I HIGHLY recommend the “Unforgotten” season/series starring Tom Courtenay, for which he won a British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was season/series 1 from 2015. I have always loved Tom Courtenay ever since he played my favorite character in Doctor Zhivago. The season was a multiple-episode season centering around the investigation into a 1976 murder, in which Courtenay’s character is one of the many suspects in the case.
Reading the Wikipedia article, there’s a fourth series of Unforgotten, which aired in the UK in February. I hope it will be on PBS here soon.
Mrs. L.A. binged on that. I would like to have seen it, but she’d start watching a season before I got home and she’d finish watching after I went to bed. Looked good from what I did see of it.
Thanks. Writing from Australia, where all our boxes are pseudo-Brit boxes, but finding long-finished series can be tricky.
My mistake!
I’ve seen some of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. They’re very good although I think the British grim settings and dark humour in Tales of the Unexpected gives it the edge. Lamb To The Slaughter is great but the one episode that I recall the most as the most disturbing is The Flypaper. Extremely ghoulish tale.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries are not English, but Australian, but have an English feel, and are quite good. The Doctor Blake Mysteries are good as well.
I find British shows to be hit or miss, although some of the best shows are British. I do not watch much TV, though.
Classic comedies include things like Blackadder, Monty Python and Mr. Bean. I’m watching Only Fools and Horses at the moment. Some claim it as the best comedy series ever, but all of the preceding choices are better.
I, Claudius is clearly in the top five TV programs ever. I think Yes (Prime) Minister is the best political show, though Veep is good too. Lots of people like All Creatures Great and Small, Doctor Who, anything to do with Sherlock Holmes, Hitchhikers Guide, etc.
My brother likes Coupling and my mother enjoys Derry Girls.
I am also on the Peep Show train.
Funny cuz I’ve been obsessed with the show since I first saw it (series 3 maybe?) and I can’t get ONE of my IRL friends to like it. Or even check it out. Every time it has shown up on a streaming service I let them know and nobody bites. Been trying for years!
I guess you people are more my people than my real people.
I found The IT Crowd to be a lot of fun, though quality varied widely. The two best episodes in my view were the Aunt Irma one and the one with Jen’s shoes.
I liked The Coroner, too bad it didn’t have a longer run. Great chemistry between Jane and Davey.
Father Brown- boy I’d really like to like that show, but I couldn’t. Maybe it’s just the period it was set in, but I couldn’t get into it.
I thought Call the Midwife was a great show. Actually I think they have one more season in it.
Thanks Dr Deth for the tip on Acorn, I’ll have to give that a try.
Amen. This is the funniest, most intelligent show… Benzedrine Cumberbund (as the pilot) is the perfect straight man to Roger Allem. I’m on my fourth time through the series, and it’s become comfort food for my ears.
Followed closely by the sketch show John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme. Notice a common ground here? Anything John Finnemore writes is… Brilliant!
Do listen to a few bits here… the answering machine sketch is my favorite.
But do stick around for the Ice Cream Van Painter…
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And then learn about an Ottery:
Oh, yes! This one really creeped me out too.
I kind of suspected what would happen from the start, but the “Oh God, no!” moment for me came when the woman in the caravan (trailer) handed the girl three tea cups instead of two. I knew then her fate was sealed.
I see no one’s recommended The Thick of It yet. Peter Capaldi was brilliant in it.
Came for the Thread Title, Stayed for the Toad-in-the-Hole
I don’t think that Upstart Crow has been mentioned yet. David Mitchell in 2 series and a Covid special as William Shakespeare, with a very slanted view of his inspiration and views of how his plays should be received. Well worth the time spent on it
I will also mention another Australian show. It is called Glitch and is about people (not zombies) coming back to life in a small town. Very well done in my opinion.
A show that gets nothing like the recognition it deserves is Cracker. Starring Robbie Coltrane as deeply flawed Dr Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald, it featured the kind of storytelling that became standard in the big dramas of the 2000s. The stories are brilliantly told with 3 dimensional characters, the villains as well drawn as the regulars. While Fitz’s psychological reasoning is astute he isn’t foolproof. Not unusually for a British show it is brief - 23 episodes over 3 years and 2 tele movies years later. One of the best TV shows ever made.
I’m going to throw a curve ball at this point.
I assume that Red Dwarf has already had shout outs (and anyway AIUI, sci fi fans in the US and elsewhere will have already heard of it).
But I was watching another Chris Barrie series, The Brittas Empire the other day. It’s a curve ball because it wasn’t considered even that great at the time. But it seems to stand up well because:
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It’s really dark; it’s a prime time comedy where almost every episode someone innocent dies. This is still pretty daring now.
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We’ve had discussions on the Dope before of what a genuine conservative comedy would look like. Well, in this series, the disasters are often caused by political correctness and the nanny state (though mercifully these phrases are never used). So, this.
My politics is not right-wing, I’m just saying.
I remember when a&e was running English shows on its “mystery Mondays” they had things like a touch of frost… the anna lee series j.brent as holmes, Lovejoy, and this one … I thought it was bleak as hell… sort of hard picturing hagrid in cracker …
Three “seasons” (series) of this now. Also it is written by Ben Elton, who in a way was loved, then lost a lot of his credibility (Thin Blue Line was awful) but still writes excellent books.
I’m not sure it was ever really looked at, but some of us knew it as great at the time, it’s a Trojan comedy which looks like an old traditional comedy, but it’s brutally funny regularly and actually very radical in it’s execution.
This might be why you seem to think it’s a tory/right wing comedy, I never ever thought of it as such, it did represent itself this way: Brittas is a well meaning character oblivious to the world around him, with all the standard management tropes we know and hate, and is a parody of that sort of person. However, he is actually well meaning, and likeable despite this, but make a lot of enemies
Thus, regularly the leisure centre explodes or burns down