Anyone who had the misfortune to live through both Hulkamania and the Millennium remembers ‘The A-Team’
Even those who managed to escape the torture of Robbie ‘Dickwhistle’ Williams gurning and gopping about what year it was while rubbing various fruits and vegetables on himself for months on end have probably heard of ‘The A-Team’.
They have become part of pop culture.
(Personally, I would rather listen to the late, great Artist Formerly Known as and Later Also Known as After He was Formerly Known as Artist Formerly Known as Prince’s idea of the party taking place the day before than an ex-boy band, egotistical moron’s cash in on the turn of the millennium. A song that, now, just reminds us all of how far things have come since then. Downhill. Out of control. At speed. On fire.)
‘The A-Team’.
Their televised antics during the mid-eighties are stuff of legend. The formulaic episodes are trope royalty.
Massive explosions, heavy weapons, multiple vehicle crashes and nobody ever died. No one ever got hurt.
3 years and 98 episodes, not counting ones which were never broadcast, and not one person died! Not one person was seriously injured!
It’s the lord high emperor of TV tropes.
Season 1, Episode 3:
A jeep driven by para-military soldiers somewhere in Mexico. The soldiers are attempting, for some bizarre reason, to take over a small chicken farm run by a comedic old man and his innocent daughter. The jeep crashes into a barrier at high speed. The smoke clears and the camera makes sure you catch the occupants crawling away from the wreckage, unharmed.
But instead of rejoining the fight, they decide to give up their evil ways and wander off screen, never to be seen again.
Face gets romantically involved with the comedic old man’s attractive daughter.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock marries a lemon.
Season 1, Episode 7:
A similar group of guerilla soldiers, this time intent, for no adequately explained reason, on taking over a small village rich in handmade sombreros and donkey shit.
A large military jeep, pulling a huge artillery piece behind it in a trailer, cruises down a road on its way to eliminate what little resistance exists in the village. The trailer hits an improvised explosive made from jelly tots and celery and flips up in the air, landing with a crash on top of the jeep. The jeep spins wildly out of control and eventually screeches to a halt.
The occupants crawl out of the wreckage, dust themselves off and run away to join the circus.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive villager.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock decides he is the ghost of Elvis Presley.
Season 2, Episode 4:
A group of rednecks led by a cruel millionaire are attempting to starve a small village of their water supply. The reason? Something about pigs. Who knows?
A large number of the millionaire’s cronies; heavily armed, tattooed and moustachioed, are heading to the village in a large military truck. They are going to, I don’t know, steal the mayor’s daughter or some such bullshit.
On the way they encounter Face, dressed as an old woman pushing a pram. Despite being battle-scarred, no good, evil mercenaries for hire, they swerve to miss the octogenarian obstacle. The van rolls off the road.
All the men get out and dust themselves off. Even though not one of them is injured in any way they all decide to leave, renege on their contract with the millionaire and head off to Vegas to start a dance troupe.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive villager.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock becomes Buddhist.
Season 2, Episode 8:
An evil businessman is trying to buy out the local shopkeepers for, let’s say, the oil under their premises.
He is not offering a fair price and, besides, the people have a lovely community and don’t want to leave (apart from all the evil businessmen and guns for hire who apparently live there too).
The businessman employs the local guns for hire, and they set about scaring the shopkeepers away. The guns for hire are all in a large military truck on their way to put the shits up the shopkeepers when Murdock flies overhead in a helicopter he found, somewhere, like you do.
The team, minus B.A. who is unconscious, drop Molotov cocktails on the truck which rolls off the road and down a cliff.
All the guns for hire crawl out from the wreckage and dust themselves off. As one they decide to move to another country and are never seen again.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive shopkeeper.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock thinks he has no arms.
Season 3, Episode 2:
An evil group of modern-day pirates hijack a large cargo freighter. They intend to steal the cargo and sell it to an evil Chinese conglomerate.
The problem? The hard-working crew have a stake in the cargo and losing it would ruin them all. The A-Team is already onboard, in disguise. The bad guys don’t know who they are trifling with. There is a huge onboard gunfight which ends with the massive freighter crashing into a bridge.
All the pirates have a sudden change of heart and jump into the sea, swimming away into oblivion for all we know. The leader badly stubs his toe and limps off muttering the usual tropes such as: ‘You haven’t seen the last of me!” and ‘I’ll be back!”.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive sailor.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock believes he is Horatio Nelson.
Season 3, Episode 10:
A group of ex-soldiers are causing chaos in a small South American town. For no reason at all. They just like causing chaos apparently. Their main weapon is a helicopter gunship against which the locals have no defence.
The team improvises a rocket launcher utilizing an old dustbin, some chickens and a carrot. They take out the gunship with one shot and the helicopter crashes to the ground and explodes into a fireball.
The camera shows the crash site a few minutes later. The fire is out and the helicopter lays mangled.
The pilot and crew are standing nearby, uninjured. One man is visibly distressed, walking around with a cracked China teacup in one hand and a saucer in the other.
“My tea! I spilled my tea!”
He whines, before joining his fellow bad guys running off into the jungle, never to be seen again.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive member of the town.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock believes he is a Welshman from the 3rd century who worships a diseased elephant with amnesia.
