Ripping Yarns
The ten best in alphabetical order (although some of them had weaker series as well):
Blackadder
Bottom
Brittas Empire
Fawlty Towers
The good life
The new statesman
One foot in the grave
Red dwarf
Yes (prime) minister
Young Ones
and a special mention for Have I got News For You, the quiz which in its best years was more funny than any comedy…
All IMO, but The Office is the best comedy to come out of the UK in a decade or more. It’s one of the very few programs that has discovered, or pioneered, a new genre of comedy - the humour of discomfort and shame.
Father Ted: The episode “Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse” is pretty much the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
Young Ones
Bottom
That’s the blackest black pudding I have ever seen mother .Did you know that Howard Molson has got a new shovel?.
Yes, Minister and To the Manor Born. Plus, anything with Geoffry Palmer and Penelope Keith, preferably working together (I think they did three separate series).
My wife likes My Hero.
I should point out that, while Father Ted was made with British money, the cast, crew, scriptwriters, etc. were almost entirely Irish, and it was filmed in Ireland (thanks to the pathetic and idiotic nature of Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE, who were offered it first).
A hearty second to Penelope Keith and Geoffrey Palmer. What WAS the name of their series about the book publishing industry. They couldn’t reveal the fact that they were married, due to company policy. PK on “Good Neighbors” was an absolute hoot.
Executive Stress
The Ecky Thump episode was so funny it apparently actually killed somebody. Seriously, they laughed until they died of a heart attack
Fawlty Towers because John Cleese is hilarious and Absolutely Fabulous because the title says it all.
Sorry, eli_the_fanatic, I should have specified that it is out in a Region 2 PAL format only. It’s called The Goodies…At Last. You can’t play it on regular North American DVD players. If you have the capability to play it though (you may be able to do it through your computer if you have a DVD drive, but it involves changing the region of the player), it’s available at amazon.co.uk, or blackstar.co.uk (they do ship to North America, that’s how I got mine). I highly recommend it.
Yes (Prime) Minister and 'Allo, 'Allo are my favorites, though the few episodes I’ve seen of Coupling were very funny.
Julie
Are you sure about that? I know the writers and actors were Irish and the outdoors shots were filmed in Ireland but I once knew someone who had been to a recording of Father Ted and I assumed it was filmed in London because he didn’t mention going to Ireland to see it. The scenes involving the outside were filmed in County Claire, Ireland (according to this site atleast http://members.lycos.co.uk/madeejit/tedshse2.htm) but theres no reason why the studio scenes couldn’t have been filmed in London.
This site seems to agree with me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted
Not for everyone but exquisite in their own way:
Kiss Me Kate which got better as it went on and
People Like Us which gives us one of the great comic characters Roy Mallard.
Both star the wonderously deadpan Chris Langham.
“While alan spent four years working towards a degree in english and social studies, his wife, Julie, worked towards a degree of happiness.”
Another recent oddity I loved was the 10 minute We Are History with radical historian David Oxley.
saulisagenius, I stand corrected.
‘Coupling’ - Tom Sharpe meets ‘Friends’…
‘Red Dwarf’ - Sitcom not sci-fi…
‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ - the triumph of go-with-the flow-ers over anoraks…
‘Steptoe And Son’ - Blood is thicker than water…
‘Till Death Do Us Part’ - A masterpiece… You hate everything he stands for but can’t hate him…
‘Dad’s Army’ - Never in the field of TV sitcoms have so many perfect characters been brought together…
Not mentioned is the slightly surreal **‘Butterflies’ **with Wendy Craig and Geoffrey Palmer. Can’t claim to have seen it much (way back when) but it had a kind of middle class subversive quality, kind of encouraging the notion of mum and dad having affairs . . or not quite. All very polite and mannered. Odd.
Standard BBC humour . . . just a curious one I wish I’d seen more of (circa 1980)
Have to put in a big shout for ‘Pheonix Nights’ Set in a Bolton nightclub it self-depricates to the point of … I cannot recommend it highly enough.
The Office is of course brilliant but I wonder what other Ricky Gervais stuff will be like - he seems so tied into David Brent.
Black Books, Spaced, The Day Today and Brass Eye - all good.
(Brass Eye did an infamous ‘special’ about paedophiles - or rather about the reporting of such in the media - and it created a proper hoohah. As a parent of a victim of sexual abuse I thought it was fantastic as it tore into the british media’s witch-hunts and handwringing while they also revel in the salacious stuff they use to sell papers/tv time etc.)
Anyway…
The Royle Family and Early Doors are both definitely worth looking into - Early Doors finished its first series earlier this year and was great - its about a pub landlord and his family and regular punters. Not broad like Fawlty Towers but dry as in the Office.