There’s a lot of good stuff on British TV. An English friend of ours is always loaning us stuff he has on DVD. We recently watched both seasons (we Americans say “seasons,” but I think the Brits say “series”) of Life on Mars, which is truly excellent. We’ve seen Gavin & Stacy thanks to him, although not the Christmas special yet; I hear they’re going to make a third season, and it’s being adapted into an American show, just like The Office was.
And speaking of The Office, we have our friend to thank for introducing us to that Ricky Gervais series, plus Gervais’ Extras show.
Lots of stuff with Rob Brydon (who plays the uncle in Gavin & Stacy and is absolutely brilliant in that role) and Steve Coogan. We just watched the first season of Coogan’s Saxondale, although we don’t think that was his best work. Coogan seems rather creepy there, and I sure hope that’s makeup and not him ging to seed in real life and looking like that. But the fat chick from Gavin & Stacy, Ruth Jones, as his wife is good.
There’s a lot of really good British stuff. If we liked those, what else would we like? (And yes, we’ve already seen Absolutely Fabulous.)
The best British sit coms at the moment are Peep Show and The Thick Of it. The humour of each is as cutting edge as the original Office was, but is a bit more hard core and even less “feelgood”.
For something that is surreal, in the true sense of the word (as well as hilarious and visually beautiful), you could try The Mighty Boosh.
Going back, a classic of its genre (reasonably serious drama about young professionals) was This Life. It might not look revolutionary now, but that’s because we’ve become so used to techniques it introduced, such as the way the shaky camera was used.
I used to watch this show, too. Lenny Henry is great. I wish the third season had met the high standards of the first two. Somewhere I still have tapes of it. I may have to dust them off and watch them again this weekend…
Primeval isn’t a BBC production, BBC America shows all sorts of British telly, they’ve got some sort of “use the name for whatever” agreement. Being Human was unexpectedly great though, coming from BBC3 which is a sort of youth-oriented testbed for stuff that is terrible more often than not.
In case you were wondering why we use ‘series’ rather than ‘season’, it’s because series/seasons don’t have a fixed length over here and so they’re not tied to actual annual seasons - no fall sweeps week over here.
Comedy recommendations in order:
Spaced, Black Books, Brass Eye, Green Wing, and of course Blackadder. And another vote for Spooks, the first three series in particular were great.
It irritates me that the current series of Armstrong and Miller is being sold as “the 2nd”. Actually it’s the 6th. They did 2 with some satellite channel which I didn’t see, then 2 with Channel 4 which were miles better than the admittedly good 2 series they’ve done with BBC. You can get series 4 on DVD - it’s great, with an excellent unbroadcast spoof white South African porn soap opera, but I’m dying to get hold of series 3. There are so many fantastic sketches I can remember from it, including very realistic prosthetic 3 foot dongs (limp) in “The Naked Practice” but for some reason it’s not available.
Both absolute comedy genius. If you like the spuriously controversial ‘Brass Eye" then you should like Chris Morris’ other well known work, the Day Today (why have BBC News so egregiously failed to heed its lessons?), and the criminally underrated Nathan Barley.
Did you ever see the BBC comedy The League of Gentleman and wonder what the ‘special stuff’ was? Well in comedy terms, it was Chris Morris’ sketch show Jaaaam which of all sketch shows is the last one you’d ever want to watch on a first date.
(In reality I think the clue to what the special stuff was came in the surname of the butcher.)
The sat channel was Paramount Comedy Channel, which aired the first series. Channel 4 aired the next three, though Paramount repeated the second shortly after C4 aired it. That second series (and the first, IIRC; not sure about three and four) was a Channel 4/PCC co-production.
On an even more pedantic note, the Beeb are technically correct. The previous four series were titled simply ‘Armstrong and Miller’ and made by Absolutely Productions*, while the new version is titled ‘The Armstrong & Miller Show’ and made by Hat Trick.
*Who also made Absolutely. A fine sketch show in its own right.