Season 4, Episode 2:
A completely different South American village which looks suspiciously like the last one but honestly is a completely different one.
(It’s not like they use the same set for all these episodes based in small villages in South America. That would be cheating, right? They don’t do that sort of thing on telly do they? Everything you see on the telly is true, innit.)
A completely different millionaire and a completely different set of guns for hire are terrorising a small village. Even though the main bad guy is a millionaire who lives in a huge, secluded mansion, apparently, stealing the meagre land of some poor farmers is his number one concern.
This time their secret weapon is a F-14 Tomcat fighter plane. It is not explained how a group of provincial, South American bad guys have a couple of billion dollars’ worth of military hardware at their disposal, but there it is, flying around the place blowing shit up.
In a stirring montage, the team disarm all the ground based bad guys with an improvised electromagnet and Hannibal fires a shoulder mounted rocket launcher at the fighter plane. Despite having oodles of sophisticated technology which would make an R.P.G. pretty much useless against it, coupled with its immense speed which would make targeting it from a ground based position with a slow, clunky bazooka almost impossible, the fighter explodes after the first shot. It crashes to the ground in a massive explosion and burns.
The camera shows the wrecked plane, the flames have gone out and only smouldering metal remains. The two pilots are shown nearby, totally uninjured. One is slapping the back of the other who eventually coughs something on to the ground. The cougher looks up, with tears in his eyes and says,
“Christ! I nearly choked on my Hubba Bubba, there!”
Before both run off into the jungle.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive villager.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock believes he is an evil, haunted egg.
Season 4, Episode 7:
A dirty suburb of a grimy American town. A large apartment block full of poor, innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. A friendly community of neighbours who care for each other and their home.
A completely different millionaire than the two before is trying to buy the building with a view to demolishing it to build like a bowling alley or some shit.
Whatever the reason, he wants the building, and the tenants are stopping him getting it, so he tries to force them out.
The millionaire enlists a group of guns for hire (who knew that there were so many of them around) to threaten the tenants and force them to leave.
The team arrive and set about saving the tenants. In the ensuing battle, where the team utilise kitchen implements and bed frames as impromptu weapons, the deranged millionaire sets the building on fire. Everyone gets out safely and another friendly millionaire, totally different to the other millionaires, donates a brand-new building to the homeless tenants just because he’s a thoroughly nice bloke.
There is a devastating loss as the team roast marshmallows in front of the conflagration, laughing and joking at another job well done. Several of the marshmallows get too close to the flames and are burned. Inedible. Thrown to the ground. Unmunched.
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive resident of the building.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock believes he is a famous stage actor and runs around quoting Shakespeare.
Season 5, Episode 10:
A South American warlord wages a terrorist campaign against a neighbouring town. His complex is huge and filled with heavily armed soldiers, tanks and military aircraft.
Has the A-Team finally come up against a threat it cannot overcome?
Of course not.
Left alone in a disused garage, the team gather materials.
An old refrigerator. Some compost. Several crates of crusty, maggot-ridden turnips. A rotten plank of wood with a nail in the end. Some rusty chains. A broken alarm clock. Eighty nine AAA batteries (flat). Three jars of pickled onions and a small spade.
In minutes, using only a belt sander and a malfunctioning winch, they manage to construct a hydrogen bomb. Murdock pieces together a light aircraft from some old cardboard boxes and flies the bomb to the evil warlord’s complex, dropping it with an amusing quip that is sort of funny but at the same time, makes no sense.
“I hope you’re feeling peckish, here’s your pineapple!”
Or something.
The bomb erupts into a huge mushroom cloud, eliminating the evil warlord’s forces with one blow.
The camera focusses in on a ruined town aflame. Everyone there has escaped, uninjured. Some people have a few scratches on their faces while others have scorched clothing. But all are miraculously unharmed despite a large nuclear bomb exploding in their face.
The evil warlord and his cronies all have a change of heart and vanish into the surrounding jungle, defeated.
The townsfolk are grateful for their redemption.
Amid the celebrations there is sadness.
Caught on the fringe of the shockwave, Hannibal’s cigar has been broken in two. Face’s carefully coiffured hair has been ruffled. B.A. has broken a fingernail opening a tricky can of Pepsi and one of Murdock’s shoes has fallen from his foot and been lost in the maelstrom!
Face gets romantically involved with an attractive resident of the town.
B.A. gets tricked into boarding a plane and Murdock believes he is Reg Barclay from ‘Star Trek: TNG’.
Always the same formula, always the same result.
Their trademark black van transported the team wherever they needed to go. Massively visible and recognisable but, somehow, never picked up by both the civilian and military police that were supposedly chasing them down wherever they went.
(I don’t care what anybody says. That van was black. All black with a red stripe.
It was always black, right? It was! It absolutely was!
According to the history books, i.e. the internet because books don’t exist anymore, it was black below the red stripe and grey above it!
It is and always was.
What the actual fuckadiddly?!
I am sure I would have noticed that. The all-black paint was cool, and the dodgy grey roof isn’t.
Why would I spend years believing that van rocked when it actually looked like some dude delivering shit for Amazon?
The grey roof makes it look like the van is wearing trousers. Badly fitting trousers. Probably made of corduroy.
