We get the “origin story” in episode 5 of The Beauty. It’s wonderfully over the top. It’s funny, we watched the season finale of Fallout (with Kyle MacLachlan) just before seeing Isabella Rossellini in The Beauty. They are both just as weird (in a good way) as they were 40 years ago in Blue Velvet
Mock the week, along with HIGNFY and Never Mind the Buzzcocks were the originals of this format, the rest of those all followed on. Mock the week being basically comedians (and the breakout star being Frankie Boyle who left after a while, and Hugh Dennis (*) being the second best thing), HIGNFY being comedians paired with a politican/journalist (and humanised the likes of Boris Johnson and Farage to their shame) and Buzzcocks being with musicians.
Frankie Boyle featured in a few series of Taskmaster, but his brutal humour didn’t tend to fit, and I can’t recall him being particularly funny in the few episodes I watched because he was in it.
(*) Hugh Dennis is a loooong famous UK comedian, as part of the Punt and Dennis comedy pairing, featuring on the Jasper Carrot show in the 80s, and half of the Mary Whitehouse Experience in the 90s (hugely successful in the UK) with Newman and Baddiel. The pair still presented The Now Show on radio until recently, a topical weekly comedy programme.
I started watching The Righteous Gemstones solely because John Goodman was in it, and instantly fell in love with it. Walter Goggins was an added bonus. I like the way that they drop in bits of backstory for the family as they become relevant. And the ending, after four seasons, was nicely done.
John Early was on Seth Meyer’s show last night so I checked about Search Party availability. Yes! I enjoyed the series very much; there are a couple scenes that were very memorable.
That pretty much was his schtick (stolen from Jerry Sadowitz, another offensive Scottish comedian). It’s not some offensive stuff, it was that most of his stuff was offensive. And funny. I loved that sort of thing, I’m not sure Americans can deal with Scottish humour at full tilt (though Bing Hitler made it big out there, I think he was very subdued. Known as Craig Ferguson…)
Just googled some of the darker ones
An ISIS caliphate is essentially the Vatican but with less sex.
Apparently the Saudi Arabian Paralympic team is mainly thieves.
Bye Afghanistan. Seems like we just couldn’t murder enough of you to bring peace, couldn’t drop enough explosives to bring stability. Sorry.
I’m from Glasgow. If I had to explain Glasgow to you, I’d say that if I had to pick a city in the world where I could depend on a member of the public to punch a man who was on fire. To punch a flaming man to the ground! We should get a photo of that blown up and use it as the welcome sign at Scottish airports. And underneath we should have the words “Scotland welcomes careful drivers.” I mean the naivety of Al Qaida trying to bring religious war to Glasgow. We’re four hundred years ahead of you guys. You’ve not even got a football team. There’s a fallacy, isn’t there, that that baggage handler prevented hundreds of people from being horribly burnt. These were Scottish people flying to Spain!
From memory, Frankie toned it down quite a lot on MTW. Or maybe the more offensive stuff just didn’t survive the edit. He was very funny on it though. I find the more outrageous stand up stuff a bit much, like being offensive for offence’s sake.
Watching Men’s Downhill - wow, they have some great new camera stuff that follows the skiers. Looks like the third person point of view you’d have in a video game.
I started watching Ponies on Peacock. It’s a spy light drama about a couple of American women in Moscow whose husbands are CIA agents who die mysteriously in the USSR. Since they are not important (Persons of No Interest – PONIs), they stay to find out what happened and work for the CIA chief (Adrian Lester) to bring down KGB people.
Nicely done and some clever plotting. I was impressed on how they sequed into a flashback in episode 3.
Not sure we’re on the right thread here but totally agree. Those drone shots where it follows them down the mountain just show how insane these skiers are. It really brings home the incredible speeds they achieve. I’ve just finished a ski trip and it made me feel a bit inadequate!!