Noel Fielding talks about his new Apple TV+ comedy, Dick Turpin – and whether Baking Show fans will get the joke

Millions of The Great British Pastry ShowFans may not know this, but Christmas Fielding It’s also very funny outside the tent.

Before becoming co-host of Netflix’s extremely cozy British baking competition in 2017, Fielding was best known for starring in The mighty Boosh, a wildly surreal sitcom that became a cult hit when it aired from 2004 to 2007 on BBC Three. Two decades later, Fielding returns to TV comedy with a new Apple TV+ series, The Completely Invented Adventures of Dick Turpin (premiering this Friday on the streamer), with Fielding playing a laid-back misfit who accidentally ends up leading a gang of stagecoach-robbing bandits 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 think we didn’t realize how lucky we were until afterwards. They gave us complete creative freedom to do whatever we wanted. But he found new inspiration in Dick Turpin: “I felt like the period costume aspect had liberated me, and it sort of removed it from any comparison with The Boo…even if there are moments that remind Displays, he admits. “I think it’s just me.”

American audiences may not know it, but Dick Turpin was a real person and a legendary figure in British culture: “We grew up knowing who he was,” Fielding says. When we were kids, executive producer Kenton Allen recalls, “we were going to play Dick Turpin, the swaggering hero, kind of like I think people might have pretended to be Jesse James or Billy the Kid. He’s like an outlaw cowboy. But Fielding’s Dick Turpin is “the complete opposite” of the legend, he suggests: he’s “inclusive, kind and vegan.” We were very interested in how this type of character could lead a gang made up primarily of criminals.

Turpin must not only lead his gang of outlaws, but he must also avoid the influence of local policeman Jonathan Wilde, played by Downton Abbey patriarch Hugues Bonneville. We may not be used to seeing Bonneville get ridiculous, but “he’s a very skilled comedian,” Fielding says, “and actually I learned a lot from him.” We did a good double act, which was just a complete bonus. He even raves that he and Bonneville have the best comedic chemistry he’s seen “probably since (Displays co-star) Julian (Barratt), weirdly. Allen, meanwhile, hopes that some fans will discover the series simply because “they know Lord Grantham is in it.”

A big change from Powerful Boosh days, these are the large budgets that Apple grants to its television series, allowing Dick Turpin get big, bold and fantastic sometimes. “You can write witches and magic coaches and crazy things, without having to cross them out and say, ‘They’re at the pub again,'” Allen says with a smile. Fielding also thinks it’s time to see more high-concept, surreal comedies like this on television, because after the success of Office“everything has become a little more like that, like mockumentaries…I think maybe we’re going back to a fancier, sillier place.”

Any silly British comedy will inevitably draw comparisons to the legendary sketch group Monty Python, and Fielding buys into the comparisons here: “Monty Python are the Beatles to us… They’re all such brilliant writers and performers.” He notes that with their sketches and films, Monty Python was “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 thing.” “. He mentions a moment in Dick Turpin where a wizard in the woods tries to cast a spell on Dick: “It’s very (Monty Python and the) Holy Grailthis piece, and it seems exactly the right tone for our show.

But then again, many viewers only know Fielding as the guy describing an amateur baker’s luxurious buttercream on Pastry show. So, will fans of this series come along for the ride? Dick Turpin? Fielding recalls seeing someone once say online, “What I like about Noel Fielding is that half his audience says, ‘That guy from the baking show,’ and the other half replies, “It’s old Gregg,” referring to a memorable swamp creature. he played Displays. “These two people don’t know each other. I feel like people who love Old Gregg will be happy that I’m doing this. But he hopes that “some of the (Pastry show) the crowd will get involved” as well.

Either way, Fielding is excited to return to his TV comedy roots. He says: “I was really looking for something to do since The Boo, from a comedy standpoint, and that was definitely it. It was definitely a return to that kind of thing for me, and I forgot how much I loved it and how much I missed it.

Are you going to check out Fielding’s new series on Apple? Hit the comments and let us know if you’ll be watching.

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