And it’s pulled the waistband way up there like those guys who think they can hide their beer gut by pulling their belt up to their nipples and tucking the fat down into their kecks.
When I was a kid there were a bunch of different vehicles gracing the TV screens every Saturday evening that were just amazing to my prepubescent mind filled with Transformers, Hot Wheels and Evel Knievel.
The ‘A-Team’s van was one of them. Along with a certain Dodge Charger with military rank, a shiny black Trans Am with a personality disorder and a (truly terrifying if you think about it) helicopter which could fly with no noise, see you taking a shit through three feet of concrete and listen in to your phone conversations.
Is this the Mandela effect or is someone screwing with me? I tend to believe the latter. The Mandela effect is just something made up by the same people trying to drive me even more insane by explaining it away as my fault somehow.
I think someone is messing with this simulation we call reality and trying to freak us all the fuck out.
Either that or my whole childhood was a lie.
What next?
Was the Duke’s Charger actually blue?
K.I.T.T. was just a Speak-and-Spell in a 1953 Hillman Imp?
Optimus Prime was actually just a vacuum cleaner called Henry with a superiority complex?
I can’t wait until I turn into a crab and none of this matters anymore.
Just krill.
The endless pursuit of krill.
Lovely krill.
But, I digress, as I often do…)
Anyway, the A-Team always got into strife helping some needy individuals and looked like they were going to lose. But it all gets turned around in the third act with a montage of half the team building a super weapon out of plastic bottles and blu-tak while the other half shuffled around waving melons, climbing trees, pretending to be a road sweeper or some such bullshit while the uplifting theme music plays.
The bad guys swallowed the whole misdirection, while giving the team exactly the time they needed to get their ducks in a row, then come over all shocked and surprised when the good guys come out on top.
It was awesome! Suspension of disbelief at its finest.
John ‘Hannibal’ Smith.
The leader of the team, with his own secrets. Secretly being an underwear model for a well-known clothing brand being the least of them.
Hannibal always had a plan. He was always one step ahead of the bad guys, even when it looked like he wasn’t. A wise cracking, smart-arse genius with a fat cigar he never actually smoked.
Hannibal had a legendarily powerful urine stream which he often utilised to piss on bad guys from a mile distant.
One of his favourite pastimes was firing his pee at birds innocently roosting in trees, knocking them from their perches and covering them with wee-wee that smelled of cigars and Sugar Puffs.
Despite his rough and ready persona, Hannibal had a softer side. He collected buttercups and liked the smell of freshly cut grass. He moonlighted as a party planner for underprivileged children.
He often used his trips to various places around the world to add rare and exotic ingredients to his cooking. Few people know that there was a full kitchen in the back of the team’s van and Hannibal loved to surprise his teammates with lavish meals and desserts.
Hannibal was also the resident cleaner of the team. Few know of the kitchen in the back of the team’s van, even fewer know of the five bedrooms, lounge, reception room and luxurious bathroom hidden in the back too.
One of Hannibal’s pet peeves was cleaning that bathroom. Especially when B.A. (Bad Arse) Baracus used it. A guy doesn’t get that buff without a high protein diet.
High protein in one end equals big, stinky shits coming out the other and when B.A. dropped the kids off at the pool, everyone knew about it, and Hannibal was always stuck cleaning up the destruction.
H.M. ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock.
Murdoch was insane, but in a funny way. Mental illness is no joke unless you’re Howling Mad Murdoch. Schizophrenia coupled with O.C.D. and a little bit of psychopathery. Serious stuff. But the guy would just pull a crudely constructed sock puppet out of his pocket, have a little chat with it and everything is rosy.
Don’t worry kids, he’s mad but he’s a happy kind of mad!
And he could fly any aircraft like Maverick from Top Gun despite being ruled by a carrot called Chris.
Murdock was the team’s resident pilot and B.A. had a phobia about flying so it was obvious there would always be friction between them.
Murdock regularly ended up in arguments with B.A. Usually over various confectionaries. B.A. always had some form of sweeties on him and Murdock always wanted them.
Despite knowing well B.A.’s superior strength, Murdock was, as mentioned before, fucking hatstand, so he never stopped trying to overpower B.A. to try and steal his goodies.
This usually ended badly for Murdock. In fact, during the entire run of the series, the only major injuries ever recorded were those suffered by Murdock as he tried to prise Gummi Bears or Jelly Tots from B.A.’s powerful fists.
Murdock suffered from a rare disease known as O.T.H.S. (Old-Timey Head Syndrome). Midway through season 3, his whole head turned black and white. Starting with his eyes, the lack of any colour slowly spread out until his entire head was devoid of pigment.
The attack of O.T.H.S. damaged Murdock’s confidence. Initially, the rest of the team thought he was playing some elaborate prank because, you know, he’s nuts, but as time passed and the O.T.H.S. spread, they began to believe it.
In the early days of his affliction, Murdock was angry about his new lack of cranial colour. He believed it would curtail his ability to be whatever crazy thing he believed himself to be this week. There were partial highs among the lows as his warped brain tried to compensate for the O.T.H.S.
