THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN – Season 1 | ©2024 Apple TV+

THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN, currently in its first season in the U.S. on Apple TV+, is a British comedy/fantasy take on the legendary (but real-world) eighteenth-century English highwayman.

Noel Fielding is co-creator and star of the cult favorite THE MIGHTY BOOSH (2003-2007) and, from 2017 through the present, one of the hosts of THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW and THE GREAT CELEBRITY BAKE OFF. Fielding plays Turpin as a kind-hearted pacifist vegan who accidentally becomes head of an outlaw gang. Dick would actually rather make clothes for people than rob them, but the gang has a reputation to maintain. In refusing to pay a bribe, Dick incurs the ire of grudge-bearing lawman Jonathan Wilde (Hugh Bonneville).

Kenton Allen, whose many producing credits include the series MUM, THE GOES WRONG SHOW, and DEFENDING THE GUILTY, is an executive producer on THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN. Allen is one of the initial shapers of the project, although the credited creators are writers Claire Downes, Ian Jarvis, and Stuart Lane; Jon Brittain and Richard Naylor receive “creative collaboration” credits. Fielding, involved with the creative side of the series since he came aboard, has a writing credit on two episodes and an “additional material by” on another.

Getting on Zoom to talk about THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN, Fielding and Allen are keen to discuss not only their series, but also their comedic and storytelling inspirations. The pair often complete or add onto each other’s sentences.

Regarding the specific origins of THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN, Allen explains “I run a company called Big Talk Studios, and we have a development meeting every week, where we play Casting Bingo, which is, think of a famous person, then think who would play them. So, we’d say, ‘Right, we’re going to make a show about Donald Trump. Who could play Donald Trump?’ Or, ‘We’re going to make a show about Boris Johnson, who would play BoJo?’ And somebody said, ‘Dick Turpin,’ who all people of a certain age know of in the U.K., and my colleague, Victoria Webb [said], ‘Obviously, Noel Fielding is Dick Turpin.’ And that became a self-determining, self-justifying statement. So, we rang up Noel Fielding and said, ‘Do you want to be Dick Turpin?’ And he went, ‘Of course, obviously …’”

Fielding staunchly denies this, as both men begin laughing. “‘Absolutely not. Never contact me again.’”

“‘Who gave you this number?’” Allen pretends to recall Fielding saying.

Fielding finally reveals the truth. “We had a chat in the office, and we’ve decided, ‘You’re a Dick …’”

Allen adds, “But he said ‘Yes,’ and then we phoned a friend of ours called Jay Hunt at Apple TV+, who said, ‘That sounds like a ludicrous idea. Come in for a meeting.’ And five years later, here we are.”

Hunt had previously given the go-ahead to NOEL FIELDING’S LUXURY COMEDY, which ran from 2012 through 2014. “Jay Hunt was the head of Channel 4 when I did LUXURY COMEDY. That tells you all you need to know about Jay, that she let LUXURY COMEDY go through,” Fielding laughs. “And then she put me in BAKE OFF. At first, when I was in BAKE OFF, everyone was absolutely horrified, but then she said, ‘No, calm down, it’s going to be okay, give it a couple of weeks.’ I’m still there, eight years later.”

Was the initial consternation because Fielding was a comedy actor, or because he couldn’t bake?

“I didn’t really need to bake,” Fielding replies, “because Paul [Hollywood] and Prue [Leith] are there as the baking specialists. It’s just a hosting job, really. So, no, it was, I’d never hosted anything, and I’d really just been in THE MIGHTY BOOSH, which was quite rock ‘n’ roll, and more like a band, really – very underground, psychedelic – but also, at that point in my life, I was probably partying a lot, and getting photographed with Pete Doherty and Kate Moss and people like that, so the public probably didn’t know what I was like as a person – they’d only ever seen me in THE BOOSH, playing a character.”

THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN – Season 1 Key Art | ©2024 Apple TV+

“An unconventional choice, I think it’s fair to say,” Allen notes, “but it worked out really well.”

Fielding commends Hunt. “But that’s Jay’s vision, really. Her daughter liked LUXURY COMEDY, and she looked at it, and said, ‘I’m going to put that guy in something.’ I didn’t know it was going to be THE BAKE OFF, but yeah, Jay’s amazing, actually. She can see things that other people can’t see. And that’s the skill of that job – it’s such a difficult job to get right.”

As far as DICK TURPIN, Fielding continues, “Kenton and Big Talk, it was their idea, really. I hadn’t been doing comedy for a while. I’d been doing BAKE OFF and really, THE BOOSH was sort of everything I ever wanted to do in comedy, apart from a film, and it was done. So, I found it very difficult to do comedy after that.

