Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding are back working together.


The collaborators on cult comedy The Mighty Boosh – their show featuring their characters Howard and Vince, a talking gorilla called Bolla and the turban wearing mystic Naboo – are working on new ideas, Barratt has revealed.

“We’re talking about doing something else together now… something with a longer arc really,” he told RadioTimes.com, adding that he and Fielding remain firm friends.

Explaining their hiatus after the show finished with its final arena tour in 2009, he said: “I had kids. We wanted to do other things on our own, so that’s what we’ve done. But you know, we’re always in contact. We do the odd gig here and there and music… quite a bit of music together and things. A lot of side projects and stuff along the way but we’re just doing our own thing.”

Barratt, who has twin boys with his partner, the comedian Julia Davis, said another reason he wanted to work with Fielding again was the response he got when he showed his children his Mighty Boosh work.

“I decided to show them it. They were really enjoying it and I was enjoying it. And I was going, ‘Yeah, this is really good.’ Well I knew it was good, but I sort of didn’t know why it was good, in a way. So I was talking to Noel about that,” he explained. “I’d really like to do some more stuff with this. And there seems to be people wanting us to do that, so that’s what that was.

“We always have good chemistry when we get back together. It’s like [Noel’s] a brother, basically. So you may have times when you fall out but he’s always there.”

Broadcasters, he adds, are interested in the ideas he is producing with Fielding, but he won’t go into more details.

The Boosh’s surreal show spawned a BBC sitcom that ran for 21 episodes. As well as his work on The Mighty Boosh, Fielding is best known as a regular on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and for two series of Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy which he made for E4.

Later this month Barratt will be seen in Flowers, a dark and surreal new Channel 4 comedy. He plays Maurice, the depressed husband of Olivia Colman’s Deborah.


Flowers begins on Channel 4 on Monday 25 April