The show wasn’t just a massive hit with audience and critics, but was rather successful awards wise with the show was nominated each year it ran at the TV Baftas and scooping the award for ‘Best Popular Arts’ show at the International Emmys two years in a row. While only now have people woken up to the fact that women can do smutty and odd comedy too with the colossal success of Bridesmaids, Smack The Pony wa Amanda Holden + Show all cast … “Lots of girls and quite a lot of boys too. “That’s the challenge of doing an animation. Sally Phillips . “I’m proud of it. It’s more powerful. I was much clearer on the fact that I didn’t want to be like them and guess what, I’m not.
© 2020 FemaleFirst Ltd. all rights reserved. “Now,” she jokes, an ironic glint in her eye,  “I sort of regret it in a way. by Cameron Smith | Of course, you’re going to be less funny. “I think when you’re small you just define yourself as different, don’t you? “You didn’t have to be masculine,” she continues, “you didn’t have to be asexual to be funny, or extremely sexual to be funny. “Or they stop me and hold me and go ‘your birth movie was so moving!’” What made the birth movie even more remarkable is the fact that, as a new-born baby, Horne was wearing only cling film and Sally’s knickers. It was this angle that not only set the show apart but also made it such a big hit with all audiences, not just its young female target. So it’s just all shutting down creativity.”.

I was back in the UK and the only kids’ book in the house was Ferdinand. I wrote it with Neil Jaworski and at the end of twenty-five drafts or something—in the middle of it we redrafted the entire film to make it look like it had a male lead, to attract a male lead because we couldn’t—I think I’d proposed to them something not a million miles away from Bridesmaids that came out as a kind of run-of-the-mill romcom with five memorable minutes.”, “I’m not as devastated as I once was,” she says about the film. duration : 0.28958s v4.2 - 2020-10-01 22:44:45. Very, very miserable, tambourine, excellent eye make-up” says Phillips, delighted. On Phillips’ ingredients list was a bottle of absinthe. “I play a character who looks a bit like that in Zapped! I’d have to mind my diet for a bit before I did.”, Phillips wasn’t disappointed not to win her series and take part in the Champion of Champions Christmas special. Now I have got a couple of films that I do care about going very slowly and cautiously and not pairing up with anyone yet.”, Television also has its frustrations. “We started improvising it and I would start coming up with comedy reasons why, and then I realised it was much funnier not to know. It was this angle that not only set the show apart but also made it such a big hit with all audiences, not just its young female target.

“I might have a go at stand-up,” she says.

Den of Geek Dominic Brigstocke Director. I had a year and a half of only playing European characters. It was a new way of being funny.”, The old ways of being funny had lost their appeal—if they ever had it to begin with—thanks to years of being given the thankless task of playing male characters. The show ran for three series and a couple of specials before the cast unfortunately decided to call it a day on the show. The temptation is always to come up with a funny word, like ‘granary baps’ or something, but just to say ‘umm’ or ‘don’t know’ or just be neutral, for me those things began to be really funny and more real to experience. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…, The Queen’s Gambit Review: A (Grand)masterful Portrait of Genius and Addiction, Star Trek: Lower Decks Episode 9 Review: Crisis Point, Sally Phillips interview: Ferdinand, Taskmaster, Smack The Pony, Veep. Her favourite sketch saw a character stack an entire supermarket with Toilet Duck. The university revues Phillips appeared in “were all written by guys so I was playing boys. by Cameron Smith for www.femalefirst.co.uk Top tips to be confident, from a chubby American who thinks she's flawless! [Ferdinand] wasn’t that common, but Hitler had banned it so it became a kind of book of the time.”. See the Screwball comedies, in the 1930s and 1940s, you were allowed to laugh at women because class was the thing, so as long as the woman was aristocratic or an heiress, she was allowed to be ridiculous. They were going [mimes talking into a radio] ‘Henry Nobbs is not in the building’, which meant ‘she’s not going to strip’. I was 13 when Smack the Pony started and decided then it was the ‘funniest thing in my whole entire actual life’. “Well,” she explains, “when I left university, a) there was a massive downturn in the jobs market, but b) there was Loaded magazine happening. Then in the sixties and seventies people became very uncomfortable and didn’t know how to laugh at women, because women were oppressed and victims, and this was just part of the journey back to being able to ridicule us.”. “You’re not only dealing with whether or not you can make something good, but it also has to be channel-branded. While people have only now woken up to the fact that women can do smutty and odd comedy too with the colossal success of Bridesmaids, Smack The Pony was showing that same side off back in 1999.

