The Best Of Not The 9 O'clock News Volume One

A forthright, irreverent, tart, often controversial and extremely funny sketch show that made the biggest splash in the genre since the heady days of Monty Python's Flying Circus and neatly bridged the gap between the zany mania of the 1970s and the anarchic cynicism of the 'alternative' comedy of the 1980s.

Volume One of Not the Nine O'Clock News comprises 98 minutes of early material from the sketch show that ran between 1979 and 1982. Starring Rowan Atkinson, Griff Rhys-Jones, Mel Smith and Pamela Stephenson and coscripted by Richard (Blackadder) Curtis among others, it wasn't especially ground-breaking by the standards of Monty Python or contemporary series such as The Young Ones, but it did provide some pretty blunt belly-laughs at the major social and political concerns of the era: Thatcher, Reagan, police brutality, the prospect of nuclear war. The latter makes for an excellent Question Time spoof, in which, with the four-minute warning having sounded, a panel of politicians continue bleating on their own agenda ("Three million people are going to die unemployed!").