Hale and Pace

There are some excellent and detailed reviews about this show here which I support. No need to re-write them.

'Hale and Pace'... what would the snowflakes of today make of these two saucy fellows? In the first episode they microwave a cat - later they played tennis with frogs... so probably this wouldn't even be made today!

'Hale and Pace' was tasteless, schoolboy humour for the rest of us... the 'us' being those that did NOT go to Oxford or Cambridge and the 'Footlights Review' for the high brow, pretentious humour which was fashionable at that time.

Part of the longevity of the series (ten years) is that the two men were simply regular, amiable and 'bloke next door' types. They worked very well together although they didn't have the polish of Morcambe & Wise or even (A little bit of) Fry & Laurie.

As time passed, the sketch routines became stale and they seemed to wear out their welcome in a changing world of British 'light entertainment'. But despite that, there are a lot of great skits and sketches that are still brilliant today.

Incredibly, every episode is available to watch for free on YouTube. Who knows how long that will last, so you might want to head on over there and see for yourself what schoolboys used to find funny (and some old folk - ahem!) still find funny, in a changing and increasingly sensitive and joyless world.

Great telly from two wonderfully funny men.

Amongst all the comical duos, trios and massive groups that British television gave birth to, i think Hale and Pace are the least known abroad. When i saw them as gravediggers in the horror episode from "The Young Ones", all i could say was "Their faces look familiar". In the same episode i recognized Terry Jones as the drunk vicar, so i just took for granted the gravediggers were two more star guests.

"Hale and Pace" has never been broadcast in my country, as far as i know; but there was a Spanish late show, "El Chou", directed by Alfonso Arús, which used to fill the gaps with sketches by H&P (uncredited, i'm afraid). I was 13 by then, i think. I didn't like them, for i found most of their skits tasteless (which is not necessarily a flaw) and very stupid (now that is a flaw). It fitted perfectly in Arús' show. Anyway, Norman's blue eyes and Gareth's mustache (or is it the other way around?! Somebody send pictures!) remain etched in my memory. And if there was a DVD, i'd give it a try.

Used to love this show and still do. Some hilarious sketches these two did, brilliant.

These TV shows were shown on TV in Iceland probably around the same time as they were running in the UK. Sadly it was on a channel that I didn't have access to but I managed to record a few of their episodes. Now these recordings are the gems of my VHS collection and when my VCR tore one of them about two years ago, I decided it was time to somehow put them all in digital format. I was not going to lose another tape like that.

I don't agree with Steve that they only "had their moments". It's true that each season was slightly different. Their humour became slightly darker but they always mixed in enough of their old style jokes. And the way they built up a series of jokes that might span not just one episode but a few, I thought was brilliant.

About a year ago, I set out on a quest to try and find this material on the internet and was able to get a hold of a few tapes on the Amazon Market. But it was not without disappointments and not cheap! From one vendor (Nick March, Deleted UK Videos) I got two covers containing the same tape! I sent him an e-mail to which he never replied.

I even tried contacting the BBC but got the information that they didn't have any plans of releasing these shows. I asked if I could possibly get in touch with them personally but never got a reply.

Anyway, I truly hope these shows will be released, not just as a one "Best of" DVD but in it's entirety. I will be the first one to buy the whole thing!

Along with Smith & Jones, Gareth Hale and Norman Pace made up the other popular British comedy duo to brighten our screens in the nineties. They spent less time on satirising the big issues and more on sexual innuendos and dirty jokes than S & J, with the kind of sniggering enthusiasm that has always been the English approach to toilet humour. Not surprisingly, their regular characters included two imbecilic teenagers with penchant for sadomasochistic pranks, and a pair of so-nice-you-just-wanna-puke children's show hosts who dropped outlandish double entendres with smiling innocence. They also had something of a gangster fetish, best realised in the two Rons, a pair of stone-faced cockney hoods in black tie who had a firm faith in the compatibility of electrodes and testicles. They shamelessly drew and played on the boorish, sexist and national chauvinistic mentality so loved by the British tabloid press and still too often prevalent when dealing with anything or anyone across the Channel, but never really succumbed to endorsing it without that tongue on the cheek. They always were a bit too clever and a bit too juvenile for that.

Interestingly, Hale & Pace also shone in the obligatory musical numbers that closed their shows, producing a few classics such as the Chris Rea parody "The Voice from Hell"; the Scottish rap duo McHammer (probably not a joke anymore); a country and western song about the singer's Dad, who was a Nazi transvestite, "a goose-stepping man of the night"; and one Godley&Creme-style video that took all the sloppy metaphors in the song's lyrics just a bit too literally. Often these are the most perfunctory parts of a sketch show, but they had enough hits to warrant the one all-music special that combined the best of their singing career.

There is of course only so many ways you can crack a joke about the French, premature ejaculation or the oafishness of anyone with a regional accent, and Hale & Pace eventually started to lose their potency. But their best skits still hold up today, smutty but clever, liberatingly funny in their incorrectness and their vigorously exploited stereotypes.