Richard Thomas

Richard Thomas

Born: January 1, 1964
in UK
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Richard Thomas (born 1964) is British a musician, writer, and comedy actor. He is best known for composing and scoring the award-winning Jerry Springer: The Opera with Stewart Lee. Thomas collected the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Score in 2004.

Richard Thomas's comedy career began in 1987, doing a musical act on keyboards. In 2000, he wrote and performed a one-act opera called Tourette’s Diva with four actors, which aired at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Thomas had the idea for an opera based on Jerry Springer at this time, and wrote it over the next two years, chiefly in workshops at Battersea Arts Centre. Thomas would offer a "Beer for an Idea", where any audience members submitting a good idea would be rewarded with a can of Foster's (and poor ideas with a supermarket store brand).

After a number of small scale performances of the first act, which was in much the same shape as it remains today, the second act (where the characters descend into hell) was vague and unformed. Thomas brought his friend Stewart Lee in to assist with the writing. Six months later, the opera was in a far more recognisable state, and was snapped up by the National Theatre.

Thomas has also worked on BBC comedy shows such as Attention Scum and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Starting on 25 February 2007, BBC Two aired his latest series, Kombat Opera, comprising five standalone musical parodies of well-known television programmes.

Thomas wrote the libretto for Mark-Anthony Turnage's 2011 opera Anna Nicole,

and co-wrote music for the 2010 film Uncle David as a part of the Avant-Garde Alliance.

Movies for Richard Thomas...

Title: Attention Scum
Released: February 25, 2001
Type: TV
Attention Scum! was a 2001 television comedy series created by Simon Munnery and Stewart Lee. It starred Munnery as his "The League Against Tedium" character and contained acerbic stand-up routines atop a transit van and sketches including mainstays such as "24 Hour News", operatic intermissions by Kombat Opera, and two characters engaged in a duel over their hats.
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Title: This Morning with Richard Not Judy
Released: February 15, 1998
Type: TV
This Morning With Richard Not Judy or TMWRNJ is a BBC comedy television programme, written by and starring Lee and Herring. Two series were broadcast in 1998 and 1999 on BBC2. The name was a satirical reference to ITV's This Morning which was at the time popularly referred to as This Morning with Richard and Judy. The show was a reworking of old material from their previous work together along with new characters. The show was hosted in a daytime chat show format in front of a live studio audience, although it featured a small proportion of pre-recorded location inserts. It was structured by the often strange obsessions of Richard Herring; examples include his rating of the milk of all creatures and attempting to popularise the acronym of the show. The show featured repetition, with regular and vigilant viewers being rewarded by jokes that would make no sense to casual viewers. The show seemed to oscillate between the intellectual and puerile. However, irony was often used, even though the citing of irony as an excuse was mocked by the show's stars in one of many self-referential jokes.
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Cluub Zarathustra
Title: Cluub Zarathustra
Character: Various (as Tom Miles)
Released: January 1, 1996
Type: Movie
'Using the stinking carcass of so-called comedy as a lens, we shall focus harsh philosophee, religion, poetrie and base animal passion onto your ear, causing it to smoulder'