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Hale & Pace: The Complete First Series (TV)
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (14th March 2012). |
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The Show
 Hale and Pace: Complete Series One (LWT, 1988) 
Winner of the Silver Rose of Montreux in 1989, this first series of Hale & Pace (LWT, 1988-96) was produced after the success of schoolteachers-turned-comedians Gareth Hale and Norman Pace’s Hale & Pace Christmas Extravaganza (LWT, 1986), which is also included in this DVD set. Prior to this, Hale and Pace had already appeared in what is arguably the most iconic of 1980s alternative comedy television programmes, The Young Ones (BBC, 1982-4). Subsequently, Hale and Pace shared writing credits on the Channel 4 sketch shows Pushing Up Daisies (1984) and Coming Next (1985), which featured the first television appearances of two of Hale and Pace’s most well-known characters, ‘the Two Rons’ (aka ‘The Management’) – two aggressively dim bouncers who were supposedly modelled on Ronnie and Reggie Kray (‘Ron here is just sentimental’/‘No, I’m not: I’m fully mental’). The Two Rons were later given their own series by LWT, The Management (1988), and appeared in a number of television advertisements during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including in 1991 a public information film promoting firework safety. Hale & Pace is usually discussed alongside other contemporaneous sketch shows associated with the alternative comedy movement, including Mel Smith and Gryff Rhys Jones’ Alas Smith and Jones (BBC, 1984-8) and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s A Bit of Fry and Laurie (BBC, 1989-95). As with much of the alternative comedy scene, here Hale and Pace effortlessly blend satire with toilet humour. However, much as Channel 4’s alternative comedy showcases Saturday Live and Friday Night Live (1985-8) (please see our review of Friday Night Live) offered abrasive new material in a format that sometimes reflected its producer Paul Jackson’s earlier sketch show successes such as The Two Ronnies (BBC, 1971-87) – suggesting that the alternative comedy scene was as much a continuation of earlier trends in comedy rather than, as is often claimed, a reaction against it – Hale & Pace also seems to look back to the sketch and variety shows of the 1960s and 1970s whilst maintaining some of the shock content and anti-establishment tone associated with the alternative comedy scene. In episode one, for example, Hale and Pace appear with a choir, singing Status Quo hits in a style that recalls the musical parodies that were a weekly feature on The Two Ronnies. At the time, Hale & Pace’s humour was often seen as verging on tasteless (for example, the first episode features a hugely controversial sketch in which the pair joke about microwaving a cat). The series also had some very vocal critics. Famously, Alexei Sayle ridiculed the programme in his BBC series Alexei Sayle’s Stuff (BBC, 1988-91), and Victor Lewis-Smith once referred to Hale and Pace as ‘the world’s only double act with two straight men’ (Lewis-Smith, 1998). Similarly, in 2003 Richard Herring wrote an ironic piece about the duo which asserted that ‘the team were very much a double act, but not one with a definite straight man or funny man’; in the same piece, Herring also described Hale and Pace’s humour as ‘mindless and childish’ (Herring, 2003). 