One week he believed he was a newspaper. Another week he believed himself to be the star in a silent movie from the 1920’s. Yet another week he believed himself to be a parallel universe version of himself where everyone had black and white heads. During those times, Murdock was able to look past his illness and be his usual cheerful self. But it was all just an illusion created by his own mind.
Eventually, even Murdock’s obliviously happy personality could no longer cope with his illness, and he slid into a deep depression. At one point he tried to take his own life with a sharpened slice of melon. This is when the rest of the team stepped up to try and help their wounded comrade.
An entire five-episode arc was devoted to the search for a cure to O.T.H.S. These episodes were never shown on TV as it was decided they were far too boring. They mainly consisted of the team sitting in a darkened, smoke wreathed office, making phone calls. So yes, those episodes would have damaged the show’s entertainment value.
A cure was located. A scrap of ancient parchment hidden under Ainsley Harriot’s fridge was found to contain the cure to O.T.H.S. It was bizarre but, at this point, the team figured that they had little to lose.
Murdock was required to personally train two Outer Mongolian Fighting Chickens. Once this aspect of the cure was complete, Murdock had to don a miner’s helmet complete with a Davy lamp, perch one of his fighting chickens on each arm and rampage through the offices of ‘Wanker, Tosspot and Shitstain; Lawyers to the Stars’ while waving a brass coal shovel and a nylon feather duster.
How an ancient scroll could know about fancy Hollywood lawyers, brass hearth accoutrements and man-made fibres is anyone’s guess, but that’s what the parchment said so the team followed the instructions to the letter.
Once this bizarre gauntlet was run, one last step remained. Murdock had to lie on his back with his feet in a vat of custard for thirty days and thirty nights.
He lay down, becustarded his feet and waited.
A month later, the remainder of the team returned to where they had left their black and white-headed teammate. He was tired, covered in bird shit and hungry but his face was coloured once more!
From that point on, Murdock had a new lease on life. His self-confidence bloomed as he revelled in his beautiful, coloured face.
Templeton ‘Faceman’ Peck.
Faceman could literally look like anyone. Or anything.
At the same time, he clearly just looked like Face in a poorly thought out and executed disguise. But in TV land he was a master of disguise, and no one could see through the oft used tropes such as wearing some glasses, putting on a hat and painting a crudely drawn moustache on his face with a marker pen. The bad guys fell for it, every single time.
I’m pretty sure he spent the entirety of one episode disguised as a table. Someone put a drink on him and he shouted,
‘Coaster! I don’t want rings on me varnish!’,
and the bad guy didn’t think anything was odd about that at all. He apologized and went to fetch a little, lacy doily.
It always puzzled me why Hannibal was supposed to be the master of disguise when it was really Face who constantly took that role. I mean, the clue is even in his name, right?
He was the ‘Faceman’, the man of many faces, the man who did faces, the man who pulled faces, the man who had an amazing collection of clocks and cliffs.
Apart from the token single attractive female who appeared in every show just to sniff around Face’s butt, no one ever noticed Face. He was a shadow, a wraith, able to flit in and out of places under the radar.
All this was weird as he bore more than a passing resemblance to ‘Starbuck’ from ‘Battlestar Galactica’.
Even though Face clearly wasn’t ‘Starbuck’ from ‘Battlestar Galactica’ he sometimes dressed like him by mistake. I mean, how could two people from different shows be the same person? That’s just insane. Starbuck and Face aren’t even from the same damn galaxy. There’s no way it could have been the same person.
That short clip of Face being puzzled by the appearance of a Cylon in the opening credits of ‘The A-Team’ was pure coincidence.
No one but B.A. ever seemed to notice Face dressed in Starbuck’s uniform rather that his usual smart-casual attire. But B.A. was a professional. Face’s flagrant disregard of the dress code annoyed him immensely.
As time went on, B.A. became increasingly frustrated with Face’s clothing and his other comrade’s failure to even notice. Even when Face turned up with a fake plastic gun that did nothing but flash and make pathetic little ‘pew-pew’ noises when the trigger was pulled, Hannibal and Murdock were oblivious.
Now Face was not only ignoring the dress code, but he was also putting their lives in danger by using a pretend, future gun. Sort of. All the weapons used in their line of work were fake, but this truth was not something to get in the way of a large, beefy man being annoyed at something he didn’t understand so, for B.A. at least, that truth was a lie.
When Face became more and more comfortable in his alter-ego’s clothing, not even having the decency to look sheepish occasionally about it, eventually becoming so brazen that he started stealing and smoking Hannibal’s cigars, B.A. felt he had to speak up.
B.A. gathered Hannibal and Murdock in secret to tell them of his concerns. Hannibal was shocked and immediately reported Face to HR.
Face received a fine and a written warning and vowed to never do it again.
Face had a good relationship with the other members of the team, despite being constantly puzzled yet fascinated by the behaviour of his nutty comrade, Murdock.
Boscoe Albert ‘Bad Attitude’ Baracus.
B.A. could build anything out of anything. In ten minutes. With one hand. While he was asleep. He hated flying but would always end up on a plane threatening to kill everyone. He was a hard nut with a bad attitude but at the same time managed to be the softest member of the group. He should really have been called ‘Benignly Amiable’ Baracus.
