Wow. It was truly amazing. It’s worth watching the movie just for those scenes.
That’s the thing. My first exposure was the radio series and nothing that came after, including the books, could live up to that. The visuals in my head were just too much for any other medium to compete with.
Is it “plaid” in the sense of the garment or the popular pattern?
We all appreciate the British sense of humor
“Grot sells things which are no use.
Some are red, some are green and some are puce.”
Genius.
I remember they used to run the excellent Agony with Maureen Lipman on Saturday nights.
IIRC Chanel 31 in NY used to be a public station until Giuliani sold it to private interests. They had a great lineup of Britcoms/comedy shows including
The Two Ronnies
Open All Hours
Fairly Secret Army
Butterflies - with the exquisite Wendy Craig and a very very young Nicholas Lyndhurst
There were many others which will probably need to be added as they come to mind.
Does anybody else remember Sister Wendy and her Art History programs in the 1990s. I got sucked into that program every time I came across it. It was always rather amusing that masterpieces this Catholic nun studied seemed to feature quite a bit of nudity.
A few quick comments from a fan of British comedy. I agree that the two clips from Only Fools and Horses when seen out of context don’t come across as particularly funny, and they also fail to convey the strength of the series, which is overall good writing. It has some serious and poignant moments, too.
I should have enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster because I’m a tremendous fan of PG Wodehouse, but maybe that was the problem – I love reading Wodehouse, not watching someone’s interpretation of it. Also, IIRC the script often strays from the original and mangles bits and pieces from different stories. For comedy in that genre, I prefer You Rang, M’Lord?. I read somewhere that it wasn’t particularly a huge success because many folks found the idea of a perennially dishonest, scheming butler to be off-putting, but I thought it was very funny, helped along by Su Pollard playing a ditzy maid in her unique comedic style. Pollard and two other leading cast members had previously starred in an earlier David Croft and Jimmy Perry production, the long-running Hi-De-Hi, about a holiday camp run by a totally unqualified and painfully shy former professor of archeology. Barry Howard, who played that part, left after the 7th season and seasons 8 and 9 weren’t as good, IMHO.
I used to like Father Ted but it hasn’t aged all that well. The absurdist humour gets a bit much after a while. I think The Vicar of Dibley is a smarter and funnier option in that genre.
Keeping Up Appearances is excellent, but for those watching for the first time, the first season starts off slow, but the writers soon get into the swing of things. It ran for five seasons, and they would have produced more but Patricia Routledge decided to move on to other projects. The producers rightly concluded that she was irreplaceable as the oblivious super status-conscious Hyacinth.
There are no words that would do justice to Fawlty Towers. It’s just flat-out the best comedy series ever produced, a work of genius from John Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth.
Down with this sort of thing!
The video for “My Lovely Horse” never fails to make me laugh even after watching it dozens of times.
Do you remember The New Avengers?
Oh, yes. I was living in England when it debuted. The TV lounge at the Cambridge Student Union Building was packed, with standing room only.
The only other time I saw people overflowing into the hall was when Monty Python was on.
And she would wax lyrical about the carnal passion on display.
When I taught English as a foreign language, the books we were using had a unit featuring Sister Wendy. I was never sure if she was fictional or a real person.
I would say I mostly liked it except but had some significant complaints. I’ll have to say that Hugh Laurie was absolutely born to play Bertie Wooster. The matchup was not as perfect between Stephen Fry and Jeeves.
I forgot to mention 'Allo, 'Allo! which was lots of fun and quite an extended ride – it not only went on for 9 seasons, but one of those, Season 5, had an incredible 26 episodes. This was in contrast to a typical British “season” having around 6 to 10 episodes. Season 5 was produced in anticipation of the series being sold to a US network, which wanted something more like a full season on US television. How they managed to write and perform 26 episodes in a market that rarely had more than 6 to 10 annually I’ll never know, but they did it, and managed to maintain the quality, too. Whatever US network it was eventually backed out of the deal, but to the delight of all us fans, the episodes remain.
It has a lot of very funny moments, but one has to be able to not take offense at the (mostly) good-natured but incompetent Nazis in occupied France. The accents are hilarious, especially the English spy disguised as a French policeman who “thinks he can speak French”. Kenneth Connor is fantastic as Monsieur Alphonse, the undertaker who lusts after Edith Artois, and Richard Gibson as Gestapo officer Herr Otto Flick. Flick is constantly consulting the official Gestapo handbook, which has solutions to all of life’s problems, including how to pick up women. Sadly, the instructions never work, and when several young women reject Flick’s advances as recommended in the handbook, Flick demands that the writers should be shot.
Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry are both great. My problem with Jeeves and Wooster was just my preference for Wodehouse’s lyrical writing and letting my own imagination create the characters. The bond that I have with Wodehouse and his creations is entirely literary, and there’s no film production that I would have found satisfying.
Nitpick: it was Simon Cadell, who sadly died too young, and after (I think) a rather shorter run. Barry Howard played the camp (in both senses) ballroom dancer.