Smack The Pony was a show way ahead of its time. So I think sometimes there’s a good argument for not being yourself if yourself is… that.”, She likes the fact that the film, about a Spanish bull who prefers flowers to fighting in the ring, is inclusive.

find me on and follow me on. Would she cite French and Saunders as a comedy influence in her early days? Smack The Pony was a show way ahead of its time. “My dad worked for British Airways and we moved from country to country and then ended up in Beirut in 1976, just as the war was starting. “I remember going into Loaded magazine, because you’re signed down to do various bits of press, and they had all these tiny little dresses and I was going ‘I’m not going to wear those.’ They used a kind of code. It was about celebrity weddings and I don’t really care about that at all. It was only the near constant Sarah Alexander who cemented a future in TV comedy from the show, going on to star in Channel 4’s brilliantly inventive and positively bonkers Green Wing and the BBC’s long running sitcom Coupling, as well as a fleet of other TV roles.

© 2020 FemaleFirst Ltd. all rights reserved. “He needed flesh-coloured pants because he was wearing maroon boxers that were going to ruin it,” she explains, every inch the artist. There are far better reasons for Phillips to have been cast in Ferdinand than her knack for accents. Beauty is more powerful than the sword!”. Now, women have higher expectations and “just ask the questions, you know, why am I not being paid the same?”. It plays well on a telly. It’s key component was that while it loved to show the hypocrisies of modern womanhood, it never dwindled on the topic, Smack The Pony was far more likely to make jokes at the expense of overzealous shelf stacking of Toilet Duck.

“Exactly!” she laughs. “There is a bigger message that isn’t about the individual isn’t there? It became unsafe to laugh at women in the sixties and seventies. Maybe.”, Louisa Mellor | “Celia Imrie is under-sung, I think she’s absolutely amazing, really, really amazing.”, Plans for a comedy feature film with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Amy Poehler have been put on hold due to Louis-Dreyfus’ ill health. by Cameron Smith for www.malextra.com I learned, do not write a movie unless you absolutely love the subject matter. “She didn’t mention that. Doon Mackichan. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! A lot of your brain’s taken up with ‘what might I sound like if I was a horse doing a pirouette?’ and then the accent went Finnish, or Swedish or Danish or whatever.”. “Doesn’t it give you deep joy that in a museum on the Isle of Wight there is a snow globe of Bob Mortimer’s poo? Another of Channel 4’s award nominated comedies at the turn of the millennium, Smack the Pony was a scatological sketch show created, starring and written by Fiona Allen, Sally Phillips and Doon Mackichan.
I’d like to act with her. I think there was a terrible misunderstanding that I might be [German accent] mitteleuropean. I still believe this to be true. The biggest shame is that unlike the stars of so many Channel 4 comedies, the three central figures to Smack The Pony never got the massive springboard effect from the success of the show. That’s the authentic him! The show wasn’t just a massive hit with audience and critics, but was rather successful awards wise with the show was nominated each year it ran at the TV Baftas and scooping the award for ‘Best Popular Arts’ show at the International Emmys two years in a row. I don’t know if they’re just being polite, they’re probably just blowing smoke up my arse!” she laughs. Lots of people when they go over to the States say they don’t like doing sitcoms with an American accent, because there’s a barrier between you and the funny, and so if you’re pretending to be a man, there’s a barrier between you and your authentic funny.