Everyone who knows the A-Team knows about B.A.’s skills with mechanics, driving and punching people very hard in the face. Not Face. Their face. The faces of the individual people he punched, not their man who was called Face. Not Face’s face.
B.A. punched people very hard in the head.
Few know about his stance on net neutrality and the morally bankrupt, internet based, businesses who rip off innocent people every day.
He was especially annoyed by internet streaming services who charge for content and then expect people to pay an extra premium to have a ‘no-ads’ version of something they were already paying for. B.A. considered this immoral and definitely shitty and campaigned against it with vigour.
B.A. regularly lamented about the fact that internet streaming services expected the paying customer to play by copyright rules and law developed in the favour of the companies. Given the alternatives of being able to visit any illegal website and watch whatever you want for free, with no ads and virtually no way of ever getting caught, it annoyed him greatly how streaming services treated their customers so badly in the name of greed.
Given that this was all in the days before the internet even existed, some have postulated that B.A. was psychic and saw what was coming before DVD’s even became a thing, never mind Netflix.
He was also a big fan of buying cheap tat at ‘Poundland’ and didn’t care who knew it.
Whichever way you slice the cheesecake, the ‘A-Team’ were awesome.
Virtuous warriors standing up for the little people. Valiant foes to all who opposed truth, justice and liberty.
And if I were to be pushed on which of the ‘A-Team’s many adventures I loved the most? Which episodes resonated with my childish mind, filling me with hope for a brighter future? Which episodes would I recommend to anyone dumb enough to listen?
Easy. Many episodes spring to mind as contenders but two rise above all the others:
The episode where Face goes on a diet of bran muffins and curry in order to force B.A. to experience what the rest of the team have been exposed to from the very beginning. Stinky farts that coil around your throat, poke you in the eyes and burn your nose off.
Face placed a cork up his butt to hold it in for as long as possible while his lower intestine pickled in far east spices and roughage filled grain. After a few weeks he gathered the team in the van. He, Hannibal and Murdock donned gas masks to B.A.’s surprise and all three looked on in glee for his reaction as Face finally released his burning guff.
While admitting Face’s trouser cough was a little bit stinky, as the interior paint of the van peeled slowly off and the leather on the seats melted, B.A. laughed it off before letting rip with his own glass fogger.
Even within the perceived safety of their gas masks, the other three team members nearly died and Face, after having several facial reconstruction surgeries, reluctantly admitted that he could never compete with B.A.’s nuclear butthole.
The other episode was the one where the team kidnapped Piers Morgan. They forced him to wear a cute, pink, frilly dress and be their personal butler. Piers was not pleased.
Any show that humiliates that pasty faced twat gets high ratings from me.
Were those TV shows based on a real life ‘A-Team’?
Possibly, but if they were it would be top secret, and I couldn’t possibly comment lest I get taken out in the middle of the night by some black ops nutjob full of caffeine and cocaine.
And I don’t mean that we would pop out for coffee and a croissant and discuss the pressures of being an assassin for the government.
Me dead. Kaput. Blown to little bitties.
My point is ‘The A-Team’ are well known.
But how many people have ever heard of ‘The B-Team’?
It’s a shocking omission from most people’s knowledge and completely disrespectful for the members of the ‘B-Team’ and the sacrifices they made in the name of peace, justice and Jelly Tots.
The ‘B-Team’s’ adventures and endeavours during the Second World War are rarely spoken of, not taught in schools and generally unknown to all except those who choose to look between the lines of the history books.
This is despite being instrumental in the end of fascism, the fall of the Third Reich and the secret recipe of Jelly Tots being made freely available to all democratic peoples of the world.
Imagine a world without Jelly Tots! No thanks! We all owe a debt to the ‘B-Team’ for this alone.
It’s true that the individual members of the ‘B-Team’ went on to be remembered and celebrated for their successful second careers following the ‘B-Team’ disbanding in 1949, but their heroic exploits before becoming movie and music hall stars should be more widely recognised.
Pictured: George ‘Fucking Nuts’ Formby performing several years after the dissolution of the ‘B-Team’. This was the largest audience he had ever performed for.
The audience’s name was Derek Trumpton-Jolliper.
Derek gave George’s performance three out of five stars, which was pretty good considering that Derek didn’t even intend to watch George’s show. He was on guard duty, under orders not to move, and George just turned up and started marching up and down in front of him in his crazy mechanical trousers, whooping, hollering and yelling.
Okay, I will admit that the ‘B-Team’ spent a lot of government money and misused much military machinery in the pursuit of the perfect dirty Martini.
It’s true that many of their self-appointed missions involved their bull-headed desire for free access to Jelly Tots and other candied jellies.
It’s also true that they spent vast chunks of time hanging around in bars, drinking heavily and throwing custard filled wellington boots at Cary Grant.
But they also did many good deeds, including but not limited to depriving the Fuhrer of his favourite fluffy slippers.
This was one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Wehrmacht. If Adolf was in possession of his slippers, his little footsies wouldn’t have been chilly and he would have been able to put more effort into winning the war rather than running around the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ shouting,
“Nein, nein, meine schlip-schlips are gegangen!”
With his slippers correctly ‘be-footen’, Adolf would possibly have also avoided the loss of his left testicle.
