When The Adventures of Lano and Woodley started airing on the ABC in September 1997, it already seemed like the product of an earlier generation. Built off the back of a slapstick stage show that Colin Lane and Frank Woodley had been honing in comedy clubs around the country since the early 90s, the pair’s double act took cues from great physical comedians throughout the ages – the likes of Rowan Atkinson, The Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin and Peter Sellers.
With their stage show wedged into a half-hour sitcom format, the duo inject the mad situational nonsense of great BBC sitcoms such as Fawlty Towers and Are You Being Served? It’s a world where misunderstandings run rife, white lies are blown out of reasonable proportion and accidental baby-theft is par for the course.
Each episode begins with the pair being fired from some short-lived job due to hapless misadventure, and goes from there. A simple disagreement or minor revelation sees them fall into a hole of their own creation, in which they continue to dig. The more clearly signposted the dangers are, the more hilarious the eventual crash. It’s a classic formula for a reason, but it’s also a hard act to nail.
Every great double act has an alpha and a beta. Colin Lane, or Lano, plays the former – the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind – while Woodley moves around the world with the childlike hopelessness of Michael Crawford’s Frank Spencer. One early episode even finds them destroying their flat in a failed effort to make some home improvements, echoing a plot in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em.
While the earlier plots are largely fodder for their excellent double act and physically impressive pratfalls, by season two the stunts became more extreme and the writing notably tighter. A particularly well-woven misunderstanding around a lost pair of socks and a local op-shop has all the clever connective tissue of a Larry David-penned Seinfeld episode, while another episode ramps up the Jackass quotient, as Col sets up a men’s weekend-style survival challenge within their tiny apartment to teach Frank to fend for himself.
The hopeless pursuit of true love lingers throughout, with a number of impossible romantic opportunities played for laughs – the pilot episode sees Frank move out of their shared flat after becoming jealous of Col’s made-up girlfriend, while a later adventure finds him besotted with a woman who gives him CPR at a local swimming pool. Despite love woes featuring across a number of episodes, Frank and Colin are played largely as sexless beings; much like Mr Bean, they are alien-type oddities leading small, satisfied lives.
The Adventures of Lano and Woodley was axed after two seasons; according to comedian Tony Martin, the ABC’s then head of comedy felt Lano and Woodley’s antics just weren’t topical enough (despite featuring a storyline about Frank’s fear of beards). They might not have been cutting edge, but they were influential. The show aired on the BBC in the late 90s, and considering both this audience and the cross-pollination that occurs on the comedy festival circuit (the duo won the prestigious Perrier award for comedy in Edinburgh in 1994), it would not be unreasonable to draw a direct line from them to the flood of double acts that made waves in the following decade, such as The Mighty Boosh, Little Britain and Flight of the Conchords.
After officially dissolving as a double act with 2006’s Goodbye tour, Lano and Woodley reunited in 2018, and are touring a show which ostensibly begins as a dramatic reading of Moby-Dick and soon goes overboard. That’s the thing about not being topical – sometimes it makes you timeless.