“I didn’t mind cropping up in THE IT CROWD and other people’s things if it was good, or Chris Morris’s work, or Richard Ayoade, people that I admired. But in terms of building another world myself, I felt like we’d built the perfect world, really, in THE BOOSH, and it enabled us and allowed us to do anything we wanted, from playing funk music to going on the Moon. It was a beautiful world that we created, like a portal to anywhere, or any time, or any place.”

Even so, “Something about DICK TURPIN interested me, snagged me.” At the time Fielding came aboard, he says, “It hadn’t been written, and we hadn’t decided how it was going to be or anything. So, it was like coming in and having chats about what could we do, what should it be like, who could be in it? So, it was very exciting, because it was a period costume thing. It felt far enough away from THE BOOSH that it could have BOOSH-y elements, but didn’t resemble THE BOOSH in any way.”

Fielding also didn’t want to let down the BOOSH admirers. “There had been enough time passed for me to create something else, without people saying, ‘Please! When will there be more BOOSH?’ Because the BOOSH fans, they’re just still waiting for more BOOSH. And we don’t want to let them down, either. So, unless we had something really good to come back with, we wouldn’t do it. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to do more comedy.”

Much of the comedy in DICK TURPIN comes from Dick being so completely counter to the notion of a rough and tumble outlaw. Even most of his followers are almost absurdly amiable.

“Well,” says Fielding, “I think that comes from Dick, with the gang. I think Moose [Marc Wootton] is quite nice, actually, and I think Honesty [Duayne Boachie] is quite nice, but I think Nell [Ellie White] would rather just be a regular highway person who’s actually getting some money and getting paid for doing what she’s doing. And she likes shooting people,” he laughs.

“But I think that, yeah, our gang are quite nice because Dick’s decided to be a pacifist. He’s quite inclusive, and he’s quite kind, and he’d rather work in terms of being creative, rather than using violence, so he’s trying to get his gang to do that. But then, I suppose the evil characters – what that does is leave room for people like Hugh Bonneville to come in and play quite an evil character, or Tamsin Greig [as Helen Gwinear], or Jessica Hynes [as the Reddlehag]. So, yeah, our gang are quite nice, actually. But a lot of the peripheral characters are much more evil.”

Asked if they were influenced by the 1979-1982 DICK TURPIN series created by Richard Carpenter & Sidney Cole & Paul Knight, Allen and Fielding fairly burst with enthusiasm.

“Yes,” Allen enthuses. “That show was on Saturday, tea time, when we were growing up as kids. So, that was really influential. We used to watch it and then go out and play and pretend to be Dick Turpin, like American kids, I guess, pretended to be Jesse James or Billy the Kid.”

Fielding elaborates, “What I liked about Richard Carpenter’s writing as well was that there was always an element of darkness or the occult, an undercurrent that was brilliant. Richard O’Sullivan, who played Dick Turpin in that, is a good comedian, actually, and a good comic actor. He played that very straight and quite hard sort of gritty, menacing character. It was brilliant, that show.

“Didn’t Richard Carpenter write CATWEAZLE as well? And ROBIN OF SHERWOOD, which had a lot of the occult stuff, [including] Robin, the Hooded Man. CATWEAZLE was one of my favorite shows as a kid, growing up, and all that time travel, and that relationship between Catweazle and that kid who lived on a farm. I loved Richard Carpenter’s writing.

“But yeah. Even though ours is a comedy, and that was a drama, all of those things – the occult stuff, the witches stuff, the magical – all of that we tried to have elements of that in this version. The episode ‘[Curse of] the Reddlehag,’ is all about a witch that’s being transported to another village, and we accidentally let her free, and she sort of wreaks havoc on the village, so we have to get the shaman in.”

Allen affirms, “That was an influence. A lot of stuff that we grew up on felt like it was missing from contemporary shows. So, shows like the original TURPIN and THE PRINCESS BRIDE and the Pythons, BLAZING SADDLES –”

“HOLY GRAIL,” Fielding interjects, referencing MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, “has that weird, black magic-y sort of strange –”

“Gothic-y,” Allen contributes.

“It’s got a weird atmosphere,” Fielding picks up. “They filmed it in Scotland, it’s very misty, those weird castles, and there’s the Knights Who Say ‘Ni,’ and all that weird sort of stuff in it,” he laughs, “that we really were drawn to, the fantastical stuff, really. There’s a lot of that that we really loved growing up – a lot of films as well, like LABYRINTH and TIME BANDITS, and LEGEND, NEVERENDING STORY, all of those weird, sort of magical things that Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones and the Pythons were all into as well.”