While searching for his fluffy booties one evening, he slipped on a carelessly discarded piece of Sauerkraut. He landed awkwardly, nadgers first, on a large stapler used for attaching hand drawn portraits of his buttocks to death warrants.
He was a funny little Fuhrer.
The stapler stapled. Addy screamed at a frequency only audible to giraffes and the rest is history.
The resulting lack of confidence, exacerbated by the Brits constantly pointing and laughing at him while singing that popular song I’m sure you have all heard of, did little to help in his quest to become the world’s biggest asshole.
So, we should all respect the ‘B-Team’.
I’m pretty sure most people are at least aware of the four members of ‘The B-Team’ due to their fame outside the covert team.
The ‘B-Team’ consisted of four members:
Humprey Bogart, James Stewart, Louis Armstrong and George Formby.
Humphrey ‘Badius’ Bogart. (1899 – 1957)
Leader of the ‘B-Team’ and the reason for the ‘B’. The name of the group was originally ‘The Bogart Team’ but it was decided that this sounded a little bit icky so they reverted to the initial ‘B’.
Bogart’s special skills were leadership, tactical expertise and looking cool while smoking in black and white photographs.
He was an expert in heavy weapons, not so heavy weapons, light weapons, really light weapons and weapons so light you have to weigh them down so they don’t float off.
He was also an expert in the wearing of hats, the proper application of shoe polish to brogues and telling naughty people off with maximum swagger.
A generally dour and miserable man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. His already gloomy outlook was only made worse during his time leading the team. He was often driven to depression by the antics of his fellow team members, especially George Formby and Louis Armstrong.
George and Louis would regularly torture Bogart by getting drunk and playing the greatest hits of Spandau Ballet on the banjo and trumpet. How they managed to play songs that didn’t exist yet is still a mystery and is a subject under great scrutiny, even today, by military intelligence.
Some suspect that George Formby had a time travelling mandolin, but this is yet to be confirmed.
While his counterpart in ‘The A-Team’ had a very positive catchphrase,
“I love it when a plan comes together.”
Bogart’s own catchphrase was darker and reflected his exasperation in being the leader of a team of what he called ‘a trio of fuckwits’. It went like this,
“Why the fuck am I saddled with these idiots?”
This was usually uttered while he bowed his head and rubbed his face in mental exhaustion.
Even after the ‘B-Team’ were disbanded in 1949, Bogart’s face remained etched with misery, hopelessness and sadness, despite being a rich and famous movie star. This is why, when not making movies and getting off with actresses half his age, he spent most of his free time drifting around in his boat feeling sorry for himself.
Seriously, look at any photograph of Bogart, or check out any of his movies and you can see the emptiness behind his eyes.
I’m sure most of us would feel the same way in his position.
Spandau Ballet sucked hard in the eighties. Being forced to hear their back catalogue endlessly repeated, badly, on banjo and trumpet by a squeaky dimwit from Lancashire and a hyperactive, laxative addicted lunatic while Jimmy Stewart wheeled and cavorted around in the background getting all the words wrong must have been an absolute nightmare!
Regardless of all this, which would have driven lesser men to much murder, Bogart still managed to lead his team to success many, many times.
Alright, a few times.
Okay, twice.
But we can’t blame the man. He was lumbered with a team of alcoholic numbskulls.
After the dissolution of the ‘B-Team’, Bogart was the founder of the infamous ‘Rat Pack’ in the late 40’s. This group, comprised of movie stars and singers, all led double lives as both celebrities and secret operatives in the ongoing fight against evil forces all over the world.
The ‘Rat Pack’ comprised of Bogart, his wife Lauren Becall, and his various famous friends including, but not limited to, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Errol Flynn, Nat King Cole, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland. Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop. They regular met at Bogart’s home in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles to discuss missions, drink heavily and throw custard filled wellington boots at Cary Grant.
Even all those years later, Bogey feared that Formby and Armstrong were always lurking nearby and took to wearing a sombrero hat that they both feared to keep them away.
George ‘Fucking Nuts’ Formby. (1904 – 1961)
Pictured: George and Louis during a mission to Bogata to rescue trapped hostages from an evil warlord monkey. It was seeing Louis’ head from this angle that reminded George strongly of an egg and he became addicted to them days later.
George’s contributions to the team were window cleaning, leaning on lampposts on the corners of streets and general buffoonery.
He was also the team’s technology expert; specialising in computers, high speed internet, facial recognition, biometric systems and all forms of sophisticated alarm systems implementing laser grids, sound/thermal activation and pressure sensors.
He could crack any form of digital encryption in minutes and access highly robust, secured computer systems with ease.
Of course, none of these things existed when the ‘B-Team’ were active so his unique skills were mainly redundant.
Due to this, George mainly concentrated on ‘entertaining’ the team with his ‘wacky’ and ‘hilarious’ songs while playing his banjo and ukelele.
George found a kindred spirit in Louis Armstrong as they were both fond of music and similarly loony and many a boring evening was whiled away with the two of them regaling the team with their stirring and highly enthusiastic renditions of Spandau Ballet songs.
George and the Egg.
George was addicted to eggs. He ate them all the time. Just eggs, nothing else. Eggs. More Eggs. Eggy eggs, Eggy egg eggs.
