500 Bus Stops

Bearing in mind that the British rock band Spinal Tap were actually an American creation (Yank actors pretending to be English rockers), '500 Bus Stops' is the nearest thing to an English version of 'This Is Spinal Tap'... and, like that movie, '500 B.S.' is hilarious. It's a mockumentary about John Shuttleworth, a grossly untalented rock singer/songwriter with an incredibly uninteresting home life (Shuttleworth and his family are the anti-Osbournes). The great premise of the joke here is that many people in Britain actually believed that Shuttleworth was a real performer ... when he is, in fact, a brilliantly deadpan creation of comedian Graham Fellows.

Fellows originally had a hit song on the British music charts in 1978 as 'Jilted John', a fictional persona. He topped this in 1985, when he recorded a deliberately crap-awful demo tape as an untalented no-hoper named Shuttleworth. A friend in the recording industry urged him to develop the joke. Soon 'John Shuttleworth' was performing onstage at the Edinburgh Fringe, receiving a nomination for the Perrier Award, followed by regular air time on Radio 4 and Radio One. 'Shuttleworth' attracted a legion of hardcore fans who had never heard of Graham Fellows, and who failed to catch wise that 'Shuttleworth' is in fact nonexistent.

Also heard with John Shuttleworth on his radio programme are his wife Mary (who has a 'real' job as a dinner-lady in a children's school) and their neighbour next-door over, Ken Worthington. Ken is John's agent, although Ken is as clueless and incompetent in this field as John is awful as a performer and songwriter. Much of the comedic material on the radio show dealt with John and Mary's two teenage children. The children were often mentioned but never heard: Graham Fellows did all the voices for John and Ken and (yes) Mary.

'500 Bus Stops' was a four-episode BBC2 sitcom in the form of a 'documentary' about John Shuttleworth's home life and his tour as a performer. (He can't afford decent transport to his downmarket gigs, so he travels by excursion coach ... hence the show's title.) Fellows could not perform all three characters on screen (as he'd done on radio) without giving away the joke. Therefore, Mary Shuttleworth showed up only briefly, and seen from the rear (played by an uncredited actress) with Fellows's dubbed-in voice. To explain why the ever-present Ken was unseen, the entire series was shot in a cinema-verite technique, with (the fictional) Ken Worthington serving as the cameraman, using a very unsteady minicam to film John Shuttleworth. This clever device plausibly kept Ken off-camera, but his moronic comments (dubbed in by Fellows) were frequently heard on the soundtrack. Ken and John held some deadpan discussions, neither of them realising that both of them are idiots who know nothing about rock music nor the performing industry.

Several rock musicians have told me that they couldn't laugh at 'This Is Spinal Tap' because it was too similar to their own painful memories. I'd like to get their opinion of '500 Bus Stops'. I rate this sitcom 8 out of 10. This show is hilarious, and it ought to be shown on American television.