That Best British Sitcom poll caused much scratching of heads round here at the time. Vicar of Dibley at number 3? You had to wonder who was voting. It seemed skewed towards cosy old school sitcoms.
Among 90’s British sitcoms, Keeping Up Appearances is nowhere near the best remembered here, with shows such as One Foot in the Grave and Men Behaving Badly and others being ahead of it. Which makes it odd that it is apparently quite popular elsewhere.
For some reason the idiots that control programming for BBC America never give us enough of the good stuff. They’re like the foreign friend of yours that only lets you have the “gringo” food and drink, because you can’t handle the native stuff…
Here’s a list of truly brilliant British shows that were either showed entirely too briefly, or not at all, in the US:
[ul]
[li]All of the Harry Enfield shows[/li][li]A Bit of Fry and Laurie (my PBS station aired a season or so, but there were at least 4 in Britain)[/li][li]The Fast Show (momentarily aired as “Brilliant!”)[/li][li]Nighty Night (aired on Lifetime)[/li][li]Peep Show (actually, in all fairness, BBC America did show it quite a bit… can’t wait until the fifth season!)[/li][li]EastEnders (sure, some of you think it’s soap trash, and it is, but they’ll show Footballers Wives over EE? It’s aired on some PBS stations in America, though.)[/li][/ul]
If Brits could explain the appeal of The Mighty Boosh, I’d appreciate it. I get recommendations for shows - Black Books, Bo Selecta!, Spaced - and they are enormous let-downs. BB and Spaced aren’t horrible, they’re just not as funny as people say they are. Now Peep Show, on the other hand, is possibly the funniest show I’ve seen in the past five years (except for Nighty Night, which might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on telly, ever).
I liked Keeping Up Appearances because I like watching people who try to be high and mighty get their comeuppance, and it’s even funnier when they don’t know they’re getting their comeuppance.
Hyacinth was infuriating. She was rude, demanding, thoughtless, and delusional, and nobody ever called her on it. But the one time that Richard put his foot down, I felt sorry for her. I think Hyacinth’s a great character. I loved Onslow and Daisy too – they had a great relationship.
Regardless, the show was created in Britain, and gained a certain amount of popularity there. The idea that Americans, more than the English, are silly for liking the show is a little bizarre.
We can’t deny that. But shows it got ranked above included:
The Office
Phoenix Nights
Steptoe and Son
The Royle Family
Drop the Dead Donkey
Hi-de-Hi
The Likely Lads
The Young Ones
Hancock’s Half Hour
I wish I could. It took me a while to take to it, I’ll admit. Some of the surreal loopiness is perhaps an onwards progression from The Young Ones through Father Ted and The League of Gentleman. It’s got a very clever fast-paced script. But what about it that really clicks with me is, still, a mystery.
I think this is the perfect thread to express my disgust that BBC America is currently showing Dancing with the (freaking) Stars for many hours every night. I’d rather they showed every episode of All Creatures Great and Small (or whatever the series based on the James Herriott books was called) back to back than Dancing with the Stars. So. Damn. Stupid.
Who told you Bo Selecta! was funny? Perhaps the worst shit to ever have graced our screens in recent years. Completely unfunny, yet strangely popular
The Mighty Boosh is about a jazz nerd, his ultra-trendy friend and their mates, a stoner alien shaman and his familiar who is a talking gorilla called Bollo. The show charts their weird adventures…I’m not selling this very well, am I?
It’s just surreal, bizarre and incredibly funny.
Oh, and the songs are awesome, especially the crimping.
Well, you can’t blame American tastes for a British survey.
You also can’t blame us for not liking shows we’ve never seen. I live in one of the biggest TV markets in the U.S. and I don’t think I’ve seen any of these except The Office and The Young Ones. I don’t know why some shows never make it to PBS and some never leave (Are You Being Served?), but I certainly don’t have any control over it. But keep in mind that PBS is not BBC1. A “hit” on public television here is still only being seen by a small fraction of the television audience. And at least in my area, “Britcoms” are usually shown between 9 and 11 on Fridays and Saturdays when competition is thin and the audience probably skews older than usual.
I have no idea why everything that that Hugh Laurie ever appeared in isn’t being broadcast during every pledge drive. Maybe it would be too expensive, or maybe the sight of Dr. House as an upper-class twit would be too traumatic for American viewers.
I’ve caught bits of Eastenders. It seems to be one of those shows you have to take time to get into, and it didn’t look worth the effort. I’ve also caught a little of Black Books and I really wanted to like it. He’s crabby and cynical and surrounded by books! But I didn’t.
