Damn right. I hate these comedy shows where the only point seems to be the permeation of the ‘nation’s conscience’ – i.e. oho! how funny we are to have memorised repetitive skits from a TV show.
I made a decision tonight to give it a proper chance and watch the first episode of the new series, instead of merely basing my opinion of it on catching a couple of minutes by accident. I lasted about 15 minutes.
The funniest thing (which is not saying that much) is Tom Baker’s voiceover.
Well, it was funny on the radio. I suppose I have it easy – I get to listen to stuff in its first flush of youth, then the TV poaches it, and it gets old and stale with pictures attached. Better yet, other people pay for both processes.
Dead Ringers is the exception – it’s getting stale on the radio – I’m assuming that the TV version is also flagging.
Wow. They look like Rednecks from a trailer park in Arkansas. Of course, rednecks from AR transplanted to London would be hilarious…I feel a new sitcom coming on.
Chris is right, it was very funny on the radio, but it is getting stale, but then I guess we sound like “they-sold-out-after-the-first-album” hipsters..–
AH! “Preview your comment”? Scared the life out of me! What have you been doing, Sharon?
–as an antidote I’ve been watching the Rock Profile DVD. Robbie Walliams. Masterful.
I never heard it on the radio. Am not convinced I’d have liked it much more.
Re live preview: Maybe I should change the wording so it’s clearer what’s going to happen…
I am getting a terrible itch to do things to the design again. Who needs books for work avoidance when you have CSS? (On inspection, I discover it is a whole 6 months since the last big change. No wonder I’m bored with it.)
At least you *tried*. I looked at their pictures in the Radio Times and found the whole concept of these characters so unattractive, and well, it looked as if they were laughing at pretty pathetic and unfortunate individuals, that I thought, Not for me.
But I gather primary school children love it – so maybe it’s an age thing.
Yesterday was one of the first times I watched an episode all the way through. I found it 25% funny and 75% bore. Caitlin Moran in The Times makes a good point when she says the show is mysognist. (spelling?)
I went to Betws-y-Coed today. It must’ve been virtually inaccessible in the 17th century. Do you know of any highwaymen Sharon?
In Betws-y-coed? I don’t think so. Mind you, they didn’t necessarily seem so terribly inaccessible to contemporaries, especially if they were near the drovers’ roads.
Well, I just looked in the Great Sessions database and it has a Robert Davies of Betws-y-coed, who confessed in 1781 to highway robbery from a stagecoach between Coventry and Daventry in Warwickshire.
Betws wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime in the 18th century: the database offers up just 3 prosecuted crimes there between 1730 and 1830. (Mind you, one of them was a homicide with 7 defendants. That must have been a local sensation.)
It’s very popular here in Australia. I like some of the characters (eg Sebastian, Lou and Andy and ‘the only queer in the village’; others I find embasrrassing or, yes, misogynist. The ones that I like are thoise that poke fun at people who take themselves too seriously, eg rescuing carers, obsessive PAs etc.
M-H, well put. There is just too much poking fun at the wrong targets. (I don’t think age-related incontinence is even remotely amusing, for example.) I don’t know about the misogyny accusations, though. I think it’s just a more generalised sneering nastiness which relies on a lot of really old, lazy cliches and stereotypes, including sexist ones.
Not meaning to defend the show too much cos I don’t really like it and have barely watched it, I do think that some of this is rather missing the point. Not to sound hopelessly naive, surely the point of the Lucas/Walliams brand of humour is not who they “poke fun at” but how they do it. I don’t intepret lots of the Little Britain skits as being aimed at “targets”, but as stylistic/humouristic exercises existing in the slightly surreal, skewed world in which the sketches that take place — a surreality and skewing which is made blindly obvious by using a narrator who makes obvious factual errors/exagerrations. There are obvious exceptions: Vicky Pollard is clearly “aimed” at something in some way; but I don’t think that the woman-pissing-in-a-supermarket sketch is taking the piss (boomboom) out of elderly incontinence, it’s just employing basic scatological humour. In that sense it’s not the “humour of an 8-year-old bully,” but of an 8-year-old child — or indeed, to judge by a combination of C18th caricature and Bottom, millions of [early] modern adults…
The fact that viewers see the show as an opportunity to make some fairly hideous claims about “chavs” is as much due to a social agenda behind Little Britain as those kids at school who imitated Ali G because they thought he was cool had to do with the program itself (or indeed those who accused it of racism!). In sum, whatever the politics of representation, and despite its title, I think LB should be judged primarily as good/bad surreal comedy (imho largely bad) rather than good/bad social criticism.
