It’s natural that the buoyantly silly series that is Friday’s “The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin” would have not one but two distinct audiences.
In the U.S. Turpin is pretty much a “Who?” character while in the UK he’s a wildly familiar pop personality. If that popularity peaked, say, in the 19th century.
“I don’t think you have to know who Dick Turpin is,” said Noel Fielding, who plays dashing Dick, via Zoom from London. “It’s like Ned Kelly in Australia, Robin Hood. Characters like Jesse James, Billy the Kid.
“You can be aware of who those people are and that they exist and they were real but most people don’t know the exact history. “The truth is,” Fielding continued, “he was a violent criminal who (had) some very bad behavior. He got romanticized by some 18th century novelists and turned into a dandy.”
The real Turpin was just 33 and a notorious highwayman when he was hanged in 1739.
“Because it’s not a drama, we haven’t taken Dick Turpin literally,” Fielding, 50, emphasized. “We haven’t gone to research the character to death. We picked out a few things from his life to use in storylines but we’ve reimagined the character.
“So he’s much more sweet and kind. He’s a vegan. And a pacifist. He’s not very violent. He can’t ride a horse. He’s inclusive and quite kind and finds himself in charge of this hard criminal gang. And that’s the tension — between him not really knowing what he’s doing and having to use his creative ideas to succeed.
“Hopefully we’re mining the comedy, as we really went down the dandy route. We wanted to make something like ‘The Princess Bride’ or ‘Monty Python and The Holy Grail,’ something along those lines.
“In a weird way, because Americans don’t necessarily know who Dick Turpin is, that gave us a bit of a blank canvas to do what we wanted with the character.”
That means this only looks like a cousin to the rustic Britain of the Oscar-winning Brit classic “Tom Jones.”
“For sure, if you like British comedy, if you like Monty Python, I think you’ll like this. It’s quite upbeat, quite visual. Surreal and whimsical and fantastical.
“It’s very different to a lot of comedy that’s happened in the last 10 years. It’s not set in an office. It’s not mockumentary. It’s not real. It’s not comedy of cringe. It’s much more than that.
“Bigger and more silly and more whimsical. Maybe a return to Pythonesque humor.”
“Dick Turpin” streams the first 2 (of 6) episodes Friday, March 1 on AppleTV+