Towards the end of its run, Spike Milligan's 'Q' series (Q5 began the run in 1969, Q9 completed it in 1980) collapsed into incomprehensible weirdness, with the occasional moment of inspired lunacy lost amongst the bewildering surrealism. Nevertheless, the BBC decided to give Spike one more chance, but that 'Q' prefix had to go - it had been confusing the viewers for far too long, so Milligan retitled the final series 'There's A Lot Of It About', and the format was tightened and lightly reworked to include convincing spoofs of other TV shows, advertising, news bulletins, films and so on, and there was much less of Spike's undisciplined laughing at his own jokes. The result was a series that seems to have stood the test of time quite well, with sketches such as 'Life On Earth' (with Milligan as a scrounging historian who cops a lot of BBC expenses on his interminable quest to find the truth behind Stonehenge), the spoof game shows 'Lose Your Furniture' and 'Flim Flam Flom', the well-deserved swipes at 'Game For A Laugh' and the Thatcher administration and Spike's characteristically irreverent take on the tourism industry still raising a laugh more than two decades later. Some of it looks rather dated, of course, and the racial slurs and Spike's obvious fondness of super-abundant women in black underwear is bound to put the PC brigade off their porridge, but mostly it's a nice way to remember the wayward talents of Spike, and long overdue a decent DVD release.
Review of There's a Lot of It About
