A Kick Up the Eighties A Kick Up the Eighties A Kick Up the Eighties was a 1981-1984 BBC 2 sketch show starring Robbie Coltrane, Tracey Ullman, Richard Stilgoe, Miriam Margolyes, Rik Mayall, Ron Bain and Roger Sloman. The series was created by Tom Gutteridge (producer/director) and Sean Hardie (executive producer). Colin Gilbert was script editor. The show was the first break into television for Rik Mayall, who played the anorak-wearing investigative reporter Kevin Turvey; it was also the start of Tracey Ullman's television comedy career. Peter Capaldi, a trained graphic artist from Scotland, contributed to designing the show's opening sequence prior to launching his
The Idiot Box (TV series) The Idiot Box (TV series) The Idiot Box is an American sketch comedy television series created by Alex Winter, Tom Stern and Tim Burns, which ran on MTV from 1990-1991. After the success of "Bill & Ted", MTV hired Winter, Stern, and Burns to develop a half-hour sketch comedy show for the network. As the channel was still strictly music-oriented at the time, "The Idiot Box" was mainly a showcase for popular music videos, but with a series of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies shown in between. Therefore, although an episode ran 30 minutes, there were only 7 to 11