He could easily have beaten B.A. in a fart off. Nothing beats an eggy one and George’s botty burps were turbo charged, premium, top quality eggy eggstons.
Like all addicts, eventually Geroge’s habit became more difficult to maintain, and he ate more eggs each day. In an effort to recreate his early eggy highs, he searched far and wide for better eggs, bigger eggs, eggs from different animals and finally, sentient eggs.
A Tibetan monk in a darkened tavern deep in the foothills of the Himalaya spoke of special eggs with a soul and a personality, and these were the tastiest eggs of all. George wanted those eggs.
Eventually, after much searching, George found two such eggs.
A male and a female egg; the two eggs were deeply in love and being housed and cared for by a kindly, old zookeeper in Prague.
George nicked the eggs and scuttled off to his hidey hole beneath the sewers of Paris, giggling and drooling. He gently cared for those eggs for a few days, savouring his secret. The eggs thought him another benign host, yet he planned to scoff them up good.
A week later and George had hard boiled the female egg, tucking into her insides like a monster and smiling while he did it. He even made the male egg watch as he boiled his lifelong love and prised open her steaming corpse with a teaspoon, feasting on the contents. The male egg uttered a curse, a promise to make George pay for his actions.
The next day, George approached the sole surviving sentient egg. The egg lay whimpering, lamenting the loss of his eggy lover. George snapped him up with a deft hand and thwacked a fork across the egg’s midsection. With pepper and a container of mixed herbs in hand, George intended to make himself a nice little omelette with buttery toast soldiers on the side.
But the egg had other ideas. The egg was a legendary double yoked, sentient egg from the shores of Avalon and had power beyond death. It reconstituted it’s form into a terrifying eggy spirit with yolks for eyes and a voice like one of the Bee Gees, I don’t know which one.
Maurice. Or Bernard. Or Alphonse. Gimme a break, I don’t know their names. The squeakiest one.
The egg began to chase George around the room, shrieking. George promptly shit his pants and legged it. He knew the sewers of Paris better than the ghostly egg and lost it somewhere in the catacombs. He never saw the egg again but lived the rest of his life in terror that it would one day find him.
He told Louis of his evil, eggy nemesis one dark night and the tale proper put the shits up old Satchmo, fostering a fear in him that the ghost egg would one day come for him too. No one knows why Louis accepted that the evil, haunted egg was after him to. Louis was just like that.
George gave up the eggs and turned to cocaine which seemed much safer and didn’t make his farts smell like something had died up his arse.
George, like his counterpart in the later ‘A-Team’, was a lifelong sufferer of O.T.H.S., which meant his entire head was black and white. He often spent time looking for some kind of cure to his affliction, usually with terrifying and horrible results.
After a particularly poor rendition of the Spandau Ballet song ‘Gold’ one evening, Bogart had an evil thought and acted on it. He told George that he had found a cure for O.T.H.S. and all George needed to do was light a special red candle and hold it close to his face, letting it burn. Bogart handed him one of the special ‘candles’ with an evil little smile.
George was initially sceptical. Bogart was never quiet about how much George annoyed him, especially when he played his banjo, so George believed it may be a trick.
Why hadn’t Bogey mentioned this until now? It didn’t make sense. But the possibility of a cure was tantalising.
George sought the advice of his good friend, Erika Van Bon Flumptardon. Erika hated George with a passion but had never had the courage to shoot him in the face as he wished he could. Instead, seeing through the fake ‘cure’ immediately, Erika lied and told George he had heard of the cure and that he should go through with the procedure.
George, buoyed by his friend’s advice, toddled off home with his special red ‘candle’ and anxiously lit it. He watched its peculiar flame as it moved lower and lower with a look of dumb stupidness on his face. This wasn’t any different to the way his face normally looked but it’s still worth saying.
The stick of dynamite exploded violently in his face and George’s head was no less black and white, but he had managed to pop his head wide open.
Clarence, the hamster in the wheel inside George’s head responsible for all his brain functions in the absence of an actual brain was particularly miffed about this turn of events and refused to even get in his wheel again until the problem was rectified. Clarence even threatened calling his union representative and calling for a general strike.
Weeks later, George landed a gig playing the hits of Pink Floyd on the banjo in a dingy bar in Macclesfield. Bogey got his dates wrong and accidentally ended up in the same bar. He sat mired in misery trying to get drunk enough to ignore the crazed Lancastrian and his insane versions of ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 3,492’.
There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world.
Bogey eventually started to feel sorry for his teammate. His heartstrings were twanged despite his best efforts when George smiled through his pain. His head split down the middle, the two halves flapping wildly around as he cavorted and gibbered on the stage. The forlorn shape of Clarence, huddled in despair at the bottom of his long stationary wheel.
Bogey vowed to fix the problem.
He utilised his considerable Hollywood connections to find a doctor who could treat George’s bizarre condition. Within a few weeks, George had been repaired by cutting edge medical technology: the doctor sewed the two halves of his head back together with some old bootlaces and chucked some TCP on the crack.
Clarence got back on his wheel and merrily ran for all his worth, elevating George’s IQ to 12.
Bogey later ran into an evil, haunted egg who was hell bent on finding and killing George, preferably by frying him with some rosemary and thyme in a giant frying pan. Despite the evil egg scaring the shit out of him, Bogey, to his credit, didn’t tell it where George was.
