Charlie Productions : How We Made It

The silliest, easiest and currently most financially successful thing we've ever done all came about because of one very bad joke...

And be warned this is one of those jokes that was only ever mildly amusing at the time and to explain it is to really kill it dead. OK, ready? Right - we were at school and the PE department worked on rota so, for instance, for the first three weeks of the term one class would play rugby, another would play football, another would play squash or tennis or something and so on. Every few weeks all the classes would swap sports, this was a process the PE department staff referred to as a 'rotation'. This meant that towards the end of the autumn term of the school year 1994/5 Ben and Keith entered their 'Last Rotation'. From this, one of us, for various reasons (all of which are basically the extreme boredom engendered by secondary education), drew a picture entitled "The Last Rotation of Christ". And no, it wasn't that funny then either.

However Ben and Keith are never ones to let a little thing like a joke not really being very funny ever get in the way of devoting their time to it. So soon this drawing had turned into an idea for making a film of the entire Bible from start to finish based roughly on the approach of the National Theatre of Brent and a joke that Keith, in real life, actually thought he was the Son of God. Ben and Keith were going to write the script and Chris, who had just bought a camcorder to enable him to do animation, would shoot it and be their Terry Gillingham (the one who comes in to do the drawings and ends up having the best career of all).

And two terms and some GCSE's later, that's exactly what we did.

The plan had been that Keith would take the Old Testament and Ben the New, however, in the end Ben wrote the whole thing, originally entitled "The Totally True Bible of Ben and Keith". Heavily influenced by radio comedy it was often ignored by the cast and was basically just used as a spring board to being silly with fake beards.

Chris shot the whole thing and also did the animations (including the parting of the Red C, one of the funniest things we've ever done) but he couldn't stay behind the camera for long and was soon getting in amongst the dressing up. However, whilst Chris was unwilling to be left out, Keith was finding it hard to meet the brothers exacting standards of dedication. On camera he was fantastic and far funnier than the others, but off it he seemed to expect to do something with his summer holiday other than type up shooting schedules and organise the costumes. Increasingly as the summer progressed Ben and Chris would plan the shoots together and Keith would turn up and make it work.

As a result we all agreed that, as a title, "The Totally True Bible of Keith and Ben" wasn't fair on Chris. As teenagers all three of us were endlessly writing stories and creating characters and all three had invented characters called Charlie; it seemed to make sense therefore to rename the film "The Bible According To Charlie" .

We cut the film together at XVV, a local VHS edit suite we found. The end result, a 105 minutes of mildly blasphemous dressing up and running about was a hit amongst our school friends and we made all our money back by selling copies. A short excerpt of the film, Ben and Keith performing "Why Snakes?", a bizzare and relatively tuneless piece of faux 1910 musical hall shouting which is the precursor to Keith's music for "Crowd Scene For Exisitentialists", was later screened on Channel Four by World of Wonder as part of Take-Over TV. For some reason they insisted we reshot the song, which we did, and they then made it go all purple.

We all agreed that we should make another film. However, whilst Chris had come onto the project as a spare hand to hold the camera, by the end he was in many ways the commanding presence. Keith, on the other hand, had been largely uninterested in the nitty gritty of getting something written, shot and edited. As a result Charlie Productions was formed without Keith. This childish snub was driven by practical concerns but was doubtlessly tactless in it's handling and hurtful for Keith and in many ways it marked the start of a rift between him and Ben which wasn't to be properly healed until "Russell Square".

However, that was all in the future. All that mattered to the three of us then was that we had made a movie, it was funny and we had the tacit approval to sell it in school from the Headmistress who described it as "Chicken shit".

"The Bible According To Charlie" was shot in July and August 1995 in Brookmans Park and Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. It cost £136.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.
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