Laugh and the world (or at least, a studio audience) laughs with you
I like sitcoms with live studio audiences. There, I said it.
In some quarters, this admission will land me with Cliff Richard fans and bus-spotters in the credibility stakes. However, I think that those who automatically dismiss studio sitcoms as a relic from the past are missing out on a treat, and I shall try to explain why.
The mainstay of television comedy, from the fuzzy black and white era right up to the late 90s, was the studio sitcom. Shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, One Foot in the Grave and Father Ted are fondly remembered by successive generations.
The audience sitcom has gone rather out of fashion in the 21st century, however, with the arrival of the “realistic” comedy in the shape of shows like The Royle Family and (of course) The Office, with a rather more subtle style of humour than the larger-than-life characters and farcical situations favoured by most traditional sitcoms.
In Extras a key plot point was the crap sitcom When The Whistle Blows, a show whose success seems to entirely revolve around the lead character’s spouting of a lame catchphrase week in, week out. By the way, is it a coincidence that this show-within-a-show seems quite similar to Dinnerladies?
I was aware of Frank Sidebottom but only recently did I start actively seeking out stuff on YouTube. As with most aspects of pop culture, I was far too late.
It was Autumn 1996 (I think) and your humble webmaster was flicking around the channels on his Telewest analogue cable box (Channel 7 is YOUR local channel!), alighting on the nascent Paramount Comedy. This was a time before the channel could rely on Frasier and South Park to prop up its schedules, and instead relied on two main sources of programming: old US sitcoms from the 1970s, and old US sitcoms from the 1990s which were cancelled after 7 episodes.
Amidst all the rubbish was the occasional gem, and the one I discovered that cold October night was It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, a wonderfully surreal sitcom starring the titular comedian and his neighbours. What marked this show out was that all the characters “knew” they were in a sitcom — cue much fourth-wall breaking and subverting of the genre. It wasn’t unusual to see the show play around with time (“It’s now two weeks later!”) or turn the cameras around to get the audience involved: one memorable episode saw the audience invited to Garry’s mother’s birthday party, only to give her a heart attack when they yelled, “Surprise!”
Running for four seasons from 1986-1990 (and originally screened in the UK on BBC2), it was somewhat overshadowed when Shandling made The Larry Sanders Show in the following decade, and nobody really seems to remember this show. There’s not even many dodgy clips on YouTube to jog the memory.
But I have found a morsel of Flash video goodness for you, so while you’re waiting for that essential DVD to arrive, here’s the ace opening titles in full, setting the tone for everything that follows:-
How friggin’ brilliant is Glee?! Of course, it wasn’t exactly difficult for this one to win me over — anything which features uptempo singing and dancing on a regular basis already has me drawn in.
It’s just so… upbeat. I always seem to end each episode with a warm fuzzy feeling in various parts of my body. I don’t know what it is: even when bad things are happening on-screen, there is an overall positive vibe which permeates the show and leaves me feeling happy.
Comparisons with High School Musical are inevitable, but Glee contains just enough sharp comedy to balance out the syrupy sweetness.
I suppose my one criticism is that most of the characters are generic American high-school stereotypes (dumb jock, cheerleaders, a bully, sassy black girl, gay kid, etc) but by episode 10 they’ve started to flesh out the characters a bit and made them seem a bit more 3-dimensional. It is good to see a successful US show set in a high school which focuses on the misfits rather than the super-popular kids.
Right at the centre of the show is someone who could be the greatest villain in the history of television: Sue Sylvester (played with relish by Jane Lynch), who steals every scene she appears in with rants about curly hair and kitty-cat related threats. Marvellous stuff.
There’s always a danger that Glee will be unable to sustain this momentum long term and struggle to keep going past the second season. For now though, it’s an amazing show fully deserving of the praise and awards that have been heaped on it.
If you’ve missed the first few episodes, E4 are repeating them all on weekday afternoons starting next Monday. You won’t be disappointed. And that’s how Sue C’s it.
The late night talk show is a format which hasn’t really caught on in the UK the way it has in America. Sure, we get Graham Norton, Jonathan Ross and (shudder) Alan Carr once a week, but how many of these hosts could successfully do a show five nights a week, for 40 or so weeks a year? Not many, I’d suspect.
In America, the late night talk show has become something of a staple of many network schedules (Wikipedia helpfully summarises). It seems odd to us in the UK, where most TV channels give up after about 11.30pm and fling on old films or Pages from Ceefax to take insomniac viewers through the night. Across the pond however, some of these shows have become icons of popular culture, and that is especially true of NBC’s long-running Tonight Show. So when questions started being asked about Tonight’s future, it was headline news in the US.
I’m not going to go into detail about the controversy (the links in this post should satisfy any curiosity you have) but I want to highlight Conan O’Brien, the current host of the Tonight Show who is being forced out after just seven months on the job.
I first discovered Conan a few years ago when I stumbled across his previous show, Late Night, which was shown in the UK for many years as a weekend filler on the business news channel CNBC Europe. I quickly became enamoured with his absurdist style of humour, honed while writing some of the very best Simpsons episodes during that show’s glory years. The surrealism was elevated further by CNBC’s practice of showing stock market prices during the commercial breaks.
Unfortunately, Conan lost some of his edginess with a move to the more mainstream Tonight Show in 2009. Fortunately, there are some choice clips from his old show available on YouTube and I’ve posted a selection of them below.
We’ve received complaints from viewers who believed a line in the second part of Doctor Who: The End of Time was insulting to people with ginger hair.
The BBC’s response
We would like to reassure viewers that Doctor Who doesn’t have an anti ginger agenda whatsoever. This was a reprise of the line in the Christmas Invasion episode in 2005, when David Tennant discovers that he’s not ginger, and here he is, missing out again – disappointed he’s still not ginger.
