British Situation Comedy Series - The Provisional Results of My Review

[Lat-Literal]

All in the best possible taste.

Some of the older titles should bring back happy memories - especially the more obscure. Among the big names that didn't make it - The Larkins, The Army Game/Bootsie and Snudge, Doctor at Large/at Sea, Please Sir, The Fenn Street Gang, Till Death Us Do Part, In Sickness and in Health, Love Thy Neighbour, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, My Husband and I, The Gaffer, Waiting For God, As Time Goes By, 2 Point 4 Children, Roger Roger, The League of Gentlemen, Gavin and Stacey, Green Wing, Spaced, Outnumbered, My Family and Mrs Brown's Boys.

If nothing else, the lesser known ones on the list should enable you to get the all important zero score if and when the topic comes up on Pointless.

01 Only Fools and Horses
02 Hancock's Half Hour
03 Fawlty Towers
04 Dad's Army
05 Some Mothers So 'Ave 'Em
06 George and Mildred
07 Father Ted
08 Desmond's
09 One Foot in the Grave
10 Blackadder
11 Count Arthur Strong
12 A Fine Romance
13 Watching
14 Last of the Summer Wine
15 The Royle Family
16 Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister
17 Rising Damp
18 Hi-De-Hi
19 The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
20 Bread
21 The Vicar of Dibley
22 Man About The House
23 The Green Green Grass
24 Are You Being Served?
25 Detectorists
26 'Allo 'Allo
27 Citizen Smith
28 Home To Roost
29 Steptoe and Son
30 Butterflies
31 The Lenny Henry Show
32 Porridge
33 A Sharp Intake of Breath
34 The Liver Birds
35 Keeping Up Appearances
36 And Mother Makes Three/Five
37 Whoops Apocalypse
38 The Good Life
39 Red Dwarf
40 I'm Alan Partridge
41 W1A/2012
42 George and the Dragon
43 Absolutely Fabulous
44 Bless This House
45 The Thin Blue Line
46 Dinner Ladies
47 Two's Company
48 The Likely Lads/Whatever Happened To
49 Lucky Feller
50 The Young Ones
51 Dear John
52 No.....That's Me Over Here
53 On The Buses
54 Oh Doctor Beeching
55 Sorry
56 Just Good Friends
57 To The Manor Born
58 Don't Drink The Water
59 After Henry
60 The Dustbinmen
61 You Rang M'Lord
62 Happy Ever After/Terry and June
63 The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs
64 Ever Decreasing Circles
65 The Lovers
66 The Rag Trade
67 Goodnight Sweetheart
68 Peter Kay's Car Share
69 Birds of a Feather
70 You're Only Young Twice
71 Agony/Agony Again
72 Rab C Nesbitt
73 Robin's Nest
74 Hold The Sunset
75 The Office
76 Open All Hours/Still Open All Hours
77 All Gas and Gaiters
78 The Brittas Empire
79 Father Dear Father
80 Shelley
81 Black Books
82 Not in Front of the Children
83 May To December
84 Oh No It's Selwyn Froggit
85 That's My Boy
86 Chef
87 Citizen Khan
88 The Fosters
89 Brush Strokes
90 Fresh Fields
91 The IT Crowd
92 Men Behaving Badly
93 Benidorm
94 Get Some In
95 Goodbye Mr Kent
96 Not Going Out
97 Miss Jones and Son
98 Drop The Dead Donkey
99 For The Love of Ada
100 Heartburn Hotel

[Stunsworth]

Which goes to show how many unfunny, third rate, comedy series the U.K. has produced - the usual 90% rule.

No Nearest and Dearest?

[Lat-Literal]

Which goes to show how many unfunny, third rate, comedy series the U.K. has produced - the usual 90% rule.

No Nearest and Dearest?

I had forgotten Nearest and Dearest and will have to review it.

Other suggestions of programmes I might have missed would be welcome.

The other shows I have reviewed are Pardon the Expression, Hugh and I, Marriage Lines, Oh Brother, Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width, Curry and Chips, Never The Twain, Keep It in the Family, Two in Clover, Whack-O, Not On Your Nellie, Lollipop Loves Mr Mole, Queenie's Castle, My Good Woman, Romany Jones, Yes My Dear, The Cuckoo Waltz, Down The Gate, Bottle Boys, No Honestly/Yes Honestly, Graham's Gang, The Wackers, Mind Your Language, Up The Elephant & Round The Castle, Odd Man Out, In Loving Memory, Brass, All About Me, Fairly Secret Army, The New Statesman, Sitting Pretty, Tripper's Day/Slinger's Day, The Bounder, Duty Free, Bottom, All at No 20, A Bit of a Do, The High Life, Gimme Gimme Gimme, Two Pints and a Packet of Crisps, Game On, Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, The Inbetweeners, Peep Show, Miranda, and The Thick of It. That and the also rans in post one are the gist of it along with the main list. Also, sadly, I've rejected Mr Bean for being sketches, Zig and Zag for being cartoon aliens and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for being beyond any category.

[Lat-Literal]

Thoughts

I'm not sure about the 10%/90% rule. Well, I am sure and yet I am not sure. As with the US sitcoms, I could draw up a list of a serious critic. It would be shorter, in a different order and credible. Two things stop me. First, I can be amused by the clever and the inane. If anything, my distinction is between what I perceive as being warm and not warm. Secondly, there is a strong argument that in comedy different rules apply. Clever people do the inane well - Perry, Croft and Lloyd spring to mind - and people who are not clever do not do it well.

