Free Tickets: Portobello Film Festival 2024 Comic Strip Comedy Screenings (Sept 2nd & 4th)
Get ready for a laugh-out-loud experience with the Portobello Film Festival 2024! Free tickets are now available for exclusive Comic Strip comedy screenings on the 2nd and 4th of September at The Portobello Electric Cinema and The Phoenix Artists’ Club.
A Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques (1984) – 36 minutes duration
Screening on Wednesday, 4th September at 6 pm sharp at The Portobello Electric Cinema exclusively. Free as part of The Portobello Film Festival 2024.
Two Spaghetti Western-obsessed friends (Rik Mayall & Adrian Edmondson) arrive in a small town in southern Spain, dressed as gunslingers, on the same day that an unemployed druggie, Paul (Nigel Planer), two Australian travellers (Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders), and a Mancunian Matador (Adrian Edmondson) arrive in this sparsely populated town.
Four Men in a Plane (2002) – 32 minutes duration
A rare screening at The Phoenix Artists’ Club, Charing Cross Road, in a programme on Wednesday, 2nd September from 7 pm onwards. Screening also on Wednesday, 4th September in a programme starting at 6 pm sharp at The Portobello Electric Cinema as part of The Portobello Film Festival.
This film reprises the four travelling salesmen from 1998’s Four Men in a Car, played by Comic Strip regulars Rik Mayall (Alan), Adrian Edmondson (Ian), Nigel Planer (Tim), and Peter Richardson (Tony). The salesmen meet at an airport on their way to a conference somewhere in North Africa. Upon arrival at the terminal, Tim (Nigel Planer) is annoyed that he is just two air miles short of joining Alan and Tony in Club Class. Landing in North Africa, they’re surprised to learn that they’ll next face a further 15-hour coach trip across a rugged desert, journeying to their final destination. Alan (Rik Mayall) suggests that they all charter a small five-seater plane from the locals. This is where things start to go frustratingly wrong.
INTERMISSION
Q&A sessions with BBC Radio host Robin Ince and Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson, plus Comic Strip and The Young Ones star, actor Nigel Planer.
The Hunt for Tony Blair (2011) – 46 minutes duration
A rare screening at The Phoenix Artists’ Club, Charing Cross Road, in a programme on Wednesday, 2nd September from 7 pm onwards. Screening also on Wednesday, 4th September in a programme starting at 6 pm sharp at The Portobello Electric Cinema as part of The Portobello Film Festival.
This film was nominated for a BAFTA as Best Comedy Programme of 2012, alongside a British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Drama of 2011. This ‘Fifties Fugitive’ movie is a clever pastiche of monochrome British ‘B’ movies. It opens with the police arriving to arrest Prime Minister Tony Blair for murder. Blair goes on the run to prove his innocence but ends up killing more people in the process. Attempting to clear his name, he literally ends up in bed with Margaret Thatcher, brilliantly played by Jennifer Saunders, echoing a would-be Norma Desmond-like recluse from Billy Wilder’s Hollywood classic Sunset Boulevard, while giving us the best on-screen parody yet of the late Iron Lady in her dotage.
The main cast features Robbie Coltrane as Inspector Hutton, Stephen Mangan as Tony Blair, Nigel Planer as Peter Mandelson, Harry Enfield as Alastair Campbell, Jennifer Saunders as Margaret Thatcher, Peter Richardson as George W. Bush, James Buckley as the Police Sergeant, Rik Mayall as Professor Predictor, John Sessions as Donald Rumsfeld and Norman Tebbit, Ford Kiernan as Gordon Brown, Ross Noble as The Socialist, Catherine Shepherd as Cherie Blair, and Ronni Ancona as Barbara Windsor.
Four Men in a Car (1998) – 8 minutes Director’s Cut
A special sequence from Peter Richardson, screening at The Phoenix Artists’ Club, Charing Cross Road, in a programme on Wednesday, 2nd September from 7 pm onwards. Screening also on Wednesday, 4th September in a programme starting at 6 pm sharp at The Portobello Electric Cinema as part of The Portobello Film Festival 2024.
Red Top (2016) – 46 minutes
A rare screening at The Phoenix Artists’ Club, Charing Cross Road, in a programme showing on Wednesday, 2nd September from 7 pm exclusively. “So funny, it’s uncanny: did the Comic Strip hack The Guardian?” said Guardian TV Reviewer, Sam Wollaston, on 21st January 2016. Set in a 1970s time warp, this Wapping-based ‘phone hacker scandal’ satire features neat iconoclastic roles from Maxine Peake as roller-skating newspaper executive Rebekah Brooks, with Russell Tovey as the former Sun newspaper editor Andy Coulson, and The Comic Strip’s mainstay Nigel Planer as Rupert Murdoch. Stephen Mangan reprises his Comic Strip role as Tony Blair, while Harry Enfield appears as EastEnders’ Ross “listen, slag” Kemp. Eleanor Matsuura is notable as the dynamic Wendi Deng, now turned Bond Girl-meets-Kill Bill baddie. Further inspired casting sees Johnny Vegas playing a sloppy phone-tapping Sun journalist, while the film’s director and co-writer Peter Richardson has a cameo role in the shape of the 1970s Old Grey Whistle Test series host ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris as he introduces Tony Blair, reinvented as a hippie in a throwback band. The most recent Comic Strip to date. It’s possibly their best.
Ticket link to the screening at Phoenix Arts Club
Ticket Link to the screening at Portobello Electric Cinema
[Image Credit: IMDB]
