Whoops Apocalypse
| Whoops Apocalypse | |
|---|---|
Opening titles
|
|
| Created by |
Andrew Marshall & David Renwick |
| Directed by | John Reardon |
| Starring |
Barry Morse Geoffrey Palmer John Cleese Peter Jones John Barron |
| Composer(s) | Nigel Hess |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of episodes | 6 |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Humphrey Barclay |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Production company(s) | London Weekend Television |
| Distributor | ITV Studios |
| Release | |
| Original network | ITV |
| Original release | 14 March – 18 April 1982 |
Whoops Apocalypse is a six-part 1982 television sitcom by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, made by London Weekend Television for ITV. Marshall and Renwick later reworked the concept as a 1986 film of the same name from ITC Entertainment, with almost completely different characters and plot, although one or two of the original actors returned in different roles.
The series has a large cult audience, and copies of videos are heavily sought after. The British budget label Channel 5 Video released a compilation cassette of all six episodes edited together into one 137-minute chunk in 1987.
In 2010 Network DVD released both the complete, unedited series and the movie on a 2-DVD set (Region 2) entitled Whoops Apocalypse: The Complete Apocalypse. (Rights issues were simplified by the fact that both LWT and ITC Entertainment productions were by this time owned by Granada).
John Otway also recorded a song called "Whoops Apocalypse", which was used as the theme song for the film. He occasionally performs it live.
In 1992 Fox Television produced a short-lived sitcom, Woops!, which may have been loosely inspired by Whoops Apocalypse, though the American series was set after the apocalypse rather than before it.
The series details the weeks leading up to the Apocalypse. It features a chaotic and increasingly unstable global political situation in which nuclear alerts are accidentally triggered by malfunctioning Space Invaders machines. The naive and highly unpopular Republican U.S. President Johnny Cyclops (an obvious Ronald Reagan parody, played by Barry Morse) is advised by an insane right-wing fundamentalist security advisor, called The Deacon, who claims to have a direct hotline to God. (The Deacon was so named because of the previous role of the actor who played him (John Barron) as a Cathedral Dean in the sitcom All Gas and Gaiters; the writers claimed not to know at the time that Alexander Haig, Reagan's first Secretary of State, was known as The Vicar in the White House.)
...
Wikipedia