I’m happy to be proved wrong. (And Sharon, I actually like the preview thing, it just scared me witless.)
Yep. I over-reacted as usual. I’m very tired, if it’s any consolation. The word “chav” is like red-rag to a bull to me (I’d blog about it but it seems like such a G2 thing to do…) and I don’t think I really read many of the comments very carefully.
I think my main (if hopelessly obscured) point was really that a lot of the humour in LB seems to depend more on execution/a certain brand of surrealism, than on “old, lazy cliches and stereotypes” (which can be read as a form of social criticism). E.g. Some will think “Ah Vicki Pollard, she’s so funny, at last someone poking fun at fat poor white girls in hideous outfits!”; many more, hopefully, will instead be cheered by the physical comedy of Matt Lucas’ attempts at break-dancing. Clear, I hope.
And something freaky *is* happening with this comment box, but only in Firefox (IE is fine). It’s presumably something to do with the tweaking I did with the code earlier this week but I have no idea what. Oh what fun.
PS: Rob, I’d forgotten I did use the term ‘chavs’ earlier. But in my defence I used it in tandem with the term ‘rednecks’ and both were meant to be a bit, um, ironic. Sorry.
Early Modern Notes 
Damn right. I hate these comedy shows where the only point seems to be the permeation of the ‘nation’s conscience’ – i.e. oho! how funny we are to have memorised repetitive skits from a TV show.
I made a decision tonight to give it a proper chance and watch the first episode of the new series, instead of merely basing my opinion of it on catching a couple of minutes by accident. I lasted about 15 minutes.
The funniest thing (which is not saying that much) is Tom Baker’s voiceover.
Yeah but no but yeah but…
Well, it was funny on the radio. I suppose I have it easy – I get to listen to stuff in its first flush of youth, then the TV poaches it, and it gets old and stale with pictures attached. Better yet, other people pay for both processes.
Dead Ringers is the exception – it’s getting stale on the radio – I’m assuming that the TV version is also flagging.
Wow. They look like Rednecks from a trailer park in Arkansas. Of course, rednecks from AR transplanted to London would be hilarious…I feel a new sitcom coming on.
Chris is right, it was very funny on the radio, but it is getting stale, but then I guess we sound like “they-sold-out-after-the-first-album” hipsters..–
AH! “Preview your comment”? Scared the life out of me! What have you been doing, Sharon?
–as an antidote I’ve been watching the Rock Profile DVD. Robbie Walliams. Masterful.
I never heard it on the radio. Am not convinced I’d have liked it much more.
Re live preview: Maybe I should change the wording so it’s clearer what’s going to happen…
I am getting a terrible itch to do things to the design again. Who needs books for work avoidance when you have CSS? (On inspection, I discover it is a whole 6 months since the last big change. No wonder I’m bored with it.)
Rebecca, now there’s an idea. “Rednecks meet Chavs”.
At least you *tried*. I looked at their pictures in the Radio Times and found the whole concept of these characters so unattractive, and well, it looked as if they were laughing at pretty pathetic and unfortunate individuals, that I thought, Not for me.
But I gather primary school children love it – so maybe it’s an age thing.
Yesterday was one of the first times I watched an episode all the way through. I found it 25% funny and 75% bore. Caitlin Moran in The Times makes a good point when she says the show is mysognist. (spelling?)
I went to Betws-y-Coed today. It must’ve been virtually inaccessible in the 17th century. Do you know of any highwaymen Sharon?
In Betws-y-coed? I don’t think so. Mind you, they didn’t necessarily seem so terribly inaccessible to contemporaries, especially if they were near the drovers’ roads.
Well, I just looked in the Great Sessions database and it has a Robert Davies of Betws-y-coed, who confessed in 1781 to highway robbery from a stagecoach between Coventry and Daventry in Warwickshire.
Betws wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime in the 18th century: the database offers up just 3 prosecuted crimes there between 1730 and 1830. (Mind you, one of them was a homicide with 7 defendants. That must have been a local sensation.)
You’re not the only one. There’s this from the Times.
It’s very popular here in Australia. I like some of the characters (eg Sebastian, Lou and Andy and ‘the only queer in the village’; others I find embasrrassing or, yes, misogynist. The ones that I like are thoise that poke fun at people who take themselves too seriously, eg rescuing carers, obsessive PAs etc.
M-H, well put. There is just too much poking fun at the wrong targets. (I don’t think age-related incontinence is even remotely amusing, for example.) I don’t know about the misogyny accusations, though. I think it’s just a more generalised sneering nastiness which relies on a lot of really old, lazy cliches and stereotypes, including sexist ones.
It’s basically the humour of an 8-year-old bully.
Not meaning to defend the show too much cos I don’t really like it and have barely watched it, I do think that some of this is rather missing the point. Not to sound hopelessly naive, surely the point of the Lucas/Walliams brand of humour is not who they “poke fun at” but how they do it. I don’t intepret lots of the Little Britain skits as being aimed at “targets”, but as stylistic/humouristic exercises existing in the slightly surreal, skewed world in which the sketches that take place — a surreality and skewing which is made blindly obvious by using a narrator who makes obvious factual errors/exagerrations. There are obvious exceptions: Vicky Pollard is clearly “aimed” at something in some way; but I don’t think that the woman-pissing-in-a-supermarket sketch is taking the piss (boomboom) out of elderly incontinence, it’s just employing basic scatological humour. In that sense it’s not the “humour of an 8-year-old bully,” but of an 8-year-old child — or indeed, to judge by a combination of C18th caricature and Bottom, millions of [early] modern adults…
The fact that viewers see the show as an opportunity to make some fairly hideous claims about “chavs” is as much due to a social agenda behind Little Britain as those kids at school who imitated Ali G because they thought he was cool had to do with the program itself (or indeed those who accused it of racism!). In sum, whatever the politics of representation, and despite its title, I think LB should be judged primarily as good/bad surreal comedy (imho largely bad) rather than good/bad social criticism.
I’m happy to be proved wrong. (And Sharon, I actually like the preview thing, it just scared me witless.)
Um, OK, but I didn’t mean to suggest that I was thinking of the show as social criticism comedy anyway. It’s just bad as anything.
And I don’t want to be scaring my gentle readers, now do I?!
(But something a bit weird is going on with this comment box at the moment, or am I the only person experiencing it?)
Yep. I over-reacted as usual. I’m very tired, if it’s any consolation. The word “chav” is like red-rag to a bull to me (I’d blog about it but it seems like such a G2 thing to do…) and I don’t think I really read many of the comments very carefully.
I think my main (if hopelessly obscured) point was really that a lot of the humour in LB seems to depend more on execution/a certain brand of surrealism, than on “old, lazy cliches and stereotypes” (which can be read as a form of social criticism). E.g. Some will think “Ah Vicki Pollard, she’s so funny, at last someone poking fun at fat poor white girls in hideous outfits!”; many more, hopefully, will instead be cheered by the physical comedy of Matt Lucas’ attempts at break-dancing. Clear, I hope.
Actually, that *was* pretty funny.
And something freaky *is* happening with this comment box, but only in Firefox (IE is fine). It’s presumably something to do with the tweaking I did with the code earlier this week but I have no idea what. Oh what fun.
PS: Rob, I’d forgotten I did use the term ‘chavs’ earlier. But in my defence I used it in tandem with the term ‘rednecks’ and both were meant to be a bit, um, ironic. Sorry.
OK, I think I fixed the comment box. (But I had to turn off the live preview to do it. It may come back later.)
Unfortunately at some point I appear to have f*cked the template for the sidebars in single post view. I really do not know how.