In 1998 the curtain came down on the satirical TV sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey. Set in the fictitious newsroom of the Globelink News organisation it was recorded close to transmission and included topical jokes based on the week’s news. It made stars of several of its cast most notably Stephen Tompkinson, Neil Pearson and the late Haydn Gwynne.
You can see the final moments of the final episode here featuring a young(er) Richard Osman as a removal man helping to empty the Globelink News offices. Osman explained on The Rest is Entertainment podcast that he was working for the production company Hatrick at the time. One of the creators wanted to be in the last episode but needed someone similarly tall to carry the other end of a desk so Osman at 6′ 7″ was the perfect choice!
The Reawakening
In mid-2023 it was announced that the creators Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton (the two also behind sitcom Outnumbered) were reviving Drop the Dead Donkey after 30 years but this time on stage. Having loved the TV original tickets were immediately booked for a trip to Woking Theatre a year hence.
Almost all the original cast were there: Gus (Robert Duncan), George (Jeff Rawle), Helen (Ingrid Lacey), Sally (Victoris Weeks), Damion (Stephen Tompkinson), Dave (Neil Pearson) and joyless Joy (Susannah Doyle) along with a new character playing a young weathergirl. A huge cheer went up as each came on stage. Only missing were Haydn Gwynne and David Swift who are no longer alive. Although Gwynne’s character was replaced for the final four seasons by Lacey’s character.
That the original programme was centred around a single location, the newsroom, must have made staging for the play much easier and, as you can see from above, was very effectively done. It was pretty static with the exception of a state of the art coffee machine that worked flawlessly for everyone other than the hapless George Dent spewing out brown liquid. Actually, there were a couple of other locations shown – one of which was outside the multi-gender toilets which had lots of gender signs on it which was funny but probably not very PC these days.
Very much like the original the script had been tweaked to include gags based on the latest news which means we got jokes based around the newly announced election such as arming 16-year olds for national service and Sunak’s deciding to go after the Saga vote: “we’re there for you. I said WE’RE THERE FOR YOU”.
I’m not going to describe the story as that would be a spoiler for anyone that wants to go see it (another spoiler – you definitely should) but it centered around a new news channel called Truth News (obviously based around GB News) that was starting out with shady (unknown) owners and they whole Globelink News team had been hired to staff it. Chaos ensued and in the end… well, you’ll have to go see it to find out what.