Sock It to ‘Em: They’ve Got an MTV Hit on Their Hands

It was 4:30 on a chilly fall morning in Liverpool, England, and Liam Lynch was rummaging through his sock drawer. Turns out that there’s not much else to do on chilly fall mornings in Liverpool. But no one bothered to tell Lynch that when he signed up to study music at the city’s Institute of Performing Arts.

So, homesick and bored to distraction, Lynch fashioned a couple of crude puppets from socks he found there, turned on a tape recorder and began acting out some senseless dialogue he and boyhood friend Matt Crocco had recorded.

But wait, that’s not the weird part.

After borrowing a camera, Lynch committed a number of his puppets’ stream of unconsciousness conversations to video and, as a Christmas gift, sent the tapes to Crocco in Nashville, where they proved a hit among friends.

Two years later, as hosts of “The Sifl & Olly Show,” an innovative half-hour comedy series that has won a loyal cult following since debuting on MTV last July, Lynch’s creations have become the laughing socks of cable TV. As the voices of Sifl and Olly, Crocco, 27, and Lynch, 28, trade quips, insults and wry observations.

Two weeks into its second season, the show ranks among the network’s top 10 among viewers aged 12 to 24.

“From the beginning it’s just been recordings of us talking, and Sifl and Olly are only the vehicle,” Crocco says. “So it isn’t like it’s a big stretch.”

“People just kind of feel that when they watch the show, they’re hanging out with us,” Lynch adds. “[It’s the way] real friends would talk to each other if they were in the middle of a Salvador Dali painting.”

But there’s more than just humor to this hosiery. Because they host what is ostensibly a cable-access-type talk show--imagine “The Smothers Brothers” meets “Wayne’s World”--sock-puppet guests drop by each night, including Sifl and Olly’s faithful but painfully dimwitted sidekick Chester and Olly’s mom--voiced by Lynch’s mother--to interview subjects such as the Grim Reaper, the planet Mars and an atom on Elvis Presley’s comb.

“What’s cool about it is there aren’t any limits. Anything can happen on the show,” Lynch says. “[We] could easily have a true interview as well as we could easily be engulfed in a black hole and end up in another dimension.”

It’s that quirky unpredictability that sold MTV on the show--although it was anything but an easy sell in the States. Before Lynch sent the original videos off to Crocco, he made copies of 10 short skits and sent those tapes to MTV and its European counterpart, MTV Europe. The Europeans loved the puppets and quickly began using the video clips as buffers between shows. But it was 18 months before Brian Graden, an executive vice president of programming for MTV, returned any of Lynch’s several dozen phone calls about using the video clips here. When he did, however, it proved worth the wait. The cable network, which has consciously sought programming that is offbeat and low-tech, offered to develop the idea into a half-hour series.

“The show costs about $13.50 an episode to make,” Lynch jokes. And despite the use of elaborate lighting techniques and some interesting special effects, that figure’s probably not too far off the mark. In fact, in terms of production, “Sifl & Olly” is just a step above “America’s Funniest Home Videos”--and a small step at that.

Sound for the show is recorded at a friend’s house in Nashville. Lynch, who was part of the Liverpool institute’s first graduating class, then performs the puppetry to the soundtrack in a living room of another friend’s house in the San Fernando Valley.

“It’s edited in someone’s house too,” Lynch adds.

The show is produced that way, MTV says, because it works, not because it’s cheaper.

“When you find something creative, you don’t necessarily have to throw hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars at it to make it good,” says John Miller, a senior vice president of original series development at MTV and an executive producer of the show. Indeed, the cable network has produced such cult classics as “Celebrity Death Match,” “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Super Adventure Team” on budgets that are just a fraction of what the major networks spend on prime-time programming.

“The driving force behind this television isn’t, to my mind, [that] it’s got to be cheap,” Miller says. “It’s very important to put out programming that’s branded to the network. It should . . . live and breathe [only] MTV sensibility. There’s no way [“The Sifl & Olly Show”] would air anywhere else.”

The show’s charm is almost exclusively a product of its simplicity. So though Lynch handles all the puppetry, he admits that he doesn’t “really care about puppets all that much. I just took some socks out of my drawer.”

As socks go, however, these two manage to convey an amazing amount of moods and facial expressions during tangential musing on topics ranging from wicker bathtubs, how to convert a room into an aquarium or what came first, ice or man?

The socks--one white, one black--even have their own distinct personalities, which mirror those of their creators. The unflappable Sifl, for example is cool and confident, as is Crocco; Olly and Lynch are excitable, talkative and expressive.

The network took its share of flak when it abruptly pulled the show last fall. MTV had quietly rolled the program out during the summer after taping just 20 half-hour episodes. And although the show received little promotion and aired at 12:30 a.m., it quickly found an audience. So when the network ran out of original shows and tired of running reruns last fall, it quietly dropped the show, igniting an Internet-based protest of letter-writing campaigns and fan club foundings.

“We’re looking for it to find a huge audience some day,” says Miller, explaining the show’s new prime-time slot. “It’s the kind of television we want to be doing. It’s just got a personality and individuality that’s unparalleled.”

*

* ‘The Sifl & Olly Show” is broadcast weeknights at 8 on MTV. The network has rated it TV-PG.

*

“People just kind of feel that when they watch the show, they’re hanging out with us. [It’s the way] real friends would talk to each other if they were in the middle of

a Salvador Dali painting.”

LIAM LYNCH

co-creator of MTV’s “Sifl & Olly Show”