Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh/BBC/Owl Power |
A couple of years ago, early in his time as controller of BBC Two, Patrick Holland got a call asking if he’d have a meeting with Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse, who wanted to pitch an idea. Of course, he was a massive fan: they were comedy heroes of his in the 90s. But then the meeting happened and Holland’s heart sank, because the project turned out to be one about … fishing. |
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“I thought: I’m new on the job, the first thing on my to-do list was not going to be a show about two old guys going fishing together,” says Holland, before changing “old guys” to “older gentlemen” and then settling on “middle-aged” (Mortimer and Whitehouse are now 61 and 62).
As the meeting went on, though, it became clear that it wasn’t all, or even very much, about fishing but more about friendship and mortality. It would be very funny because Mortimer and Whitehouse are very funny. They cast their wit and their charm and Holland took the bait, though when he told his channel team “I sort of slightly cringed because I thought no one is going to think that this is the future of television.” |
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