[[TheEighties 1980s]] British comedy SketchShow which starred and launched the careers of Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, RowanAtkinson, and Pamela Stephenson.

A mixture of conventional sketches, brief non sequitur punchlines of the type later popularised by ''Series/TheFastShow'', musical numbers and biting political satire, it was so called because Creator/TheBBC put it on BBC Two opposite their own BBC One ''Nine O'Clock News''. After a long fallow period during the post-Creator/MontyPython era it was the next big thing in British TV sketch comedy, and inspired a boom in the genre during the rest of the 1980s.

The team had a particular fondness for taking real footage and inserting their own around it - for example, having a drunken, swearing Atkinson go put on a blonde wig and blue dress, walk through a door, and then switch to some real footage of Margaret Thatcher leaving Downing Street.

Smith and Jones went on to continue their partnership with ''AlasSmithAndJones'', while Atkinson struck out on his own, notably with ''Series/{{Blackadder}}'' and ''MrBean''.

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!!This TV show provides examples of:

* AluminiumChristmasTrees: Foreign viewers may not realise that the "Get a TV licence--it's cheaper than a funeral" parody (in which the TV Licensing Authority hunts down and murders people who don't pay their TV licence fee) is only a ''slight'' exaggeration of the real [=PSAs=] it was based on, and indeed ones that came later on were even more extreme, almost indistinguishable from the parodies.
* AngryMobSong: "All-Out Superpower Confrontation"
* CarFu: The truckers in the "I Like Trucking" song (a parody of then-common Yorkie chocolate bar adverts) keep a tally of their casualties on the side of the cab. [[EatTheDog They're particularly fond of hedgehogs]].
* {{Defictionalization}}: The show was the first to use the term "flange" to describe a troop of baboons; the word later made its name into serious studies. (The official name for a group of baboons is a "congress" which, as [[{{QI}} Rich Hall can tell you]], is funny enough on its own.)
* {{Eagleland}}: Complete with Country & Western music in the parody song [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmWLJmbytkk ''I Believe'']]
* IncessantMusicMadness: Gryff-Rhys Jones plays a colonial planter, driven to drink by the noise of the jungle, who staggers drunkenly onto the verandah and demands, "Will you shut up! Will this damn noise never end!" The camera pans back, revealing that what we have taken to be the chittering of night insect noise is really 30 or 40 natives, each of whom is playing with a Rubik's Cube...
* IntellectualAnimal: Gerald the Gorilla. "Wild? I was absolutely livid."
* MileHighClub: From the song "Do Bears" by RowanAtkinson and KateBush (originally performed at ''UsefulNotes/ComicRelief 1986'' and later included on one of the ''NotTheNineOClockNews'' albums):
-->'''Rowan:''' I met her in the first class lounge of a jumbo jet\\
It was love at first sight, Romeo and Juliet\\
'''Kate:''' He looked pretty rich and I was down on m' luck\\
So I charged him a fortune for a flying [[CurseCutShort fu...]]\\
'''Rowan:''' [[SubvertedRhymeEveryOccasion ...for crying out loud!]]
* MissingEpisode: Only two GreatestHits [=DVDs=] have been released, which included the most famous sketches ("Gerald the Gorilla", "Kinda Lingers", "the deaf telephone" etc.) and those which don't rely too heavily on the current affairs of the early 1980s. Much like ''SpittingImage'', some of the references and sketches would probably be somewhat impenetrable for viewers without much knowledge of that period. The full episodes probably ''are'' somewhere in the BBC archives, but if they are it remains to be seen if they'll ever see the light of day.
* {{Mondegreen}}: The point of "[[GettingCrapPastTheRadar Kinda Lingers]]"
* MoodWhiplash: Often played for laughs. Also the show was capable of going from incisive biting satire to crude slapstick humour (e.g. Rowan Atkinson walking into a lamppost) and back again very rapidly.
* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: The Billy Connolly pub sketch.
** Constable Savage isn't the most decent of people either.
* RomanceOnTheSet: BillyConnolly and Pamela Stephenson.
* SkewedPriorities: One sketch is about an episode of ''QuestionTime'' being recorded shortly after the Soviets have just started World War III; aside from an OnlySaneMan panellist whose contribution is "Help! We're all going to die!", the others focus on the 'real issues' such as blaming the crisis on the appalling record of the previous government.
* SurrealMusicVideo: Parodied in "Nice Video, Shame About the Song".
* TakeThat: Aimed at all sorts of media formats.
* ThoseWackyNazis: [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APMdeQFCGMQ Baronet Oswald Ernald Mosley.]]
* {{Zipperiffic}}: Poked fun at with a sketch set in a gents' lavatory with a punk desperately zipping and unzipping his many zips, frantically trying to gain access to relieve himself.

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