Something else that Fielding and Allen feel looms over all subsequent British television comedy is BLACKADDER (1982-1989, with later additions), created by Richard Curtis and starring Rowan Atkinson.

“BLACKADDER is always there,” Fielding declares with a laugh. If you’re British, it’s just one of those shows that is sort of perfect, really. I’d say Series 2 and 3 and 4 are pretty much perfect comedies. So, you can’t escape BLACKADDER. It’s got brilliant people in it, it’s got Rik Mayall, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson, of course – ”

“Miranda Richardson,” Allen reminds him.

“Miranda Richardson,” Fielding concurs. “It’s big in this country [the U.K.]. It’s just there. If you’re a comedian, there’s no way you cannot be influenced by that. It’s too powerful. So, there were elements that we wanted from that. And actually, weirdly, this has a bit more in common with the Series 1 of BLACKADDER, the one with Peter Cook in it, who I love. But it’s tricky with BLACKADDER, because if you say you want something to be a bit like BLACKADDER, [that comparison] is a little bit of a poison chalice, because it’s so good. “

“It’s hard not to be intimidated by it,” Allen observes. “I guess the fact that we are, like the first series of BLACKADDER, we’re not a studio audience show, we’re not a classic sitcom, and that we are on location, and that we do have the budget to kind of properly do the [show’s] world justice, and do the jokes justice, which I think the first BLACKADDER kind of suffered from, because it was shot on location, but didn’t quite nail the comedy. When they put it in front of an audience and got it tighter, it became much, much funnier.”

“Well, also, Rowan Atkinson changed it, the character, didn’t he?” Fielding points out. “He was much more Mr. Bean in the first series, wasn’t he, and he then became sarcastic. That’s one of the great, truly great comic performances, I think, of all time, Blackadder. Timing-wise, you’d have to go back to [jazz musician Herbie] Hancock or someone – it’s just so precise, it’s like music, jazz. It’s incredible.”

Additionally, Fielding says, “We were very influenced by THE PRINCESS BRIDE. We liked the anachronistic nature of that, we liked the lots of different characters that you come across and just visually, that was a feast. You’ve got Andre the Giant in it, and you’ve got Billy Crystal in it, and you’ve got Peter Cook in it, and you’ve got Mel Smith it. And you’ve got the brilliant main core team. There are so many brilliant people in it. There’s Rob Reiner [as director] as well, who is a genius.”

Allen provides another PRINCESS BRIDE MVP name. “Carol Kane is amazing.”

“So, that was a big one for us,” Fielding acknowledges. “We were like, ‘That kind of vibe would be really good.’”

Given the title of THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN, who is completely making up the adventures – the series’ creators, or Dick himself?

Fielding just laughs at first.

Allen considers. “That is a very existential question. Because he has been to the future, as you know.”

“It could be Dick making it up,” Fielding posits. “You could have a point where Dick wakes up and it’s all a dream, and he’s still in the butcher’s shop. He’s a dreamer. He’s basically someone who knows that there’s more for him in life, but he doesn’t quite know what his skill set could achieve. So, he’s been put in charge of this gang, and he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. And he’s playing, really, but as long as he keeps imagining things, and making things up, taking them into this magical realm, hopefully, they’ll stay alive.”

In terms of what Allen and Fielding would most like audiences to know about THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN, Allen says, “I think we’d like audiences to know that it’s a funny comedy, going, ‘Remember those? We’re going back to funny comedies that you can watch with your family.’ It’s a safe space. You can watch it with your kids. We wanted to make a comedy that was funny, which sounds [redundant], but we’ve been through a period of comedies that, frankly, aren’t funny, or are quite dystopic and sort of funny comedy-dramas. We wanted to make something that was ‘hard funny,’ a phrase I heard.”

It has, Fielding adds, “proper jokes.”

“Proper jokes that work on any number of levels,” Allen elaborates.

“It’s silly,” Fielding pronounces.

It has, Allen concludes, “falling over, practical humor, as well as verbal humor, physical humor, and trying to just, in this quite bleak world in which we’re currently living, be a lovely escapist comedic world.”

Follow us on Twitter at ASSIGNMENT X
Like us on Facebook at ASSIGNMENT X

Article Source: Assignment X
Article: Exclusive Interview with THE COMPLETELY MADE-UP ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN star Noel Fielding and executive producer Kenton Allen on Season 1

Related Posts: