Jonno from Sheeps shares his Perfect Playlist

Daran ‘Jonno’ Johnson is a member of the Sheeps sketch trio alongside Liam Williams and  Al Roberts. Currently at the Edinburgh  Fringe with the troupe’s new show, The Giggle Bunch (That’s Our Name For You). Here he picks his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites…

ChuckleVision: Series 6, Episode 3 - Pizza The Action 

My first pick is gonna be from ChuckleVision (BBC, 1987 to 2009!) and one of my earliest memories of laughing so much it hurt. I would’ve been about 5.

I’d like to make clear that I didn’t have to rewatch anything to write this. Chucklevision is the screensaver in my head. If I am not actively directing my mind onto other topics, it is looping Series 5 to 7 of Chucklevision.

I’m just gonna tell you a thing that happens in this particular episode. It is seriously good stuff.

There’s a bit where Barry’s supposed to deliver a pizza. He’s been trusted to get the job done. Misunderstanding his task in a way I cannot begin to fathom, he goes to the postbox to post it. I’m already laughing. They’ve already got me. 

He doesn’t even write the address on it, he just tries to put the frigging pizza box right into the red post box. But it doesn’t fit. So he takes out each individual slice and puts a stamp on every one of them (again, no address - and yeh he does lick the stamps first) and then puts the slices one by one into the post box. 

The thing that always makes me laugh about Barry is just imagining what his best case scenario is, in any given situation. This is maybe my favourite example of that. Even if his plan had worked, the idea that somehow, the following morning, the person who’d ordered the pizza would’ve received eight cold slices dropped through their letterbox and somehow been happy with the service still makes me laugh. It still genuinely kills me. I get the giggles thinking about it 31 years later. 

Forget the actual mechanics of his plan. Even if it’d worked, he’d have done a terrible terrible job. And he walks away from it KIND OF smiling. He definitely thinks he’s made the best of a bad situation. I occasionally catch myself doing this exact smile onstage with Sheeps. The guy who thinks he’s just about got away with something, but everyone in the audience can see he has not.

ChuckleVision: Series 5, Episode 14 - Spooks and Gardens 

My second pick actually comes from the 1987 to 2009(!) kids’ TV Show ChuckleVision. Anyone who’s ever owned a television will have guessed which episode I’m gonna say. I’m sure other people have already chosen it for this, so apologies if I’m being unoriginal here.

Spooks and Gardens (which bears no relation to the later Straight to DVD special ‘The Chuckle Brothers in Spooky Goings On’ which dear Jamie Demetriou bought me for my 27th birthday) is, to my mind, near enough the weirdest half hour of television ever recorded.

A couple of years back, in the cinema, halfway through the weirdest scene in the movie Cats, Al Roberts (in Sheeps with me, good guy) leant over and whispered to me ‘imagine if this wasn’t based on anything’ and I collapsed laughing. Spooks and Gardens is kind of that. 

Paul and Barry wander into a haunted house looking for a bike pump. Just swallow that. That’s what they do. They almost immediately get separated and soon enough Paul finds a door to a magical garden inside one of the rooms. Within the garden all of his wishes come true.

The fun part is discovering that what Paul really wants more than anything is to just sit down in quite an uncomfortable looking chair and eat fresh fruit. He’s laughing and rubbing his hands cos he’s so happy that he gets to sit and have some fruit. Like he’s the luckiest lad on earth. 

There’s an alternate-universe Barry inside the garden too but he isn’t silly and he’s Paul’s magic butler. I also like (while I’m sure this was just unlucky on the day for filming) that in Paul’s paradise garden the sky is clearly overcast.

There’s a really great sequence of Paul trying to make the humourless alternate-universe Barry walk over a banana skin over and and over again.

It’s a lovely little careful-what-you-wish-for story in the end, but it’s unusually dark and probing for a ChuckleVision episode. Think it’s informed my understanding of what happiness is in helpful and unhelpful ways, tbh.

I later discovered this episode was written by a young Russell T Davies, who’s also a bit of a hero. And it makes immediate sense if you watch it back.

ChuckleVision: Series 6, Episode 5 - The Bells

For my third pick, I’m gonna have to go for something a little unusual. Which is an episode from a kids’ show I used to watch, called ChuckleVision. It ran from the year I was born (1987) to the year I graduated uni (2009 (I got a very high 2:1 but not quite a first if that’s part of the question?)).

Episodes of ChuckleVision usually start with Paul walking up to Barry (who’s in the middle of doing something daft), asking him to guess what his new scheme is, and then Barry guessing incorrectly. Paul usually says ‘silly you’, Barry usually concedes ‘silly me’. And then the premise of the episode arrives. Paul simply says ‘We’re gonna be [insert job]’. And we’re away. They have a totally different job from the previous week and we must accept it. If an explanation is required as to any logistics, all that’s offered is that ‘Dan The Van’ has arranged it all in one way or another.

Many years ago Sheeps had a sitcom in development at the BBC (which you’ll recall did get made and we did about six full series of it and it did really really well) and I kept putting references to Dan The Van into the pilot script because I wanted to hint that Sheeps canonically share a universe with Chucklevision. This remains head-canon for me, despite it never really coming up.

Anyway, I cannot even begin to understand what Dan The Van must’ve done to make The Bells make sense. 

In this one, the brothers have been asked by a local vicar to forge a brand new bell for the top of the church tower. We’re told this in the first minute.

Dan The Van must somehow have funded the construction of a furnace within which the Chuckle Brothers can forge bells of approximately 7ft height. The exterior shot for this location is the same as the brothers’ normal offices for series 5 to 8 (they tend to change base every few series). So how Dan The Van has built this enormous forge into the existing office, only a fortnight since it was a pizza restaurant, is beyond me. Plausibly, he just expanded the oven.

But again it’s an honest-to-goodness masterpiece we’re talking about here. As always, they mess it up, but you can’t help but be on their side this time. It’s such a specialised job, there was just no way they could master it in the time they were given. They simply should not have been put in this situation. They’re not nearly qualified.

Somehow the problem isn’t actually the forging of the bells. They only fail at this part once, and then immediately get the hang of it.

The problem they face is getting the bells to the church. They lose honestly about 20 big bells over the course of the episode. They roll down hills, they fall into rivers. It’s a nightmare. And then when they finally get it to the church and up the tower, they bloody drop it! All the way down it goes (and a right bloody racket it makes too!)

If someone hadn’t made this up, I’d tell you you couldn’t make this up.

ChuckleVision: Series 6, Episode 4 - Mystery Tour

This one is, to be honest, from ChuckleVision, which ran from the late Eighties all the way until the late Noughties.

Paul and Barry become travel agents. But for some reason they also take their clients on local tours personally, driving them around in a horse and carriage. 

With their first customer, Barry immediately loses the map and they can’t find their way to the stately home Mrs Carrington (? I might’ve got the name wrong actually - it’s 31 years ago, in my defence) wants to visit. So they do the obvious thing and tell her the lord of the manor is shy, then blindfold her, and attempt to trick her into believing she’s being shown around the stately home anyway, when really they’re just in the Chuckle Brothers’ office.

Confession time.

I ripped this off at university when we performed a sketch called Zoo4You about an app where you can have someone bring any animal you like to your home to visit you, so long as you agree to wear a blindfold and never peek at the animal. 

Liam (Williams) and I would then play two guys who would hold up mops and stuff for the customers (Al Roberts and Keith Akushie, creator of Siblings, writer for Fresh Meat and Avenue 5) to trick them into thinking they had e.g. a giraffe in their house. 

It died on its arse every night and it’s precisely what I deserve! Actually,  another comedian started doing basically an old bit of mine recently - from the same show as the zoo thing, except it was a good bit - and I genuinely don’t think he nicked it, I get these things just happen sometimes, but the upshot is I can’t really do mine anymore and I honestly honestly feel it might be my cosmic punishment for stealing from the Chuckle Brothers all those years ago. 

The Brothers giveth. The Brothers taketh. To me, to you. That doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think. Long, this article, isn’t it?

ChuckleVision: Series 5, Episode 3 - Up In The Air

This was the first episode of ChuckleVision I ever saw. I only caught the second half of it, but I caught it a lot of times. We must’ve been taping something on VHS before we changed channel. Wisely, Mum said to leave the tape recording, probably just because Paul and Barry have basically our accent.

I could not believe what I was watching.

By the time we’d tuned in, the brothers were already up in the air. In a hot air balloon, floating high above South Yorkshire, with no way of getting down. I have seen the second half of this episode perhaps one hundred times. I have never seen the first half. I still have no clue how they ended up in this awful situation (although the smart money’s on it somehow being Barry’s fault). 

I had never seen a person on television who sounded like me or my family. Now I was looking at two, and they were being funny and they were in a hot air balloon. I could not and cannot imagine a more exhilarating cluster of truths.

My home town, Barnsley, shares a border with the Chuckle Brothers’ town, Rotherham. They sounded basically like me. And my parents, aunties, and uncles. And they were adults - they had moustaches and everything. But they were really really really really silly. I loved and love them more than any other comedy. There’s no irony here at all. They mean just as much to me as my later ‘adult’ heroes do.

I took the VHS to my Nannan’s house the next day and showed it to her. And the nicest imaginable thing happened. She laughed her absolute head off. An adult, then pushing 70, was totally helpless in the face of this show. And it validated my own reaction to it. Me and an adult found the exact same thing funny. 

She had the actual best laugh I’ve ever heard. She smoked about as much as a fire does and had done essentially her whole life, and so when she laughed it kind of sounded like she was dying. Her whole body went. 

And she was one of my favourite people to hang out with. So whenever I went over I’d bring a VHS of the latest ChuckleVision and me and my Nannan would watch these very silly men, and both roll around in agony at how impossibly outrageously indefensibly silly they were being. They would get absolutely everything wrong! They couldn’t get a damn thing right, bless the boys! 

ChuckleVision: Series 6, Episode 6 - Party Planners

‘Oh no, don’t tell me I’ve missed Christmas again!’ goes Barry. And he hasn’t.

I know I’ve already picked an episode from this show, but my final pick is gonna have to be from ChuckleVision (1987-2009). I’m sure for a website CALLED Chuckle, you don’t have any objections.

The Chuckle Brothers have my favourite double act dynamic, where they’re both dumb but they mutually agree that one of them is the smart one. In this case, it’s Paul. But the line is incredibly thin.

In this episode, Barry accidentally tells the person they’re organising a surprise party for that they’re here for the party. Paul attempts to cover this by saying ‘the party of your house-y. We’ve come to look at a party of your house-y. A part of your house.’ Again, this is good stuff.

The shows I’ve really loved have all basically been Chucklevision. Not many years later, it was Kenan and Kel which is basically ChuckleVision. At uni, it was (the US TV show) Stella, which is basically Chucklevision. Sheeps is basically Chucklevision.

Every year as a young child, my parents would take me to Scarborough in the summer holidays. I loved it. And my favourite part was always going to see the Chuckle Brothers live on stage, by the pier. But I would be so excited about it all week that my parents would simply have to lie to me and tell me they were definitively not performing.

They would trick me all the way to the theatre. They would even tell me that the posters advertising the show were there INSTEAD of the Chuckle Brothers. Which I for some reason found plausible and devastating. While I asked Mum what all these people were doing in the theatre, Dad would stand behind me, ready to grab me. Because the millisecond I saw the Chuckle Brothers, I would attempt to bolt for the stage. I wanted quite desperately to be onstage with those silly adults. 

Occasionally, during Sheeps shows, I feel a bit like that’s where I am.

• Sheeps: The Giggle Bunch (That’s Our Name For You) is on at the Pleasance Courtyard at 8pm.

• Russell T Davies really did write Chucklevision episodes.

Published: 1 Aug 2024