"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Here’s a TV show I recently came across, which I somehow never saw in my youth, Bless Me Father. Not only is it a sit-com about a Catholic priest, it stars Arthur Lowe who played the iconic Captain Mainwaring from one of my all-time favourites, Dad’s Army…
I can’t believe I forgot these two shows when I previously shared my favourite British comedies…
When I was living back in Cheltenham, “Black Books” was a shared love between myself and my flatmate, Amit.
The show is set in a book store, which obviously immediately made me love it. The shop is owned by Bernard Black, a drunken slob of an Irishman. Manny, played by the musical genius Bill Bailey, is Bernard’s shop assistant/lackey/human pet. The cast is completed by Fran, Bernard’s long-time friend/drinking buddy and owner of the store next door.
Over the course of the three seasons I would say that that the comedy style changes quite a bit and becomes increasingly farcical. I initially found this a little off putting. I don’t think it matters though; you really can’t help but love these three misfits.
The clip below comes from the second episode of the first season, where Manny arrives for his first day working at Black Books:
I remember when the show “Spaced” being released in the UK. I didn’t like it at all. It was all just a bit random and a little too weird for my tastes at the time. However, a few years later, with an evening to spare and nothing on TV, I sat down with my flatmate’s Season 1 DVD and watched the entire series in one sitting. I absolutely loved it.
This programme is really a show for geeks. If you love star wars, video games and cult classic movies, this is the TV show for you!
I’ve now posted quite a few Best of British posts and, although I’m sure I’ll do one or two more at some point in the future, I’ve pretty much covered most of the British comedy shows that I love. For this entry I thought I’d mention two relatively recent shows produced by the comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb.
The dubiously named “Peep Show” was my first exposure to Mitchell & Webb. The show’s central characters are two friends, Mark and Jeremy. Mark is repressed, uptight and slightly obsessive, whereas Jeremy is his antithesis: directionless, hedonistic and more than a little thick.
The humour is often crass and tasteless, but has some really wonderful moments. The camera will often switch to the view of one of the characters and, when this happens, the audience gets the privilege of hearing that person’s inner monologue. Upon trying to talk his way out of a tricky situation you hear Jeremy think “That’s it, just say whatever you need to say….they’re just words…you can think about what they mean later”. We are also treated to a wonderful presentation of “bloke wisdom” when, while talking to a girl, we hear Mark think: “My God, she’s beautiful….I bet nobody’s ever told her…I should tell her!…wait, no…if I tell her and she realizes it, she’ll dump me for sure”…
Following the success of “Peep Show”, Mitchell and Webb produced a comedy sketch show. I think it’s hard to do sketch shows well and it’s extremely hard to keep the comedy standard consistent between different sketches.
It’s quite rare that I ever want to watch an episode of a sketch show more than once, but I’ve found “That Mitchell and Webb Look” to have good replay value, having some particularly great sketches such as the Nasty Vicar, The Homeopathic Emergency Room and, of course, what’s comedy without some Nazis?
In my last Best of British post I started to share some of my favourite British comedy shows which have aired more recently.
Today I’d like to talk about a show with which most residents of the United States will be familiar, “The Office”. However, not all Americans will know that this was originally a British TV show which played its final episode long before there ever was a Michael Scott or a Dwight Schrute.
I’ll admit that, when I first heard that they were making an American version of “The Office”, I became extremely indignant (“Why can’t these Americans handle British comedy?!” etc.). However, after watching the first season of the American version, I was converted. Whereas the British version limited itself to two brilliant seasons, the American version still continues when it should have been put out of its misery several seasons ago…
The original British show’s humour is far drier. You will spend far more time watching the British version through your fingers, trying to shield your eyes from the awkwardness produced by the boss from Hell, David Brent. The clip below is one of the more light-hearted moments though, where David performs the activity dreaded in every office, the performance reviews…
As I said above, the British version of “The Office” only lasted two seasons. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant then went on to write the show “Extras”, following the characters David and Maggie as they “star” as extras in movies and TV shows. I think it probably nicely captures the boredom of the job which would involve a lot of standing around.
Each week, some celebrity would make a guest appearance, such as Kate Winslet and Patrick Stewart. My favourite though was probably when Orlando Bloom made his guest appearance shortly after “Pirates Of The Caribbean” had been released:
In my last post I moved on to talking about some of the newer British comedy shows I love. However, soon after posting, I realized that I had missed a few more of the classic shows which are dear to my heart. So, today I’m going to remedy this by talking a little bit more about some older shows, before returning to contemporary British comedy next time…
Before there was The Daily Show, there was Drop The Dead Donkey, a sit-com set in the fictitious GlobeLink News newsroom. What was wonderful about this show was that, since it was recorded close to transmission, it commented upon contemporary issues in society and politics.
