Time to launch another new blog god-related feature. This one will show off some of the lesser known work of satirist ChrisMorris, who's best known for The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam.
Naturally enough, I'm calling it Morris Minors.
Anyway, the first entry is a bit of stunt work by the man himself, in which he turned up in the audience of daytime debate show The Time The Place and pretended to be an expert on sex and Roman history. He starts of sensible, he ends up silly, just to see at what point he'll be rumbled.
Here's an interesting bit of footage ('embedding disabled by request'. Sorry). Porn baron David Sullivan tried to define pornography to blog Hall of Fame memberChrisMorris for Brass Eye. This clip never made the final cut as other Sullivan interview sections were chosen instead. But it still survives.
PS My sister sent me this. She cc:ed Stewart Lee on it. Absolutely typical!
I'm quite a fan of David Quantick. He's written for just about every comedy programme going. He's collaborated with Charlie Brooker and ChrisMorris. He is, to put it bluntly, a talented man.
How, then, to react to the idea of a David Quantick comedy play, particularly one written for the seventh Doctor?
Is it going to be of the science fiction/Doctor Who milieu or is it going to be some random piece of comedy that takes the piss?Is it going to be of the terminally rubbish (but beloved by Big Finish) comedic season 24, or is it going to be of the darker season 25/26 style? Is Quantick going to know the characters and the back story, particularly of new companion Hex, played by Philip "Brookside/The Games/Naked calendars" Olivier? Is it, in short, going to be rubbish, or is it going to be worth listening to?
On balance, I'd say, if it weren't for the slight hindrances of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, it would actually be all right.
In the UK: Fridays, C4, 9.30pm. Repeated on C4+1 an hour later. Obviously.
In the US: Being remade by NBC as we speak.
Characters re-cast: 0
Major characters gotten rid of: 1 (next episode)
Major new characters: 1 (next episode)
Format change percentage: 0%
When you think about it, a big chunk of classic – and not so classic – British sitcoms are set in an office of sorts. For example, On the Buses, Are You Being Served, even Dad's Army are all work-based sitcoms. However, The Office, for obvious reasons and not just its name, has occluded these in most people's minds and prevented any subsequent office-based sitcoms from emerging (the reverse is true in the US). Indeed, The Office has started a whole number of trends, including a veering towards cringe-comedy rather than joke-based comedy.
However, it's fitting that The IT Crowd has been trying its best to buck that trend, since it has The Office's producer Ash Atalla at the helm. The IT Crowd is sort of the flipside of The Office. It's traditionally filmed, with traditional characters, traditional jokes and traditional plots.
Posted on February 27, 2007 at 13:45 | 2 comments |
Today marks the start of a new category on the blog: people elevated to God-like status (do you like the banner? Impressive, huh?). There are actors, writers, performers and other creative types who produce things that fill our lives with joy. Then there are people who hold opinions so right, so accurate, that they are as gods, walking among us. This category will celebrate them.
Today, I'm going to launch the category with two inaugural members: Charlie Brooker and Stewart Lee. Really, I was just going to start with Stewart Lee but then I realised that that would mean Charlie Brooker wouldn't be the first member of the elite, which just wouldn't do. So they're both going in at the same time.
I'm not going to say much about Charlie Brooker, since I've already said rather a lot. Instead, I'm going to focus on Stewart Lee. Now, whatever you think about a certain opera, Fist of Fun and a whole load of other things he's done over the years, he was automatically granted membership of this glorious category purely as a result of comments he made on Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe this week. I will let his wisdom speak for itself.
Christ, I've just realised ChrisMorris needs to be in here, too. Okay. That's three then.
Posted on December 21, 2006 at 12:20 | 7 comments |
In the UK: Wednesday 20th, 10pm, More4
Aha! The much heralded 30 Greatest Political Comedies! No, really, it was. Okay, I'm lying, it wasn't.
I mean let's face it, if you were the More4 marketing department, would you bust a gut in the run-up to Christmas, promoting a list show voted for by MPs? No. Me, neither. I'd be off with Tiggy, Mimzin and the other PR girls, drinking cosmopolitans at that super new bar that's just opened near Victoria.
So it snuck out last night with the stealth of Jack Bauer, a knife clenched between his teeth, throwing a terrorist's body overboard to cover his tracks. Hosted by two Thunderbirds puppets with uncanny resemblances to Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy, the show listed, surprisingly enough, the 30 political comedies that MPs felt were both the closest to real life and the funniest. Ranging from the election night sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus to Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, the shows got hyped by various sitting MPs, journalists and broadcasters, strung out on speed and intravenous drug-using Dutch prostitutes.
See? That's what happens when you watch shows about politicians. They rub off on you and you start lying every five seconds.
I had high-ish hopes for this. It comes from the House of Armando Iannucci for one thing. It satirises modern news and televisual trends by pretending to look back on them from the perspective of 2031. It could have been The Day Today of our day.
But it wasn't. It was kind of funny. It was clever. It made you wonder just how much time they'd spent trawling through the archives for clips they could doctor with CGI. But it wasn't the side-splittingly funny show I was hoping for.
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