Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number

Ricky Gervais: Step into my office

He created one of the great sitcoms. He is a very funny man. And he's concerned about his 'legacy'. Which is exactly why Nicholas Barber would like to have a quiet word with Ricky Gervais

Published: 14 January 2007

Ricky Gervais opens his new live show wearing a plastic crown and a regal red robe, with his name in lights behind him and a six-foot model of an Emmy award to his left. "Not too much, is it?" he asks with mock-concern, but the answer is, no, it's not too much. If anything, it's not enough. Once he's slipped off the fancy dress, the reigning King of Comedy strolls around the stage for an hour and a bit in his trademark jeans and black T-shirt. He couldn't be more relaxed if he was at home in his pyjamas (which he is, he says, by 6.30 most nights).

He's such a natural comic that he gets laughs every time he unleashes his falsetto sarcasm or his saliva-soaked giggle. He skilfully deconstructs his stories as he's telling them, and he slips nimbly back and forth across the boundaries of taste, so we're never quite certain how offended to be.

But compared to any other stand-up show in a venue the size of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, it's a lackadaisical performance. Between swigs from a beer can, Gervais recounts a few chat-show anecdotes, does some student bar stuff about how nonsense songs don't make sense, has a smirk at those dunces who abused a paediatrician because they thought he was a paedophile, and dishes up regular portions of ironic homophobia.

At least, I assume it's ironic. When he makes an Aids joke, and then mutters, "I won't do that one in Brighton," I'm not 100-per-cent sure why it's less objectionable than it would have been if Jim Davidson had made the same remark. Overall, it's an amiable show, but there's not much in the way of depth or quotable punchlines, and there's no theme beyond the tour's title, Fame: doing charity gigs, signing autographs, being misrepresented in the tabloids, hugging Chris Tarrant. You'd assume that someone who didn't start writing The Office until his late thirties would have a stock of pre-fame memories to transmute into comedy. There was his stint in an Eighties pop duo, and then as a university entertainments officer, to name the two best-known jobs he had before he made headway at XFM and on Channel 4's 11 O'Clock Show. But instead of mining these veins of material, Gervais seems obsessed by his own celebrity. He's like one of those rock bands who get to their third album and can't dredge up anything to write songs about except groupies, hotel rooms and the disappointments of being a multi-millionaire.

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Since The Office brought Gervais sudden fame and fortune, he's been the proverbial kid in a candy store, living out the fantasies of every film and comedy geek. He made a guest appearance on Alias because he was a fan of the show. He wrote an episode of The Simpsons, and turned up in it in cartoon form. He became friends with Jonathan Ross, as every rising UK comedian is contractually obliged to do. When Channel 4 offered him his own interview strand, he jumped at the chance to badger his heroes, Larry David, Christopher Guest and Larry Shandling. His first film roles seem to be motivated by hero-worship, too. Having shone as a pompous boss in The Office, he can now be seen cameoing as a pompous boss in both Night at the Museum and For Your Consideration. Neither film is very good, but they did allow him to hang out with Ben Stiller and Christopher Guest, just as his role in the forthcoming Stardust let him share a studio with Robert De Niro.

"It's like winning a competition," he said in one recent interview. "It's like, would you like to play with Spinal Tap for a day? Yes. Would you like to play with The Godfather for a day? Yes." Gervais is not the first British comedian to jump on a plane to Hollywood, of course, and there's nothing wrong with mutual appreciation sessions with your idols. Indeed, there's something sweet about such a major star letting his inner fanboy come out to play. As his collection of Golden Globes and Emmys attests, the American entertainment industry loves the man from Reading, so you can hardly blame him for loving it back. Who wouldn't want to be Peter Lawford in a comedy Rat Pack?

On the other hand, it's getting harder to ignore the weird disjunction between the way Gervais talks about his career and the way it actually is.

Ever since The Office began broadcasting in July 2001, its star and co-creator has been repeating in interviews that he's primarily a writer and director, and that he gets "no joy from seeing my fat face on the screen". Initially, he said he didn't want to do too much TV as himself because he wanted viewers to enjoy the illusion that David Brent and his colleagues were real people; that was why he cast unknown actors.

