There are many facets of 1980s UK television whose political incorrectness would not be acceptable in the 2020s. This particular facet of 1980s television was not even acceptable in the 1980s. Banned from Channel 4 for a sketch in which they manhandled prostitutes and pushed one out of a window, The Dangerous Brothers protested by demolishing a wall at London Weekend TV, and smashing up a Vauxhall Viva in the TV executives’ car park under cover of night… Before discovering it was their own vehicle…
Released on VHS, The Dangerous Brothers Present – World of Danger is self-evidently one of the most stupid videotapes ever made. It charts an eight-part run of TV appearances from Richard and Sir Adrian Dangerous – AKA Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson – in the run up to their ban. It also includes the ninth, banned episode, which was never at any point shown on TV, and the aforementioned car park rampage.
Where the idea for the Dangerous Brothers came from it’s hard to work out, but it was one of the first routines that long-time double-act Rik and Ade did. Very much a cult theme, the concept is for a cabaret act in which two demented chancers frantically present and perform dangerous stunts directly to a live audience, for applause and money.
Richard is the boss and presenter. Sir Adrian is made to perform the stunts. For example, being fired out of a cannon, putting dynamite down his underpants, enduring “every form of torture known to man”, being set on fire, etc. In the latter stunt, Ade Edmondson sustained serious real-life burns, but the sequence was not cut from the programme and it’s included on the videotape. On occasion, not only does Richard fail to take part in the stunts – he also turns his back and puts his fingers in his ears.
Richard sees himself as the brains of the operation, although his plans invariably backfire, and Sir Adrian regularly objects to the plans, at which point there will normally be a physical fight – with Richard frequently coming off worse.
The basic idea is unusual in that the performance was delivered as a daredevil act, but received as stand-up comedy. In other words, it’s sitcom played in a stand-up situation, with no separation between the situation and the actual event. The audience is part of the situation. Also unusually, rather than wearing a ‘bald cap’ to achieve the effect of male-pattern baldness, Rik Mayall actually shaved off the top section of his hair.
The Dangerous Brothers act saw a very cursory TV airing at the start of the ’80s, and was then suppressed through the early 1980s as the duo worked on other projects such as The Young Ones and The Comic Strip Presents… But it proved ideal, at least in format, for an alternative comedy-based variety show beginning on 12th January 1985. That was Saturday Live.
Because each Dangerous Brothers ‘episode’ was designed to slot into a variety compilation, the durations are much shorter than typical sitcoms. They’re midway between a sketch and a sitcom in format. There’s a cult aura to the whole thing, but it’s very slapstick, and very funny. If you’re the kind of person who hates comedians who try to be too clever, this would be my recommended medicine. It’s also a good antidote to the relentless, performative virtue-signalling that batters our sanity on social media.
A lot of the elements in World of Danger would today provoke outrage in that social shaming-ground, where there’s often no distinction between humour and reality. But actually, the routine was progressive in its day. Alternative comedy was left wing, and came in as a very vocal opposition to the racist and sexist UK comedy of the 1970s. So World of Danger is politically correct to an extent. Some elements indeed chime very much with the political left of today. For example, the Police are portrayed as thuggish, gun-happy murderers. In other ways, however, the video would cause deep offence to 2021’s permanently outraged “woke”.
In the Babysitting episode, for instance, Sir Adrian enters a room in which the baby is crying, and it’s implied through sound that he’s hit the baby to shut it up. When the baby later resumes crying, Richard says “I’ll deal with this, this time!”, goes into the room, and again you hear a slap or punch, immediately followed by silence. On this occasion, however, Richard comes back out of the room holding his face – the implication being that the baby has punched him.
Throughout the video, the violence is endless, and in the Torture episode barely a second passes without someone being punched, kicked, hit with a hammer, nipple-clamped, pulverised with a food-blender, convulsed with high voltage, attacked with a red hot genital pinch, hacked legless with an axe, or shot.
During the period of original TV transmission, The Dangerous Brothers attracted complaints from the public. The Crocodile Snogging episode was slammed in a viewer’s video message to a TV “reply show”. A key focus of the complaint was an incident in which Sir Adrian, on Richard’s instruction, burns the director (played by John Bird) in the “goolies” with a blow torch. Reference was made to the sound effect played to represent the frying of the director’s “goolies”. The sound effect was described as “sick”.
It’s juvenile, but that’s its beauty. It’s cartoon culture brought into the human domain. There’s surrealism, indestructibility, people clouting each other with unfeasibly large weapons… But it has the character play of all the best comedy, and I would challenge anyone to watch it without laughing. The Dangerous Brothers, short-lived as it was in TV history, remains a brilliantly stupid comedy innovation. Is World of Danger the most stupid video of all time? I’ve tried for over 35 years to think of one more stupid, and I’ve never managed it yet.
Tape Tardis 