Regardless of these criticisms, the strengths of Hale & Pace lie in its short, snappy sketches which veer from the crude (Pace, dressed as a yuppie, intones ‘I just don’t hold with these chicks who say that a guy’s wheels are an extension of his penis’ before a cut to a long shot reveals that he’s driving a penis-shaped car) to the satirical: a parody of 1980s action movies and public information films, ‘The Dustmen’, comes complete with gravelly voice-over: ‘We thank God for… The Dustmen [….] In their never-ending pursuit of productivity bonus, nothing but nothing gets in their way’, we are told as Hale and Pace, dressed as binmen, pick up a homeless man and an elderly lady in a wheelchair and throw both of them into a dustbin truck. ‘They are… the privatised dustmen’, the voiceover declares seriously. Equally impressive are some of the comic songs, including the excellent ‘Northern Calypso’, which bursts the bubble of numerous Northern stereotypes (‘North of Watford’s heaven on earth/But may be unknown to you… southern nancies [….] You want to be a Northerner? Here’s what you do/Go and get yourself an outside loo [….] I come down pub and I have ten pint/It comes up, I’m getting plastered (Burp)/ I go back home and I beat up wife/Cos I’m a big fat Northern bastard’) and a satirical song featuring a chorus of estate agents that is even more amusing now that we’ve had singing bank staff featured in the Halifax adverts (‘All young couples come lend an ear/We’ll stuff you with a mortgage for twenty-five years [….] We are sole agents/R. Sole agents for your property/We are sole agents/R. Sole and Sons, are we/We’re nearly legal/Not quite bent/We’ll do bugger all and charge you two per cent [….] Buying and selling your houses/Puts plenty of money in our trousers/Estate agents may look morons/But you don’t find many who are poor ones’). This is preceded by a very funny, and thanks to the recession still relevant, brief sketch in which Norman Pace stands in front of a stately home and declares, ‘Hi. Like a lot of people in London, I sold my basement flat in Peckham, and moved up north and bought this place’. Such jokes, and sketches satirising the New Right's trend towards privatisation, are still likely to raise more than a few titters, and touch an equal number of nerves, in our recession-hit times.   DISC ONE: Hale and Pace Christmas Extravaganza (LWT, 1986) Series One: 2/10/1988 9/10/1988 16/10/1988 23/10/1988 DISC TWO: 30/10/1988 6/11/1988 13/11/1988
Video
The series was shot on video, mostly in a studio environment, so don’t expect great shakes from this DVD presentation: all the hallmarks of shot on video footage are present, including burnt-out highlights. Nevertheless, the episodes are in good shape, and probably look as good here as they did on their initial broadcasts. 
All of the episodes are presented in their original broadcast screen ratio of 4:3. The original break bumpers are intact.
Audio
Audio is presented by a functional, clean two-channel stereo track. There are no subtitles.
Extras
The first disc features Hale and Pace’s 1986 ‘Christmas Extravaganza’, produced for London Weekend Television and originally broadcast on Channel 4, which features many familiar characters from their later series (the Two Rons, the inept children’s television presenters Billy and Johnny), guests including Doon Mackichan, Harry Enfield and Kit Hollerbach, and musical interludes from Status Quo and Courtney Pine.
Overall
Hale & Pace has its moments, but overall it’s a little less consistently funny than I remember it being during its original broadcast. This is perhaps because some of the humour within the show was very much of its time, and Hale and Pace’s brand of taboo-busting comedy has had its ante upped, and been placed in ironic quotation marks, by later comedians such as Ricky Gervais – for whom Hale and Pace delivered a cameo in the 2007 Christmas special for Gervais’ series Extras (BBC, 2005-7). 
Nevertheless, there is some very funny material here, notably in the parodies of film conventions and television advertisements. Episode three features a particularly funny parody of the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s biopic Raging Bull (1980), with Gareth Hale as Robert De Niro playing Jake La Motta, and Norman Pace as Joe Pesci playing La Motta’s brother Joey. As the pair argue onscreen over spaghetti, a voiceover intones, ‘Robert De Niro is Jake La Motta, in a movie about people you wouldn’t want to know, with scenes you won’t understand [….] Don’t miss the padding, the needless chat, the inane dialogue and the piles of spaghetti in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bullshit, gathering dust in a video shop near you’. Likewise, the first episode features an equally good parody of Coppola’s The Godfather (1971), with Hale delivering a fantastic impression of Marlon Brando. So whilst Hale & Pace may not be the best of the sketch shows of the late 1980s and early 1990s (for my money, that award belongs to A Bit of Fry and Laurie), it is often very funny – but sometimes tasteless, and frequently inconsistent. This DVD release offers a very welcome opportunity to revisit Hale & Pace, which has previously only been available on DVD in Australia. Hopefully, Network will release the remaining series of the programme. References: Herring, Richard, 2003: ‘Warming Up’. [Online.] http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/?id=364 Lewis-Smith, Victor, 1998: ‘Victor Lewis-Smith Column’. The Daily Mirror (20 June, 1998) For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD. This release has been kindly sponsored by: 
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