer award at Edinburgh in 1998, and a Douglas Adams writing award for their radio series in 2001.

The third thing is that they only finish half the sentences they start, often abandoning them in favour of new, more exciting ones. This is most apparent when they try to define what The Mighty Boosh, their ultra-weird new series, is.

They play zookeepers who frequently leave their cages behind to go on quests - to the arctic, or even other dimensions. It's been labeled "tripcom" for its hallucinogenic qualities and is a departure from dark, suburban comedy, having more in common with Monty Python's anarchy and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's astonishing creativity. Fielding explains: "We were living in Hackney, but we thought we'd rather live in a magical forest."

The show was born in the mid-1990s when Fielding and Barratt teamed up to do something different from conventional stand-up. "in our first show we came out covered in shaving foam and danced arounda s two white characters called the Hoop brothers," claims Fielding.

Edinburgh in 1999 saw Barratt playing a monster made out of Jiffy bags. "We were working in a post office," he says. "So it's not illogical to have a boss made out of Jiffy bags."

The TV series features more DIY monsters. In one episode, Fielding falls through a mirror and meets a man made of chamois leathers and sponges. But Boosh is not simply a freak show - it boasts plenty of unhinged exchanges between Fielding's idiot savant and Barratt's intellectually arrogant fool, both characters based closely on their own personalities.

For a long time, TV was wary of the Boosh. "If you do weird stuff," says Fielding, "they think, 'You're mad, you probably eat chairs.'"

The fourth thing you realise when the Boosh are in the room is that you can't stop laughing.

Danny Plunkett

NUTS (14 – 20 May)

There are articles in Nuts, the Radio Times and Time Out.
Scans of these are in the Yahoo Group Booshlist so if you haven't joined the mailing list, do so and you can access them.

Will post the transcipts up in the meanwhile...

NUTS (14 – 20 May)

Insane Animal Antics

At last! New comedy that could finally kill of the withdrawl pangs you’ve been suffering since Little Britain and Nighty Night finished their recently acclaimed runs. Set in a run-down zoo, "Zooniverse", this surreal show focuses on two of the zookeepers, would-be genius Howard Moon (Julian Barratt) and his sweet natured chum Vince Noir (Noel Fielding).
The pair undertake the sort of adventures their real-life counterparts could only dream about – taxi rides to Hell, journeys into the jungle and even a trip to the Arctic. Add in some battles with mod wolves and an angry boxing kangaroo and you’ve got the warped ingredients for one of the maddest sitcoms of all time.
The Mighty Boosh comes fighting out of Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow stable and Barratt has stressed how important the Alan Partridge star has been to the show.
"He (Coogan) saw us at the Edinburgh Fringe, where everyone thought we were a bit abstract, that we were going to come on dressed in foil or something," he told Nuts. "Coogan saw the mainstream possibillities. He helped a lot."
As you would expect, there’s a supporting cast of quirky characters ranging from Naboo, the enigmatic mystery man who runs the kiosk, to demented disco-loving American zoo manager Bob Fossil.
So how did Barratt and Fielding come up with such inspired lunacy?
"We listen to a lot of music. The series was written under the influence of Carlos Santana," said Barratt. No drugs then?
"Um… quite a lot of coffee. I mean people ask that, but it was mainly coffee. Honest."

Chat List

I think its time we got the old chat list going now we actually have things to talk about..!

Go here...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BooshChat/?yguid=74790494
if you want to join and start chatting Boosh...

Official BBC website is now online...

They have an exclusive competition to win one of the
turquoise tracksuits from Killeroo and in the next few
days will have a shiny Boosh game for you to while
away your hours while waiting for 18 May!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/tv/mightyboosh/index.shtml

BBC Website Online

Official BBC website is now online...

They have an exclusive competition to win one of the turquoise tracksuits from Killeroo and in the next few days will have a shiny Boosh game for you to while away your hours while waiting for 18 May!

Click *HERE*

Boosh trailers

There are currently three Boosh trailers running on BBC1, 2 & Three. Two are montages of snippets from all of the shows and the third is a 48 second long clip starring some dancing Mod Wolves...

N: I think it's gonna be alright.... look
J: Mod wolves.
N: Yeah. And I'm the king of the mods.

The 4 mod wolves dance to the music which radio fans will recognise from the 'Alabaster Moon' song in show 2 and which is being played by another 4 mod wolves in a band - also in the forest. Noel and Julian dance around manically on the sidelines.

Julian is wearing his forest casual look (shirt, jacket and hat) from the original stage version of The Mighty Boosh

Get watching the BBC NOW for trailers of the Boosh.... coming soon.... Trailers are being screened this from this evening. Before Casualty on BBC1.

The BBC insist that Tues 18 May is definitely going to be the date of transmission but we hear from those working on it that it may be changed to Sat 16th...

The Mighty Boosh Trailers on the BBC

Get watching the BBC NOW for trailers of the Boosh.... coming soon.... Trailers are being screened this from this evening. Before Casualty on BBC1.

The 30 second long trailer is showing on BBC1, BBC2 and BBC Three.

"Fed up with the same old excursions? Fancy something interesting for a change? Then you should take a trip to the Zoo-niverse ('Come with us now... on a journey through time and space... to the world of The Mighty Boosh') The unnatural habitat of The Mighty Boosh... It's a mighty fine day out."

Starting with what is seemingly a boring slide show of pictures of houses and 50s style suburbia, the slides reach one of a gorilla sandwiched between Noel and Julian and proceeds to show glimpses into the whole series.


We look through the gates of the Zoo-niverse to see an old man wandering around.

Noel stepping through a mirror.

Julian's head surrounded by pink balloons.

Noel (dressed as the woodland character on the back of the Voodoo Hedgehog flyers) wearing white boots dancing in front of a imposed backdrop of the Taj Mahal.

A mirror's view of Noel preening his hair.

Julian dressed in his turquoise tracksuit (to be given away on the BBC Three website) holding the phone.

Noel dressed in his red jumpsuit sitting with Mr. Polar Bear.

Noel dancing and doing hand-claps with a gorilla.

Noel dressed as a cobra...
The sequence ends back at the slide show with a picture of the Mighty Boosh logo which is at the top of this news page.

"The Mighty Boosh opens soon only on BBC3"

The BBC insist that Tues 18 May is definitely going to be the date of transmission but we hear from those working on it that it may be changed to Sat 16th...

The Mighty Boosh - Double Helpings

The Mighty Boosh - "Killeroo" - will be broadcast on Tues 18 May at 10.30pm - immediately followed by the second episode - HOORAY!

Go *HERE* for official photos and wallpaper downloads.

"Killeroo"

The Mighty Boosh - "Killeroo" - will be broadcast on Tues 18 May at 10.30pm - immediately followed by the second episode - HOORAY!

Go HERE for official photos and wallpaper downloads.