Fanny and Johnny Craddock

## Bio

**Fanny and Johnny Craddock** are a husband and wife cooking team with their own culinary series, *Fun In The Kitchen with Cranny and Johnny Faddock*. There have been a few incarnations of the series and the duo with minute changes and variations of their names, as well as appearing German and Chinese. In all versions, Fanny's efforts to be a chef turn into failures, and her husband, Johnny, struggles with his problem with alcohol and usually giving in to it.

In their first appearance, Fanny tries to prepare *Chicken ala Freud* (also known as Freud (fried) Egg) from a plump young fryer and mistakes a potato in the pan for a egg. To cover it, she shows how to create a cheese and wine sauce with red wine, assuring her watchers that her hands are clean. (She just gave Johnny a shampoo.) Meanwhile, Johnny leaves with the wine. She goes on to show what to do with left over figgy pudding, but when she returns to the chicken, it's burnt to a crisp and the sauce for it is still raw. She promises to make boiled cabbage and custard in her next show. They're also recipients of a string of bloopers on July 5, 1973.

In their next appearance, Fanny and Johnny are Chinese (*Fanee And Jonee Claddock*) whose mastery of English is not as good as they think and just as bad as Chow Mein. While Johnny is absent most of the time and heard from off-camera, Fanny tries to teach Henry McGee how to make a Chinese dish called Politician's Pudding. It includes meat from the shu-shu bird which has one 12-month long mating season. (As it has no female of the species, it's a very unhappy bird.) it also includes the egg of a linney bird, the smallest bird in China, which produces an egg ten times it's size. (It's also a very unhappy bird.) Meanwhile, Jonee comes in late and accidentally trashes the kitchen. In the devastated room, McGee samples the dish as Fanee eats fish and chips, confessing she hates Chinese Food.

In their last appearance, Fanny is trying to create a dish while a somewhat sober Johnny is distracted by TV nature host David Bellamy whose TV show is being broadcast on a TV in the same store window as the Hill's Angels and TV news anchor Ann Afford. Taking all the wine and liquor for his TV series, Johnny crosses behind Afford on her TV and joins Bellamy on his TV as they phone the Angels on their television above Bellamy's television. Hearing the phone ringing in the phone booth of their footage, Sue Upton turns down their request to party with with them, giving in once she hears they have liquor. Bellamy pulls out a ladder and they quickly join the Angels in their television.

Meanwhile, Fanny notices Johnny missing and goes in search for him. She crosses over into Afford's abandoned TV and into Bellamy's TV where the party is still going above it. She pounds on the ceiling, but Johnny and Bellamy start dancing harder and cause the ceiling to come down on her. She climbs up the ladder with the roof in one chunk around her head and chases them with a rolling pin into the background of the Angels set.

## Trivia

* Fanny and Johnny Craddock were played by Benny Hill and Bob Todd; Jackie Wright played Fanny in the third sketch.
* Fanny and Johnny Craddock are a spoof of Fanny and Johnnie Cradock who had a cooking show on the BBC from 1955 to 1976.
* Fanny's descriptions of the animals in the first sketch is based on material he originally did in The Underwater World Of Jacques Custard.
* Fanny and Johnny Craddock also appear in a series of brief "bloopers" in Undercover Sanitary Inspector and in Coalpits.
* The Remote Control Angels are Louise English (gray business), Cathy Holmes (blue business), Sue Upton (military fatigue), Abigail Higgins (chauffeur), Samantha Spencer-Lane (blonde karate girl), Elfrida Ashworth (brunette karate girl), Denise Gyngell (red leather dress) and Jane Paris (biker chick).
* The "canapes/canopy" confusion gets recreated in The Dinner Party sketch on April 5, 1989.

## Episode(s)

* Fun in the Kitchen
* Murder on the Oregon Express
* Big Poppa

## Gallery

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