Oh gentle reader series#

It's comedy in the way things are phrased, and Joe Orton pioneered it with Entertaining Mr Sloane. 'He came in one day and said: 'I've just taken some disadvantaged youths to see a horse in a field.' It's that stilted language, a bit like 'team leader' or 'outreach worker' - all the things that The Office picked up on so brilliantly. John Shuttleworth's cadences came, at least partially, from Fellows' father-in-law. I remember I was going to say something to them about their faces, but they looked embarrassed - sheepish - so I didn't.' 'The only jobs they can get are in the local swimming pool, collecting money. 'I had a dream recently about three men who were born with sheep's faces,' he says, as we go outside to the garden table so that he can smoke a roll-up.

But there is something about him - almost an air of sadness - that suggests an empathy with them. The presence of his beautiful wife gives him a touch of sophistication entirely lacking in his characters. 'John Shuttleworth mentions them on stage - he's got a song called Mutiny on the Bounty, about how we should all rise up and demand the reinstating of the cardboard strip that Bountys used to come with - so someone from the marketing department sent us crates of the stuff,' says Fellows, who looks younger and hipper than you might imagine. We are at his house in Louth, Lincolnshire, and the kitchen cupboards are filled with boxes of both. 'Do you want a Tracker bar or a Bounty, courtesy of Mars?' asks Fellows. Fellows also has the rock musicologist Brian Appleton, another manifestation of all things provincial, and for this year's Edinburgh festival he is unveiling Dave Tordoff, a self-made businessman from Yorkshire.

Oh gentle reader series#

His most famous character, John Shuttleworth, is a failed songwriter from Sheffield who represents pop stardom at its most microscopic, although since his BBC2 special 500 Bus Stops, and the Radio 4 series The Shuttleworths, the ex-security guard's success has far outweighed his talent. Before The Office and Alan Partridge put the spotlight on middle England, Graham Fellows was making a career out of the humour of little things and the gentle tragedy of British parochial life.