I well remember the episode where Fry was reciting some of the more entertaining scientific misconceptions of whichever Pliny, ending with “He even said homosexuals can’t whistle”.
And just before the audience’s sympathetic chuckle, Alan Davies slipped in “Well, not with their mouths”.
I lived in Blighty in the 1980s and have a regular teaching gig where I bring students over in the summer. Thanks to COVID, I haven’t been since 2019. But I watch British Telly pretty regularly.
We watch EastEnders nightly. Out of habit, I watched with my family from its debut in 1985. Many PBS stations carried it in the 90s, but apparently it’s quite expensive. I started watching again when I was back in the early 2000s and figured out ways to watch. Once BritBox came out, we were able to watch easily. There is one character who was on the show as a teen and has stayed on. Ian Beale is now a middle aged wanker.
I thought the mid 80s was the golden age of UK comedy. The Young Ones, The Comic Strip Presents…, Spitting Image - all vicious and brilliant.
More recently, I would agree that Peep Show is amazing. There was a US attempt that never aired. Mitchell & Webb are the latest Footlights alums in a long line of masters (Python, Fry and Laurie, etc.).
I devour anything with Steve Coogan. Any of the Alan Partridge series are brilliant, though I think you might have to look for them, I don’t think they air on US TV or on the streaming services. Julia Davis is a comedic genius, and all of her work from Nighty Night, to Hunderby, to Camping, to Sally4Ever (aired on HBO a year or so ago) is cringe inducing and hilarious. There was an American Camping but it wasn’t that funny TBH. If you’re into podcasts, I highly recommend Dear Joan and Jericha. (Audible also has the Alan Partridge from the Oasthouse podcast, as well)
My latest and greatest comedic discovery is This Country with talents Daisy May and Charlie Cooper. Partly because I used to live in rural Oxfordshire, but also because it is pants-pissingly hilarious.
Charlie Brooker is also fantastic, and the Weekly Wipe shows are brilliant. The breakout character is Philomena Cunk, and she did a series of mockumentaries. Here’s one on YouTube. If you liked Ali G, you’ll like this.
I really don’t think the best British Telly makes it over here, and I have no idea why. I think Americans are confused by non-RP accents and that’s a shame.
On the non-comedy front, my students fell in love… with Love Island (ugh). Gogglebox is an incredibly stupid idea - watching people watching telly - but it is hilarious. You can find the holiday show online sometimes.
I’ll think of more I’m sure but this should get British comedy fans going…
I just remembered an older Coogan series called Saxondale - he plays a retired roadie. Really good stuff. Looks like it’s on Apple TV+
And you got a big old virtual pre-COVID hug from me for the Swallows and Amazons reference. Love Ransome, including his autobiographical nonfiction.
AIUI, yeah. As in, what would happen if you had a detective who really did have obsessive-compulsive disorder to a disabling extent, not just comic mannerisms of insistence on tidiness and symmetry and “order and method”?
For my money, they’re the best political comedies of all time. Two of my favorite clips.
I’ve read his autobiography, and his nonfiction books on Russia, as well a couple of biographies about him. He was an interesting and remarkable man.
You could say that the Swallows and Amazons series is more about children, than for children. Even though they were huge bestsellers as children’s books, they have always been enjoyed even more by adults than by children.
They’re also highly recommended for people who like ‘British shit’. And sailing! 
In many ways, Arthur Ransome was far ahead of his time. One of the main characters, Nancy Blackett, definitely has gender dysphoria.
The most remarkable thing about it is that nobody considers it remarkable. Everyone, both children and adults, accept her as she is without comment or judgment. Nothing is ever mentioned or discussed. There is never any moralising.
You simply notice as you read (if you’re observant) that she likes to dress in boy’s clothes, that she avoids activities like cooking and sewing that she regards as ‘women’s work’, and that she identifies as male in all significant ways. It’s presented as inherent from birth. ‘Nancy never liked playing with dolls when she was small’, her mother says.
She’s better than any of the boys at sailing, camping, and any kind of outdoor and practical activity. More than that, she’s a natural leader, automatically in charge in any group of children, bossing adults around as well as children, self-confident, comfortable in herself, and upbeat.
In general there are more girls than boys in the books (there are about 14-15 children that you get to know well over the series!), and girls are mostly stronger characters than boys.
