Looks Unfamiliar: Phil Catterall – It’s Like A Choose Your Own Adventure Of News

Stewart Lee And Richard Herring - listen to Phil Catterall and Tim Worthington talking about their 1995 Christmas Special for BBC Radio 1 - as well as the Christmas Specials of On The Hour and The Chris Morris Music Show - in Looks Unfamiliar.

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to.

Joining Tim for a special Christmas edition is podcaster Phil Catterall, who’s singing hosanna at the festive headlines from the Christmas Specials of BBC radio comedy shows On The Hour, The Chris Morris Music Show and Lee And Herring. Along the way we’ll be learning how to accurately pronounce ‘BBC7’, discussing how to defend yourself from a bear armed only with a book about Week Ending, testing Phil’s On The Hour Karaoke skills, and lamenting the tragic fate of the Breakaway theme music. Also, if you’re taking part in ‘Whigageddon’, you might want to have a think before listening to this…

If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, why not buy us a coffee here?

On The Hour - listen to Phil Catterall and Tim Worthington talking about the 1991 Christmas Special - as well as the Christmas Specials of Lee And Herring and The Chris Morris Music Show - in Looks Unfamiliar.

Richard Herring on Plastic Bertrand, from Fist Of Fun (BBC Books, 1995).

Stewart Lee on The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, from Fist Of Fun (BBC Books, 1995).

About Phil

Phil Catterall would like to assure everyone that he is not building a private army of Transformers. Yet.

Buy A Book!

You can find much more about On The Hour, The Chris Morris Music Show and Lee And Herring in Tim’s book Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1. Fun At One is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Although beef and tomato soup from the BBC drinks machine is also acceptable.

Further Listening

You can also find Phil on Looks Unfamiliar talking about Madballs Comic, Wise Up!, the Platoon computer game, Phantom 2040, Birdseye Steakhouse Grills and Star Wars: Droids here and the Christmas episodes of Community here.

Phil has also appeared on Tim’s Marvel Cinematic Universe podcast It’s Good, Except It Sucks talking about Iron Man here, Iron Man 3 here, Inhumans here and Deadpool 2 here, and standing in as host to chat to Tim about Guardians Of The Galaxy here and Ant-Man And The Wasp here.

Phil also appears in The Best Of Looks Unfamiliar alongside Suzy Norman on Hugo The Hippo, Richard Littler on the episode of The Waltons with a Poltergeist, Gary Bainbridge on Radio City’s Jack Your Body parody Deadly Boring, Tim Worthington on It’s A Shame by Kris Kross, Ben Baker on Now – The Christmas Album, Mitch Benn on Two-Stage Self-Assembly Ice Cream Cones and Darrell Maclaine on Blockbusters Bubblegum, which you can find here.

Come With Me Now, Into The Swirling Mists Of Human Inadequacy… is a look at the story behind Lee And Herring’s early radio series Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World which you can find here, and there’s more about how On The Hour became The Day Today in Eat This, Sissons! here. Amongst Them Trevor The Sheep is a feature about how Chris Morris’ subsequent Radio 1 show Blue Jam ran into trouble in the middle of the night; you can find it here, along with a look at the background to Blue Jam itself in E Arth Welcome… In Blue Jam here. There’s also much more about my love of the Fist Of Fun book in The Books I Couldn’t Help Thinking About – a feature looking at the books that have had the greatest influence on my own writing – here.