Noel Fielding Talks His New Apple TV+ Comedy Dick Turpin — and If Baking Show Fans Will Get the Joke
Millions of The Great British Baking Show’s fans might not know it, but Noel Fielding is very funny outside the tent, too.
Before taking over as co-host of Netflix’s supremely cozy UK baking competition in 2017, Fielding was best known for starring in The Mighty Boosh, a wildly surreal sitcom that became a cult hit during its 2004-07 run on BBC Three. Now two decades later, Fielding is returning to TV comedy with a new Apple TV+ series, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin (premiering this Friday on the streamer), with Fielding playing an easygoing misfit who accidentally ends up leading a gang of highwaymen who rob stagecoaches in 18th-century England.
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Fielding admits to TVLine that, following the success of The Mighty Boosh, “it’s very difficult to do comedy after that… I don’t think we realized how lucky we were until afterwards. They gave us complete creative freedom to do what we wanted.” But he found fresh inspiration in Dick Turpin: “It felt like the period costume aspect of this freed me up, and it sort of took it away from any comparisons to The Boosh… even though there are some moments” that are reminiscent of Boosh, he admits. “I think that’s just me.”
American audiences might not be aware, but Dick Turpin was a real person and a legendary figure in British culture: “We’ve just grown up knowing who he was,” Fielding says. As kids, executive producer Kenton Allen recalls, “we would go out and play Dick Turpin, the swashbuckling hero, a bit like I think people might have pretended to be Jesse James or Billy the Kid. He’s like a cowboy outlaw.” But Fielding’s Dick Turpin is “completely opposite to” the legend, he hints: He’s “inclusive and kind and vegan. We were quite interested in how that sort of character would be able to be in charge of a gang who are all basically sort of criminals.”
Turpin not only has to lead his gang of outlaws, he also has to avoid the grasp of local lawman Jonathan Wilde, played by Downton Abbey patriarch Hugh Bonneville. We may not be accustomed to seeing Bonneville get silly, but “he’s a very skillful comedian,” Fielding declares, “and I learned a lot off him, actually. We had a good double act, which was just a complete bonus.” He even raves that he and Bonneville have the best comedic chemistry he’s experienced “probably since [Boosh co-star] Julian [Barratt], weirdly.” Allen, meanwhile, is hoping that some fans check out the series just because “they know Lord Grantham’s in it.”
One big change from the Mighty Boosh days is the ample budgets that Apple bestows upon its TV series, allowing Dick Turpin to get big and bold and fantastical at times. “You can write witches and magical coaches and crazy things, and then not have to just cross them out and go, ‘They’re in the pub again,’” Allen says with a smile. Fielding also thinks it’s about time we saw more surreal, high-concept comedy like this on TV because after the success of The Office, “everything became a little more like that, like mockumentaries… I think maybe we’re getting back to a place of sort of more whimsical, silly stuff.”
Any silly British comedy will inevitably draw comparisons to the legendary sketch group Monty Python, and Fielding embraces the comparisons here: “Monty Python are The Beatles for us… They’re all such brilliant writers and such brilliant performers.” He notes that with their sketches and movies, Monty Python were “always trying to do these fantastical stories… so in a way, I feel like we’re just trying to carry on the tradition of that kind of stuff.” He mentions a moment in Dick Turpin where a warlock in the woods tries to cast a spell on Dick: “It’s very [Monty Python and the] Holy Grail, that bit, and it feels exactly the right tone for our show.”
But then again, plenty of viewers only know Fielding as the guy describing an amateur baker’s luxurious buttercream on Baking Show. So will that show’s fans come along for the ride on Dick Turpin? Fielding recalls seeing someone online say once: “What I love about Noel Fielding is half of his audience go, ‘That guy from the baking show,” and the other half go, ‘That’s Old Gregg,’” referring to a memorable swamp creature he played on Boosh. “Those two people don’t know the other one. I feel like the people who love Old Gregg will be glad I’m doing this.” But he hopes that “some of the [Baking Show] crowd will get into this” as well.
In any case, Fielding is thrilled to get back to his TV comedy roots, he says: “I’d been looking for something to do, really, since The Boosh, comedy-wise, and this was definitely it. This was definitely a return to that kind of stuff for me, and I forgot how much I loved it and how much I missed it.”
Will you check out Fielding’s new series on Apple? Hit the comments and let us know if you’ll be watching.
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