Perhaps it is my age but cramming viewing in the way that I have done in just the past few weeks somewhat changes the personal outlook. It's been enjoyable but not always easy, unlike in earlier times when these programmes would have been fitted around daily activities. Then, many of the characters, scripts and productions would have seemed novel. Now, what comes across now is the sheer universality of life. The treadmill of going from one age in life to another, irrespective of the era. The way in which for all of the social changes a lot doesn't change and the evident truths about personality stereotypes although here is a proviso. A friend of mine who declared last year that everyone is now just a corporate type or a chav or both these things rings true even more than at the time he said it. They always existed but he was so right to lament that there are comparatively few true individuals now.

The same writers crop up across productions. Beyond the names mentioned, I am grateful that the likes of John Sullivan, Galton and Simpson, Carla Lane, Graham Linehan, Esmonde and Larbey, Lynn and Jay, Cooke and Mortimer, Aherne and Cash, Gran and Marks, Chesney and Wolfe and Victoria Wood have brightened our lives. They've contributed a great deal.

[greenilex]

To be rather grim and unfunny, we are all individuals at the end...

[LMcD]

I discovered some time ago that recommending any comedy show is a good way to strain even the most established of friendships.
We're currently laughing our way through the complete 'Rising Damp'- (a birthday present)- delightfully non-PC! Among recent series, we particularly rate 'Peter Kay's Car Share', 'The Detectorists' - if it is actually a sitcom- and 'Mum'.

[vinteuil]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_(TV_series)

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[Stunsworth]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_(TV_series)

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i watched all of that a few years ago. I thought it very good. There are some cracking one liners. “I can’t stand around chatting, I’ve got men to sack.”

[french frank]

Sykes

[MrGongGong]

To be rather grim and unfunny, we are all individuals at the end...

"Yes, we are all individuals"

[Conchis]

Situation comedies date very quickly.

Fawlty Towers' reputation as the 'funniest thing ever on television' puzzles me. I found it amusing when I was a below-teen in the seventies but when I re-watched it as an adult, I was shocked to see how reliant it was on formula/hyertical over-acting by most of the cast/cliched situations. Only Prunella Scales gives a durable (and funny) performance. And since literally EVERYONE in the western world now knows all the punchlines, I don't really see the point in re-watching it.

My favourite was The Likely Lads/Whatever Happened To..... but I'll admit that even large parts of that are no longer that funny. Fortunately, the central characters are all very likeable and it does have that warm, nostalgic glow for those who remember watching its first run (a comedy about people lamenting the loss of their youth which now appeals to people whose own youth coincided with the programme).


I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't find Father Ted funny.....

[french frank]

I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't find Father Ted funny.....

I might be with you, though I've never seen it. I'm very resistant to anything that tries to make me laugh

[vinteuil]

I'm very resistant to anything that tries to make me laugh

... so if you don't laugh at the works created by comic writers / actors who are 'trying to make you laugh' what do you laugh at? Fat men unintentionally slipping up on banana skins??

or perhaps you are a follower of Lord Chesterfield -

" True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: they please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter; and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above…. Not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions. Laughter is easily restrained by a very little reflection; but, as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity…. I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh..."



[ Lord Chesterfield: Letters to his Son, March 9, 1748.]



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[french frank]

... so if you don't laugh at the works created by comic writers / actors who are 'trying to make you laugh' what do you laugh at? Fat men unintentionally slipping up on banana skins??

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Sort of. That doesn't mean to say I would laugh at a fat man slipping up on a banana skin (which doesn't strike me as at all funny). But I might find something which happens unintentionally funny. Whether I found it funny or not would depend on what it was. It might be something spontaneous rather than unintentional, something said so spontaneously that people say it without the specific intention of making someone else laugh.

<sigh>'"My remarks, I fear, must savour of the legendary German professor, who wrote a large book on Das Komische. After which, whenever anyone told him a funny story, he thought for a moment, and then nodded, saying ,"Yes, there is that joke."' :-|

:-)

[vinteuil]

<sigh>'"My remarks, I fear, must savour of the legendary German professor, who wrote a large book on Das Komische. After which, whenever anyone told him a funny story, he thought for a moment, and then nodded, saying ,"Yes, there is that joke."' :-|

:-)

... and the notorious inability of Dr Freud to enjoy the spinach/mayonnaise joke -

" A series of wit-like productions for which we have no appropriate name, but which may lay claim to the designation of “witty nonsense,” may be added to the nonsense-jokes. They are very numerous, but I shall cite only two examples:

As the fish was served to a guest at the table he put both hands twice into the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. Being looked at by his neighbour with astonishment he seemed to have noticed his mistake and excused himself, saying: “Pardon me, I thought it was spinach.”

Or: “Life is like a suspension bridge,” said the one. “How is that?” asked the other. “How should I know?” was the answer.

These extreme examples produce an effect through the fact that they give rise to the expectation of wit, so that one makes the effort to find the hidden sense behind the nonsense. But none is found, they are really nonsense. Under that deception it was possible for one moment to liberate the pleasure in nonsense. These witticisms are not altogether without tendencies, they furnish the narrator a certain pleasure in that they deceive and annoy the hearer. The latter then calms his anger by resolving that he himself should take the place of the narrator... "


Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Section B. Synthesis of Wit IV. The Pleasure Mechanism and the Psychogenesis of Wit


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