Probably because she recognizes some of herself in Hyacinth (who’s not altogether unsympathetic to the degree of, say Basil Fawlty or Blackadders 1-3). There aren’t many American sitcoms where the leads (virtually the entire cast, actually) are of such advanced years and are not cosmetically or surgically disguised as younger.
Socioeconomic status in the U.S. is not at all comparable to the traditional British class system. A multimillionaire NBA starting center descended from slaves has a higher status than a minimum wage clerk whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Until relatively few years ago, most members of the upper house of Parliament held office by virtue of their birth. U.S. Senators and Representatives frequently come from previously undistinguished backgrounds. The U.S. Constitution expressly forbids hereditary titles. The British social system until quite recently was built around them.
Much is made of the fact that you have to be rich, white and male to be president (although at least one of those may be subject to revision soon), but, with one or two exceptions, our head of state has never been a hereditary position. A few of them have actually come from humble beginnings.
Here’s a relevant L.A. Times article from way back in 2007:
The article also includes evidence that the class system is morphing if not breaking down entirely, but it certainly exists.
No doubt it boils down to which shows they bought the rights to show repeats of without forking out more cash.
As for the list I gave there, it was a deliberately wide spread from the historic (Hancock, Steptoe) through to the modern (Royle Family, Phoenix Nights, both worth searching out if The Office was to your liking). And they’re all, at least IMO 
, far far superior in so many ways than Keeping Up Appearances, plus my amazement that not one of them got above the latter in the poll, given the mix of popular modern shows and cherished classics.
The LA Times article is spurious rubbish, based on British tabloid tittle-tattle. If anything, there is an inverse class system in operation in Britain these days. High flying politicians such as Michael Ancram and even Tony Blair are careful to conceal any traces of poshness.
They couldn’t take pains to conceal distinctions if those distinctions didn’t exist.
I agree. Perceptions of class persist, and it’s crazy to pretend they don’t. I find myself grappling with it on a daily basis, with the entrenched lack of ambition and aspiration it creates among large sections of poorer classes. It really is a ‘not for the likes of us’, stay-in-one’s-place attitude.
Yeah, I think the show’s kind of amusing, but it’s pretty damn formulaic. I used to like Are You Being Served?, but then I realized that Mrs. Slocombe was going to say something about her pussy, and then I realized it wasn’t actually funny.
PBS needs Fawlty Towers (all six of 'em), A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and Jeeves and Wooster if they want to show some classic Brit comedy that’s actually funny.
WTF PBS MF OMG.
I am totally not up on the dynamics of any class system, traditional (UK) or pretend-to-be-non-existent (U.S.), but could the UK system engender an attitude of “we’re locked in, so why try”?
I also used to love KUA, but the repetitiveness got stale, although I’ll still watch if I have nothing else to do.
How’s it different from a president who comes from a preppy old maoney background making out that he’s just some hick from Texas?
Anyway, plenty of British PMs have come from modest backgrounds. Major, Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson… The so-called upper house, the House of Lords, is a sideshow. The House of Commons is where it’s at. It’s not like the Senate vs. the Representatives.
Not really, more a state of mind which doesn’t look beyond the familiar and the traditional. Perhaps the very reason for its continued existence is the lack of a sense of actually being ‘locked in’.
That is not a class system as I understand it, i.e. a system of widespread prejudices and conventions which keeps people “in their place” regardless of their ambition and ability. What you’re talking about seems like the sort of despair that afflicts poorer people in all societies. Individuals thinking that university, say, is “not for the likes of them” is not the same as a class system.
The older Bush was a New Englander and sounded like it. The younger’s history is a little more complicated. He was born in New Haven, raised in Midland and Houston, attended a prep school in Andover, went on to Yale, “served” in the Texas and Alabama Air National Guards, attended Harvard, and lived in Texas for most of the next 20 years. Seems like he had plenty of opportunity to acquire an authentic Texan accent. In any case, there’s very little difference between an old money background and a new money background over here.
Aw, geez, you made me defend the president.
I thought the monarch was the head of state.
Maybe the two are so intertwined in Britain that it’s impossible to talk about one without the other being involved? Situations I’m talking about include clear statements by people that a particular school is ‘too posh’ for their children to go to, which I could only interpret as meaning ‘too middle-class’. It also happens to be one of the best comprehensives in the country. This kind of thing comes across to me, at least in part, as being a ‘know their place’ situation, that they’ll make do with something else.