Another character, Dick Callum, who appears in six of the twelve books, definitely has Aspergers or high functioning autism spectrum disorder. These books were written at a time when ASD was utterly unknown, yet Arthur Ransome describes it with great accuracy, understanding, and empathy. Dick is also accepted without comment, just as he is, by both adults and children.
The character was no doubt based on a real child that Ransome knew, as most of his characters were. Ransome wrote what he saw, and he had the ability that all great children’s authors have of being able to see the world through the eyes of a child.
I’ve always thought that he’s highly underrated as a writer.
The Trip series , with him and Rob Brydon, is excellent.
Nitpick: Nancy definitely has major resistance to mandated gender conformity, which is a totally reasonable response to the typical gender-norm restrictions on girls’ lives in that period. But ISTM that Ransome gives us no particular reason to think that she actually “identifies as male”.
Yes, she rejects the use of her given name Ruth (the better to be a “ruthless” pirate), but the name she chooses instead is equally female-identified. And at the start of Peter Duck she explicitly rejects identification as a boy:
Nancy AFAICT is fine with female identity as long as it doesn’t involve being relegated to the conventional limitations on “girls” and “women’s work”. She definitely wants, and assertively demands, the same freedom, autonomy and authority that boys are awarded, and is willing to appropriate male categories to assert her right to them. But it doesn’t seem to me that she actually wants to be a boy or to be perceived as a boy by the people who know her.
Contrast that with the behavior of another famous tomboy of children’s literature, namely George (Georgina) in Enid Blyton’s (IMHO far inferior to Ransome’s work) Famous Five book series. George is always insisting on the use of her masculine name, always lamenting the fact that she’s a girl, always delighted to be mistaken for a boy. That might be ultimately just resistance to gender conformity as well, but I think Blyton’s George is a much stronger candidate than Ransome’s Nancy for a depiction of actual gender dysphoria in a character.
Ransome does also demonstrate a respect and appreciation for “women’s work” unusual among authors of his time, possibly owing to the non-gendered nature of such work among male crews of vessels. Afloat, somebody’s got to take care of the sewing and cooking and hygiene issues when you can’t just step into the next room or round the corner to outsource them to some female family member or cook or charwoman. So men learn to respect the skills involved in such work and their importance for sustaining the community.
That can get combined with patriarchy in a rather toxic way, of course, as in the case of Susan, whose parents kind of take advantage of her maturity level and executive ability (and comparatively minimal resistance to gender conformity) to push her into a sort of “Wendy syndrome”. Susan is held to be responsible for the safety and obedience of her entire sibling group, far more than her older brother John is, even though he’s officially the captain in charge of the group as well as being the eldest. Susan is so weighed down by these expectations of her quasi-maternal responsibilities that she damn near has a nervous breakdown in We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, and I can’t help worrying a bit about that character’s prospects for a well-adjusted adulthood.
I agree, although to my mind the character who is even more clearly neuroatypical in some way is the adult Timothy Stedding (the guy who turned out not to be an armadillo), with his quite extreme social-avoidance behavior. But again, as you say, it’s just accepted by the other characters as part of who he is.
Totally concur.
You may be right, but I still tend to think that it’s far more than that.
It’s rather that she lives in a society where other gender options don’t even seem to exist as possibilities, and she doesn’t have any role models.
Nancy is not simply breaking out of the boundries of conventional women’s roles. It’s that she genuinely has zero interest in feminine things, and never has had, as far as we know.
She’s still young, and it’s interesting to speculate how she might turn out in later life. One thing that certainly doesn’t seem to be her future is a conventional marriage.
Timothy is certainly not neurotypical, and is very likely on the spectrum, but I wouldn’t say that he’s more clearly on the spectrum than Dick.
Dick fully displays all the characteristics of Asperger’s. He’s a typical ‘little absent-minded professor’, who is clueless socially, rather than just avoiding social interactions like Timothy.
“He’s always like that when he’s thinking about something,” said Dorothea quickly. “It isn’t at all that he means to be rude.” Dick looked at her, but not as if he had heard what she was saying.
…
What a good thing it was, too, that he seemed to know all about Dick without having to be told. Not like some people, who never seemed able to understand that Dick was always sure that for them, as for himself, stars, or stones, or birds, or chemical experiments, or whatever at the moment it might be, were more important than anything else in the world.
Dick shows the extreme obsessiveness typical of Aperger’s, and the tendency to rush ahead casually into danger where others wouldn’t, as in the episodes of the cragfast sheep and the sailing sledge in Winter Holiday. He’s also always excessively accurate about the time. “What time is it?” asked Dorothea. “Fourteen and a half minutes to one.”