In addition, the Doctor’s previous companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and his new one Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) are both redheads.
To everyone who complained: go out and get a bloody life and stop trying to see offensiveness in everything.
The return of The Crystal Maze could be great news (if true — the original report comes from the Sun) but why is Amanda Holden’s name in the frame? I can’t think of anyone less suited to the role.
ITV seem desperate to cash in on the success of Britain’s Got Talent by putting the show’s stars on screen at every opportunity. There are more than five TV presenters in existence, guys: try using someone different for a change!
Was this year an exciting way to say goodbye to the decade? Here’s a reminder of what happened on planet Hampo this year (part 2, hopefully, follows tomorrow):-
January started out with one of my favourite shows being revived. Despite being up against EastEnders and being hosted by Ben Shepherd, the Krypton Factor did well enough to be recommissioned for a second series. We found out Who would replace David Tennant, and a year later we still haven’t actually seen him in the role. ITV’s latest attempt to ape the success of Doctor Who was Demons which failed spectacularly; the only creative thing about it being the number of different excuses the writers found for Christian Cooke to remove clothing.
The BBC had nine of the top 10 shows on Christmas Day, according to the ratings people. The only ITV1 show to make the list was Coronation Street.
Many criticise ITV1 for not making much of an effort at Christmas. This ignores the fact that ITV1 is a commercial channel which makes its money from advertising, and the advertisers don’t want to spend money on Christmas Day when there are no shops open. The big spend from advertisers comes before Christmas, hence ITV1 devoting its energies in November and December.
It’s an argument which isn’t mentioned much when the licence fee is debated, but it’s one which should be considered: strip the BBC of its guaranteed funding and force it to rely on advertising income, and you’ll see an equally unimaginative schedule on BBC1 on December 25 in future years.
Just look at what happens in America, where the Christmas specials usually go out in the first week of December. On the day itself a load of old films and repeats are usually served up by the big networks.
Would it be the end of the world if Christmas Day ceased to be a big family-around-the-TV day? Probably not, but you can guarantee that those who howl loudest about the licence fee (the Daily Mail and its ilk) would also be the first to complain about the dire Christmas schedules that would result.
The weather’s getting colder, the nights are getting longer and Ryan Giggs has won the X Factor (or something). It can only mean one thing: Christmas approaches, and as usual the broadcasters clear their schedules for some festive hijinks.
Here is my pick of the Christmas TV schedules. I actually thought I’d done this last year, but in fact it was all the way back in 2006 when I hand-picked some top Christmas telly, so it’s high time I did it again. There’s a lot of dross this year, and a big thumbs down to BBC Two who fill an hour of precious peaktime on Christmas Day with a repeat of the previous week’s Top Gear! Still, there’s some proverbial wheat to be found among the chaff. Here’s my choice.
So the X-Factor final is tonight. I’m not particularly interested since the main reason to watch the show exited a few weeks back.
I’m completely over the whole TV music show thing, mainly because it rarely delivers on its premise. For every Will Young and Leona Lewis there is a Michelle McManus, Leon Jackson or Steve Brookstein. Simon Cowell and his mates rake in the cash and everyone else gets trampled in the process (remember when the Christmas number one wasn’t a foregone conclusion?)
So rather than dwell on it, I’ll post this video from the BBC Comedy site, featuring Mr Saturday Night Telly Voice Man himself, Peter Dickson.
So should the BBC have allowed Nick Griffin on to Question Time? I think, on balance, the answer has to be “yes”. Opponents have said this gives the BNP an aura of respectability, and they might be right. But I believe it is vitally important that their reprehensible ideas and views are challenged publicly.
The general consensus in the media seems to be that this was a humiliation for Griffin, but check out these reactions from Burnley and Dagenham. The key issue is that many people in poorer areas voted for the BNP because they feel totally disenfranchised from the political process and believe no mainstream party cares about them. Factor in a healthy dose of hysteria from the right-wing tabloids and you have a recipe for (limited) electoral success.
In this situation, the solution is not to ignore the BNP and hope they will go away, as Peter Hain and others seem to want. Instead, the powers that be should be explaining exactly why the BNP are wrong.
Last week BBC Four showed Micro Men, billed as a “drama-documentary” (i.e. facts with made up bits in between to make it more interesting) about the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn for dominance of the UK’s nascent home computer market in the early 1980s.
I came to the world of computers long after this battle had been fought (Acorn had the education market sewn up, but Sinclair’s cheaper ZX Spectrum won the majority of the home users) but for a long-standing Acorn fan such as myself it was fascinating to see the events recreated, including a marvellous scene where the Acorn techies frantically work to get the prototype BBC Micro working while boss Chris Curry is stalling the BBC executives in the corridor outside.
One aspect the programme does capture perfectly is the genuine feeling of excitement that existed as affordable home computers entered people’s homes for the first time. Whether it was the Spectrum with its rubber keys and colour clash, or the BBC Micro’s occasionally-flammable power supplies and blocky Mode 2 graphics, computing has never seemed quite so exciting since.
Yes, I hate Big Brother, but to be fair, I hated it long before it was cool to do so. Dominating Channel 4′s schedules for months on end (axing it will apparently free up 200 hours!) it was, until this year at least, impossible to avoid. Even the fairly highbrow papers would devote precious column inches to the show, and I had to listen to people at work prattling on about it endlessly (until this year, because no-one cares about it). It actually got on my nerves and angried up my blood in a way that’s hard to articulate.
On a lighter note, Channel Four are reportedly looking at a “long-running comedy soap” to fill part of the void — so looks like Brookside is finally coming back.
to arrive, here’s the ace opening titles in full, setting the tone for everything that follows:-