It had some really great characters such as the two news anchors, Henry Davenport and Sally Smedley, who shared a passionate mutual disdain for one another. However, my favourite character was without a doubt the field reporter, the sometimes overzealous Damien Day…
Many know Michael Crawford from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “The Phantom of the Opera”. However, not so many people know him from the show Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em where he played the hapless and accident-prone Frank Spencer. Here some great physical comedy:
Then there was Waiting For God, a comedy set in the rather surprising location of a retirement home. The two main characters are simply terrific – Diana is cynical and mean, while Tom is jovial and a little loopy. They strike up an unlikely friendship while “waiting for God”…
Finally, no discussion of my childhood comedy shows could possibly be complete without mentioning Only Fools and Horses, a show which has won a huge number of comedy awards over the years. I think it was very much inspired by another classic comedy, Steptoe and Son. Anyway, the show followed the shenanigans of Del and Rodney Trotter. These brothers make up Trotter’s Independent Traders (TIT), a company which buys and sells all kinds of merchandise, some of which include smoke-damaged fire alarms and raincoats marked “Dry clean only”.
In the clip below the brothers try their hand at chandelier repair…
Next time we’ll be back at looking at newer British comedy…
Up until now in the Best of British series, I have spoken exclusively about British comedy shows I associate with my childhood. I’d now like to introduce some of the shows which came along a little later.
Although I contend that British TV has fallen somewhat from the comedic heights of my childhood, there have most definitely been some real gems produced in recent years. Here are some of them…
“The Vicar of Dibley” came onto our TV screens at a particularly turbulent time for the Church of England. Two years prior to the first season, the Church of England had begun ordaining women and this was causing significant issues within the Anglican communion. In true British style, Richard Curtis sought out the comedy in this tense situation and crafted a sit-com about the life of one of these early female vicars in the sleepy village of Dibley. The lead character, Geraldine, was played by the well-known comediane, Dawn French. Although I would suggest that the final seasons were rather sub-par, on the whole, this was a lovely, gentle-natured comedy which took a light-hearted look at parish life from both sides of the pulpit.
I never felt that “My Family” really received the recognition that it deserved. As the title suggests, it’s about a family, the Harper Family. The Dad, Ben, is wonderfully grumpy and feels constantly harangued by his wife and harassed by his children, especially his idiotic son, Nick:
The show lost a lot when Nick’s character left, but I still think those earlier seasons were superb.
There is a saying in Show Business that one should never work with children or animals. The show “Outnumbered” breaks both of these rules since it stars three children who, at times, act like real animals. There is no great story line to the show, it’s simply about the lives of two parents and their three “spirited” children. The kids in this show are a-maz-ing, especially Ramona Marquez who plays little Karen.
Rather than “scripting” the children, the writers of the show give the children broad instructions and then simply turn on the cameras. The result is truly wonderful and if you pay close attention to the grown-ups in the show you can quite often see that they’re having to work very hard to suppress their laughter.
In the clip below the kids are at a wedding, under the patient care of the local vicar…
I haven’t done a Best of British posting in ages so I figured it’s about time.
In these posts I wanted to introduce Americans to some of the classic British comedy I watched growing up and which was so influential in the cultivation of my “unique” sense of humour (it’s always good to know whom to blame!).
Most people know that I’m a bit of a bibliophile and that I love to read, but I don’t think it’s common knowledge which book I’ve picked up and re-read the most times. The title which gets that dubious honour is The Red Dwarf Omnibus, a collection of books based upon the TV comedy called “Red Dwarf”.
Red Dwarf is a comedy set in deep space about crew of the mining ship “Red Dwarf”. The crew consists of the last human alive, the hologram of his dead bunkmate, a creature descended from a domestic cat, a neurotic android and the ship’s senile computer. If that isn’t the formula for comedy gold, I don’t know what is…
In the clip below, the last human alive, Dave, is teaching the neurotic android, Kryten, how to lie:
Some of the jokes in “Red Dwarf” were definitely more on the “toilet humour” end of the comedy spectrum. Speaking of immature comedies…one show I loved during my teenage years was the suitably infantile “Men Behaving Badly”. This TV show followed the antics of Tony and Garry, two flatmates struggling with adulthood and grown-up life when all they really want to do is sit on the sofa and drink beer.
The following snippet comes from the end of an episode where Tony has been trying to diet…unsuccessfully. Also, Garry’s friends have found out he has actually got a lot of money squirreled away in his bank account. Because everyone keeps asking him for money, Garry goes out and spends all his money on expensive beer and high-end watches for his friends in an effort to get things back to “normal”:
No examination of British toilet humour would be complete without a brief look at “Bottom” 😉. Below is probably my favourite scene in the show’s entire run, in which Eddie tries to teach Richie how to play chess…
Needless to say, I wasn’t allowed to watch this show! 😉