For some reason I never quite got into the television series of Drop The Dead Donkey. It ran from 1990 to 1998 which meant that I was in my forties and possibly a bit above the age for the target audience. I did catch a couple of episodes but they didn’t register. When I knew I would be going to see this stage adaptation all these years later, I streamed the first couple of episodes and also the last one to find out how it ended.
The programme was set in a TV news studio with the staff of Global News in seemingly endless bouts of bickering about their personal lives and professional shortcomings. The style was formulaic with the characters being more like caricatures. There was the new owner’s lackey, Gus, played by Robert Duncan, whose vocabulary was from the management-speak phrasebook of the period. His only weapon, the threat of demotion or dismissal. Jeff Rawle as George, the editor of the station, was ineffectual but each week he seemed to make a stand until Gus had had a quiet word with him, at which time he backtracked. He was also more henpecked than a ton of corn. Dave was the office Jack the Lad, a role which included being an habitual gambler, drinker and womaniser, a part played so well by Neil Pearson that he drew on it several times in his later work. Susannah Doyle played Joy, a feisty PA, while the role of Helen, the HR manager was filled by Ingrid Lacey. Stephen Tompkinson, as Damien, was the stop-at-nothing-to-get-a-good-story contributor. His penchant was to carry a child’s teddy bear and blood stained tennis shoe around in his luggage, planting them at the scenes of disasters such as earthquakes, fires and war zones for effect. He was also not above adding washing-up liquid to a cattle drinking trough to make them foam at the mouth for his story on mad cow disease. Victoria Wicks played the female newsreader, Sally Smedley, who was highly pretentious and a diva. Her nemesis, in the other chair behind the on-screen desk, was the over-the-hill, toupee-wearing misogynist, Henry Davenport, who constantly boasted about his sexual prowess. He was played by David Swift, who is sadly no longer with us, as is, or should that be isn’t, Haydn Gwynn, the Deputy Editor, Alex Pates, who kept the machine turning. It was nice to see them acknowledged during the show.
The cast.
In retrospect, the format regarding the characters had to be well defined as the main content of the show was reference to the week’s news items, so I would imagine that the writers, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, would need to have a skeleton script written in advance into which they could drop lines about whatever was going on in the real world. The banter was typical of the time, as were the ethics. The final episode saw Global News closed down due to diminishing viewer ratings with each of the main players dispersing to do their own thing.
It doesn’t matter if you too missed the series as this stage version is takes place in a newly formed news studio, with the very Trump-like name of Truth News. All of the surviving characters had separately been given a job in the new setup and appeared, one by one – to great applause from the audience – to be reacquainted with their old colleagues. They obviously were curious to know what had befallen their workmates since they last met, hence we were all on the same page when the play began.
Clockwise from left: Ingrid Lacey as Helen; Neil Pearson as Dave; Suzannah Doyle, Joy; Robert Duncan, Gus and Jeff Rawle as George.
It obviously didn’t take long for the old enmities, and alliances, to resurface with Damien, now wheelchair bound after a trip to the Amazon jungle, filling the male news presenter’s job. There were two new characters in Serena Jagpal as Rita, the weather presenter and Julia Hills as a woman planted in the organisation by an outside party to find out who the backers were. As well as the relationships reverting to type, the attitudes also rewound to the nineties, with long-redundant expressions used, and then apologised for. There were also the obstacles to be overcome such as multigender toilets and a voice-activate coffee machine which seemed to be as adept at ignoring George’s instructions as the staff were.
Newsreaders Sally Smedley (Victoria Wicks) and Damien (Stephen Tompkinson).
The ‘plot’ of the stage show was that Truth News has been set up by a mystery backer and everyone was trying to work out who they were and what would be their hidden agenda. Once again, the core script had been embellished with current stories, notably the Conservative MP at the centre of the honeytrap scandal, William Wragg. There were nods to Martin Bashir, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin et al, and Xi Jinping of China, whose name was displayed on the autocue in upper case, causing Sally Smedley to call him Eleven Jinping during a newscast.
The one main change since the original television programme was the language. F bombs were thrown around like confetti, as were other expletives, banned at the time but which seem to be compulsory today.
To begin with the play worked pretty well, but, as it wore on, the jokes became repetitive in their content and method of delivery. Towards the end I realised that is why I had probably baled out of the original. Mockery of any organisation is not a very sophisticated method of criticism as it takes the edge off any serious point you are trying to make. When it is aimed at a branch of the media charged with exposing wrongs and delivering accurate information, it makes them seem harmless and amusing. In those days, the only television news channels were ITN, BBC, Channel 4 and Sky. Channel 5 wasn’t launched until 1997, so it was pretty obvious as to the target. Because of the shortcomings of the journalists in question it also undermined anything they might have to say about current affairs and so fell far short of being satire.
Should you wish to spend an evening wallowing in nostalgia or watching a basic comedy then this is for you, but, had it not been a spin-off with a guaranteed fanbase to draw upon, I doubt it would have warranted a tour.
Fortunately, Hat Trick Productions, who are responsible for the series, are now producing some of the best television programmes of any genre so I am more than happy to regard it as the beginning of a learning curve.
Drop The Dead Donkey – The Reawakening! is at Leeds Grand Theatre until 13th April. For more details and tickets please go to https://leedsheritagetheatres.com/whats-on/drop-the-dead-donkey-2024/
For other shows at Leeds Heritage Theatres it is https://leedsheritagetheatres.com/whats-on/
All images supplied by Heritage Theatres
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