Noel Fielding Made ‘The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin’ for the Comedy Nerds, Dreamers, and Kids

Noel Fielding‘s new Apple TV+ series The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin wastes no time letting the audience know that it is a very silly show. The first episode opens in England in 1735 at the very precise time of “just before bedtime.” Fielding’s version of legendary highwayman Dick Turpin is a purple-heeled vegan sweetheart who encourages the muscle man in his newfound gang to wear dresses. He pals around with a wee bartender named “Little Karen” and dons a bizarre costume to masquerade as a time-traveling version of himself during a heist. The jokes are aplenty, the laughs nonstop, and nothing is taken too seriously — except the show’s commitment to celebrating all things springing from the imagination.

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin is the kind of madcap show you could count on British comics making in the past. It calls to mind the absurdity of Monty Python, the irreverence of Blackadder, and the psychedelic splendor of Fielding’s first show, The Mighty Boosh. It’s also the kind of unapologetically blithe comedy you don’t see too often anymore. Most sitcoms feign realism with the mockumentary set-up standardized by both the UK and US version of The Office, while the last show to win the Emmy for Best Comedy Series was FX’s intense dramedy The Bear. But The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin wants you to remember when comedy, specifically British comedy, was hella weird.

“We’ve been through a period of comedies that, frankly, aren’t funny or are quite dystopic and sort of funny comedy-dramas,”Dick Turpin executive producer and co-creator Kenton Allen said during the show’s recent panel at Winter 2024 TCA. “And we wanted to make something that was hard funny,”

“I feel like we were desperate to get back to this kind of Python-y type comedy, which is what the Boosh was trying to do as well,” Noel Fielding said to Decider later that day. “You know, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, [Monty] Python, all those things really were things that we were very interested in and influenced by.”

“Because it’s Dick Turpin and because it’s a period comedy and because it’s big and silly, this definitely was the right vehicle for a show that was more like Python.”

“It’s the right vehicle for you, as well,” Allen said. “Noel’s incredible imagination and creativity.”

“I feel like we were desperate to get back to this kind of Python-y type comedy.”

Noel Fielding

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin‘s specific brand of absurdity is indeed a perfect match for British comic Noel Fielding. While most Americans might best know the fifty-year-old Fielding as the quirky co-host of The Great British Baking Show, comedy nerds associate him with the long-running comedy act, The Mighty Boosh. The Boosh started as a stage show starring Fielding and comedy partner Julian Barratt as eccentric zookeepers Vince Noir and Howard Moon. It soon expanded onto radio and became a global sensation as a television show in the early ’00s. While The Mighty Boosh was a cult hit in America, airing first on BBC America and later on Adult Swim, it was a far bigger deal in the UK.

“People like Billy Bragg would say, ‘The Boosh is what brought my family together. We all watch it together. It’s like our sort of family show that we all watch,'” Fielding said.

The Mighty Boosh might have been unlike anything else on television, but it never captured the full scope of Fielding’s or Barratt’s imaginations. Fielding explained to Decider that British comedy contemporaries like Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost left television for cinema in order to get the budgets necessary to bring their vision to life. Fielding assumed The Boosh would have to do the same.

“I think that with The Boosh, we always imagined that we would go on to do films,” Fielding said. “Julian would have loved if we’d have had this budget to do The Boosh because he always was interested in making The Boosh filmic.”

“And I was the one that was saying, ‘No, it should be low-fi. We’ll make our own props and you know, we’ll have animation.’ Julian was going, ‘No, let’s just have a massive budget and make it like a film.’”

Fielding said “in a weird way,” The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, achieves this.

In an ironic twist, Fielding wasn’t the creative mind to come up with the concept of Dick Turpin. Instead, long-time British producer Kenton Allen stumbled upon the idea for The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin by playing a “game” in his office. Basically, he and his cohorts would name an iconic figure and come up with a slightly not obvious actor to play them.

“Anyway, somebody said, ‘Who would play Dick Turpin?’ and my colleague, Victoria, went, ‘It’s obviously Noel Fielding,’” Allen said.

The reason Victoria naturally put notorious 18th century horse-thief, highwayman, and murderer Dick Turpin and the gentle, odd, and hilarious Noel Fielding together has to do with Turpin’s legacy in British culture. During Turpin’s trial, a chapbook was hastily pulled together by writer Richard Bayes to capitalize off of the public’s interest in the criminal. There were multiple fabrications about Turpin published there and over the years other writers seized upon the more colorful fables attributed to him. Soon, he morphed into a roguish dandy and was considered, as a character, like an 18th century analogue to Robin Hood.

Apple TV+’s The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin continually nods to this history, both with its cheeky title and Dolly Wells’s pamphlet-writing character, Eliza Bean. What Fielding brings to the role is his own unique personality. His Dick Turpin leaves home because his veganism precludes him from following in his father’s footsteps as a butcher. He travels around with a ludicrously small sewing machine, dresses up in bizarre costumes, and orders peppermint tea at the pub. Fielding imbues Dick Turpin with a kindness that rubs off on the people around him and inspires loyalty from his Essex gang.

Fielding told Decider that this kind, inclusive brand of comedy is indeed by design, and partially inspired by his real life role as a father to two young children. “Especially when you have kids, yeah, you do think about those things a little bit,” Fielding said. “But I was always really intrigued by comedians, like Jerry Seinfeld, and Owen Wilson and people who are charming, but not necessarily mean.”

“Comedy, when it’s universal and charming and inclusive and kind, it’s harder to do. Obviously because it’s much easier to do grotesque characters and rude characters… Especially nowadays, it’s much easier to be shocking or to be more in your face [with comedy] because everything’ short attention span, so it’s harder to do gentle,” Fielding said. “There are such good comedians who are so physical and bombastic, and I love those characters as well, but that’s not quite necessarily my character.”

“Younger people do tend to like characters that I play and I think it’s because they’re quite childlike in a way.”

Noel Fielding

Because Fielding’s version of Dick Turpin is so gentle, you might find yourself wondering if kids can join in the fun and watch The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin. After all, two of the biggest scene-stealers in the show are children: Kiri Flaherty’s Little Karen and Samuel Leakey’s Christopher Wilde. While Fielding and Allen were loathe to give the green light to children under twelve because of the show’s propensity of goofy “dick” jokes, they admitted that they could see the whole family sitting down to watch Dick Turpin together, as Billy Bragg and his kids used to watch The Mighty Boosh.

“It’s like a moment when your family comes together,” Fielding said. “And now with my kids, my five-year-old started to watch [The Great British] Bake Off because she likes the competition elements and that’s amazing. So I think there is definitely a world where twelve-, fourteen-year-olds can watch with their parents.” 

“It’s not like a cringe comedy or not something which is mean or something that we’ve got to be worried about young minds seeing,” Allen agreed. “I think I think it’s true, the whole family can can watch.”

Fielding even has a theory why young people are particularly attracted to his work as a comic. “Younger people do tend to like characters that I play and I think it’s because they’re quite childlike in a way,” he said.

While Fielding was reluctant to over-analyze his comedy during his time with Decider — “It was it was Groucho Marx say? Don’t dissect comedy. Yeah. It’s like dissecting a frog.” — he repeatedly showed off his scholarship as a comic. His approach to comedy, be it on The Great British Baking Show or The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, is intentional. He wants to emulate the work of Monty Python, name-drop Blackadder as an inspiration for Dick Turpin, and ensure his humor is inclusive.

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin is for the comedy geeks who miss weird humor, the creative types who worship imagination, and even for kids to connect with their parents. Noel Fielding wants to welcome everyone into his world and that’s why he made Dick Turpin.