Another character on the spectrum may be the ‘silent Mr Dixon’. It’s significant that he and Dick are on the same wavelength.
“I’ve never seen him [Mr Dixon] take to anyone like that,” said Mrs Dixon as she and Dorothea watched them move slowly off along the slippery road. …
Dorothea, too, as she trudged away up the hill to the barn, was very pleased about it. Sometimes, she felt, Dick wanted a lot of pushing in affairs of that kind. But he had driven off with Mr Dixon as if they had been a couple of old friends.
I must admit I’ve always shipped (ha ha) the grown-up Nancy with Jim Brading, the master of the Goblin. I can see them forming a really adventurous partnership for seafaring exploration or wartime spying or whatever. But I definitely agree that to be successful their marriage would have to be highly unconventional.
Bree Louise was fantastic, much missed. Their cheese platter was to die for.
Since cheese has been mentioned, let me talk about Cooper’s Hill. Several years ago I began noticing a brand of cheese called Somerdale Cooper’s Hill being available in the cheese section of some supermarkets near me. The packages say that it’s Double Gloucester with chives and onions. If you don’t know about the cheese rolling contest held every year on Cooper’s Hill in England, you might want to look that up. In this contest, a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is rolled down Cooper’s Hill and people chase after it, trying to catch it. This always means that many of the people chasing it end up rolling down the hill.
The reason that this is interesting to me is that I lived in Brockworth near Gloucester during most of the three years I spent in England from 1987 to 1990. My house was right at the bottom of the hill.
Strangely though, I never had time to go to see the contest. I’m not sure why the Somerdale company chose to sell Double Gloucester with chives and onions as being Cooper’s Hill cheese rather than just plain Double Gloucester, since that’s what’s rolled down the hill.
The prize for catching the wheel of cheese is that you get to keep it. One of my British coworkers when I worked over there joked about what a ridiculous contest and prize that was. He said that the prize for being first in the contest was one wheel of cheese that had rolled down a hill and the prize for being second was two wheels of cheese that had rolled down a hill.
I would have thought much of this was incoherent gabble, until I watched the very excellent documentary on the event - its part of a NEtflix series called ‘We are the Champions’. The cheese-rolling episode is just mad - it definitely comes within the ambit of British shit - some of the others less engaging.
But wow. And you lived at the bottom of the hill and never went. Wow.
Possibly the rolling cheeses pick up some of the wild alliums growing on the hill? So they’re plain Double Gloucester at the top of the hill but Double Gloucester with chives and onions by the time they get to the bottom?
That’s clever, but the fact is that the cheeses are always protected these days from any dirt that they might acquire in rolling. The cheese is actually inside a wooden frame, or so I’m told. I don’t know how long they’ve done this.
I actually only had one pass and got two wrong, in total. I just had really long questions (I answered very quickly), and the presenter took up a few seconds of my time to take the piss out of my subject choice, which put me off a little. In the end my maximum score was less than the winning score, which was the highest of the series. It wasn’t actually possible for me to win. Although I had a great time on the show, it didn’t actually feel very fair.
(For people who haven’t seen it - you’re asked questions within a time limit, rather than being asked a set number of questions. It’s two minutes for your specialist subject and two and half minutes for the general knowledge round).
I was just going to mention McDonald & Dodds, which is a cop show, that had an episode with Rob Brydon. The show was about a group of 80s popular icons involved in a murder, and the four icons were played by Patsy Kensit, Cathy Tyson, Rupert Graves, and Martin Kemp.
I recall one show (it had to be a parody) where a bunch of '70s cops and/or PIs trying to solve a crime gathered in a room Agatha Christie–style. The only PI I remember well was Jason King, who, in describing his MO, said “I come into a house, smoke a dozen cigarettes, drink a bottle of claret, and solve the case!”
It may have been they were actually suspected of the crime and being interrogated by another cop/PI (and it turned out that one of them was indeed guilty). I don’t really recall, but I do remember the Jason King bit.
I wonder now if maybe this was a sketch on The Benny Hill Show?
Takeaway sandwiches in England are awesome. The story of how they became popular is interesting too.
This has not at all transferred to Canada, or the US AFAIK. Probably because sandwiches in plastic are associated with gas stations, crappy quality, lack of freshness and the worst business talks and meetings. No fresh bread. No tandoori chicken with coriander mayonnaise…