Louis ‘Beefy Anchovy’ Armstrong. (1901 – 1971)
The team’s muscle, ‘B.A.’ was trained in many forms of unarmed combat and could always be relied upon to get into a scrap.
Louis liked punching people in the face, as he eloquently put it, ‘so hard their arse falls off’.
Louis was also the team’s driver and owned and maintained the team’s normal mode of transit, an ex-police, 1940 Bedford K-Type van Louis affectionally nicknamed ‘Sassy Niblet’.
Louis used laxatives as a method of controlling his weight as he suffered with unwanted weight gain. This was not helped by his peculiar penchant for eating whole piglets on an hourly basis. He eventually became addicted to the laxatives and would regularly shit himself.
The rear of ‘Sassy Niblet’ held a large store of spare trousers and a small furnace for the disposal of Louis’ shit encrusted trousers and long johns.
Louis was an adept trumpet player, as evidenced by his more well-known music career. He postulated that a trumpet could be substituted by kippers and other fish and sea creatures.
His experiments with blowing through crustaceans ended quickly as the crabs and lobsters were not very keen and always attempted to remove Louis’ lips.
His experiments with other sea creatures were less definitive. Louis attempted to use a large octopus as an instrument. No music was produced but the experiment ended quite suddenly when Louis inadvertently fell in love with the octopus in question. The two were married a few weeks later in a secret ceremony on Venice Beach, Los Angeles. They divorced just five months later with both parties citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ and ‘incompatible physicality’.
Louis later claimed that the reason for the divorce was that the octopus was ‘too clingy’ and ‘a bit handsy’.
Louis never gave up on his idea that kippers were the ideal substitute for a trumpet and attempted to ‘play’ hundreds of kippers throughout his life. He blamed the kippers for the failure to produce sound, saying that they ‘simply didn’t have that jazz, man’. He never gave up on his quest to find a kipper with musical ability just waiting for a large, hyperactive, laxative addicted man to pluck it from the sea and blow down its nose.
“It’s out there man, that fish with the biz, the feels, that special fish with soul, I just gotta keep blowing kippers ‘til I find it.”
(He was concentrating on kippers but may have been more successful with a sole. Ha ha ha, good lord.)
Louis’ theory that kippers could be played like trumpets in the right circumstances was never proven. It has to be said, in all fairness, that it was also never disproved.
The one thing that is true about the situation is that it doesn’t matter.
Why would anyone want to substitute kippers for trumpets anyway? Trumpets already exist. What would be the point exactly?
‘Oh, this kipper sounds just like a trumpet when you blow down its nose, isn’t that amazing?’
‘Not, really. See I have this trumpet here. That also sounds just like a trumpet when you blow in it. And you don’t get covered in kipper slime and get a jihad put on you by the RSPCA with this. Also, it’s a lot more hard wearing, doesn’t smell like kippers and isn’t, I must emphasise this point, a kipper.’
Louis did prove that you can play the drums with a chicken though, which is something. I guess.
Pic George and jimmy
James ‘Buttface’ Stewart. (1908 – 1997)
Pictured: James looking shocked as George demonstrated his patented mechanical nipple remover.
Jimmy was later heard to mutter,
“What the fuck is wrong with Formby? Why does he have a mechanical nipple remover? Why would anyone want nipples removed? Especially mechanically? Does he have loads of nipples? Do they just keep growing back whenever he removes them? What the fuck is going on? Where am I? Is that a ham sandwich? I need a drink.”
Jimmy Stewart was the master of disguise on the team. He had a few regular disguises he employed during missions. These were: ‘James Stewart wearing a blue suit’, ‘James Stewart wearing a black suit’, ‘James Stewart wearing shorts and a singlet’, ‘James Stewart wearing a silly hat’ and ‘James Stewart after a food fight in an Italian restaurant’.
Fair enough, James Stewart usually disguised himself as James Stewart.
Jimmy was a famous movie star before the ‘B-Team’ was even created and, whatever mission the team were on, whatever country they were in, whatever psychopathic dictator they were trying to take down, no one would ever have believed James Stewart would be involved.
The system usually worked quite well.
Jimmy had no other talents and basically ended up on the team because he just happened to be in the room when the team members were chosen. Jimmy had wandered in because someone told him there were burritos.
So, there you go. Commit the legend of the ‘B-Team’ to your memory. We owe them thanks for the work they did in helping establish the democratic world we all take for granted.
Without them, we would be knee deep in goose stepping Germans and there wouldn’t be any Jelly Tots
A horrific reality indeed. Especially the Jelly Tots thing.
“In 1939, a sour faced actor, a Lancastrian lunatic, a totally batshit crazy trumpet player and a butt-faced, idiotic, amiable movie star were sent to prison by a military court for a crime they probably did commit but just didn’t remember committing it.
These men promptly escaped from a maximum-security stockade to the Los Angeles underground.
Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.
If you have a problem, if you want someone to get drunk and vomit on your eiderdown, if you want to be tortured by horrible banjo/trumpet renditions of famous songs that haven’t been invented yet, if you want to hear a story about an evil, haunted egg, if no one else can help, and if you can find them….maybe you can hire The B-Team.”