He even boasted, somewhat ungallantly, that he'd turned down roles in Pirates of The Caribbean and the other films which went on to feature his Office co-stars. "Secretly I think I'd be quite good on QI," he told one interviewer, misinterpreting the word "secretly". "But you have to discipline yourself and you have to ration yourself. I can get sick of someone I like within the space of a weekend if I see them on two quiz shows and then in the Sunday paper." It's a strange statement from someone who once fought Anthea Turner's husband in a televised boxing match.

The Ricky Gervais who talks to journalists is a publicity-shy artist with exacting principles. "That quest for excellence, and also the legacy - I think about that," he said in The Radio Times. "I don't know if that's because I came to it older, but we really want to to have a great batting average. We don't want to let our guard down. You do it because you want to be proud of it." To Esquire, he pronounced: "When you're creating art, you've got to be a complete fascist." To GQ, he described himself and his co-writer and co-director, Stephen Merchant, as "comedy fundamentalists". He's often said that he doesn't rate many British comedians after Stan Laurel. "American comedy is better. It aims higher," he told Esquire. This Ricky Gervais is an ascetic, slightly intimidating perfectionist. And yet the other Ricky Gervais, the one who's all over the media, is someone who knows he won't be in the limelight forever, and who wants to revel in the exposure, the side projects and the glamorous friendships while he can.

It's impossible to exaggerate just how successful he's been. The Office has been broadcast in 80 countries, and remade in several, including the hit American edition with Steve Carell in the lead role. Sales of the British Office DVDs were record-breaking - four million is the current figure - and, as the tongue-in-cheek introduction to his live show reminds us, he's won an Emmy, two Golden Globes and six Baftas.

But this astonishing Midas Touch doesn't stop a large proportion of his work falling short of the benchmark he's set himself. His current stand-up tour, the fastest selling in history, sees him sitting right in the middle of his comfort zone. Podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show are another record-breaking hit, but as funny as they can be, they consist largely of his XFM producer, Karl Pilkington, reeling off outlandish theories, while Gervais and Merchant berate him for not being as well educated as they are. And if his trio of children's picture books, Flanimals, hadn't had Gervais's name on it, the publisher would have sent it back with a polite note saying that it wasn't what they were looking for.

And then there's Extras. At the risk of inviting hate mail, I'd argue that Gervais and Merchant's second sitcom is, objectively, a patchy programme. Yes, it had its laughs. The fizzy water incident is destined to join Del Boy falling through the bar in all future bank holiday retrospectives of The 100 Best British Sitcom Moments. But it always felt less like a fully-formed show than an exercise in muscle-flexing by two writer-directors who had realised how powerful they were. They wanted superstars, they wanted location shooting, they wanted no canned laughter and almost no supporting cast; they had a list of minorities for the characters to upset and they wanted to tick them off methodically, week by week. Everything they wanted, they got.

The mysterious aspect of Extras was that it drew almost entirely from Gervais's own experiences in television, and yet it couldn't shake off a whiff of fakeness. It missed the satirical targets which were right in front of its creators' noses. Take its famous guest stars, for instance. On the programme which had the biggest influence on Extras, The Larry Sanders Show, the celebrity guests challenged us to spot where they ended and their scabrous self-parodies began, something Gervais himself does brilliantly on talk shows and on stage. But in Extras the celebs were all caricatured so ridiculously that there was never any danger that they might have been revealing their dark private selves. Did anyone watching it ever suspect that Daniel Radcliffe goes around propositioning actresses twice his age, or that Orlando Bloom pathologically hates Johnny Depp, or that Ben Stiller has exactly the same speech patterns as David Brent? Probably not. The actors could congratulate themselves on being good sports without the slightest risk.

Beyond that, there was the implausibility of Gervais's character, Andy Millman, being hoiked to stardom from work as a "background artist" even though - unlike Gervais - he had no TV-comedy experience. There was also the bewildering animus against the BBC, which was forcing Andy to wear a bad wig and specs in his sitcom-within-a-sitcom; when did that last happen in the real world? But what was more damaging was the series' grating inconsistencies. Sometimes Andy would be as crass and tactless as David Brent ever was, whereas at other times Andy would be the judicious one, and the solecisms would be parcelled out to his friend Maggie or his agent, played by Merchant.

In their introduction to the Extras script book, the writers say that they wanted a change from Brent. They wanted "Andy to be more like us: more normal, more self-aware, educated and liberal-minded, with a half-decent sense of humour". And so he was - some of the time. But he was also a man who saw a Bosnian refugee's photograph of his murdered wife, and then chided him for his choice of developer. "Oh, you missed a trick," he said. "Truprint give you a free film when you get something developed. So you're a mug." And witness the way Andy was shocked when Keith Chegwin grunted that the BBC was run by "Jews and queers" - and I'd love to know when anyone in showbusiness last said that - but was also horrified when a schoolmate he hadn't seen in 20 years thought he might be gay himself. (More only-just-ironic homophobia there.) "Andy's not a jerk at all," said Gervais in the Onion AV Club last week, but when it suited the joke, Andy mutated into David Brent multiplied by Basil Fawlty.

Whereas The Office took such pains to fool us, for half an hour at a time, that we were flies on the wall of a genuine paper merchants', Extras required viewers to give it the same leeway that they would a pantomime. In a single episode of the second series, Andy was at the BBC, filming a sitcom, and yet the same sitcom was already on air, getting a critical pasting, and Andy was also auditioning for a play, rehearsing it and performing it. Assuming that he wasn't supposed to be a Time Lord, Gervais and Merchant had given up caring whether their programme had any internal logic or not.

At the risk of inviting yet more hate mail, I'd suggest, too, that even in the second series of The Office, there were signs that its writers already believed the hype. Gareth was more obnoxious; Brent was more self-deluding; the humour was broader and cruder. When Brent frothed at a birthday party about how he'd have sex with the Corrs, the raucous, drunken festivities slammed to a halt and everyone stared in disgust.

Fair enough, that's the kind of thing which happens in sitcoms all the time, but the previous series hadn't felt like a sitcom; it had felt like an unwittingly hilarious documentary. The second series could have been written by someone who had watched the first one, but hadn't quite understood it.

That's not to say that anyone who masterminded those first terrific six episodes of The Office shouldn't be proud of himself. Nor is this an attempt to start a backlash or chop down a tall poppy. After all, everything Gervais does is worth a look, because he's funny even when - as on the current stand-up tour - he's not trying very hard. And when someone has accrued so many millions, so many plaudits and so many famous admirers he might feel justified in letting standards slip.

But let's get his output into perspective. Perhaps we should ease off on the King of Comedy accolades until Gervais's batting average, as he calls it, is a little closer to Galton and Simpson's or Clement and Le Frenais's. And that's not likely to happen unless he eases off on the cameos, the podcasts and the children's books. Maybe now that he's done a stand-up show called Fame, he can get back to the sort of work which made him famous.

The first leg of Ricky Gervais's stand-up tour has sold out. Tickets for the second leg, beginning on 6 March, go on sale on Tuesday at www.ticketzone.co.uk

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2152792.ece

BURN.

is this true?

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xp

I would say that though, because I hate women.

Here's a scene. You're looking along your collection of CDs, or shuffling through your playlist, trying to find that new Lady Sovereign album or whatever. But you stumble across something else, something from 10 years ago - the Fugees, say."

That senile dribbling cunt with his own column in the Guardian weekend magazine.

That senile dribbling cunt with his own column in the Guardian weekend magazine.

Cue stock that's no way to talk about Zoe Williams gag.

I don't have a Wikipedia entry either.

Includes News Summary at 9.00pm.

like swimming in a cool sea and passing through a warm current, etc...

Where are the standards of today, I ask you.
I don't have a Wikipedia entry either.

-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarli...)

Oh, have I got one?

Whew.

also on the bad can someone please put Have I Got News For You out of its misery.

At the risk of, on this reviewer's logic, inviting lynch-mobs to my door, I'd argue that Extras was shite.

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To put things into context: Harry Hill aside, all British TV Comedy right now is total shit.

-- Ruairi Wirewool (horseproduction...), January 15th, 2007. (Ruairi Wirewool) (later)

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what were the chances of that happening?
-- mark grout (mark.grou...), January 15th, 2007. (mark grout) (later)

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If you can put CT and Green Wing on a par, you truly show a lack of discernment IMO.
Frankly, now that GW has been and gone, I'm inclined to agree with Ruairi, minus the bit about Harry Hill.

-- You've Got Scourage On Your Breath (papiermachealamphibia...), January 15th, 2007. (Haberdager) (later)

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If you can put CT and Green Wing on a par, you truly show a lack of discernment IMO.
no it's just a 'higher' (or rather 'stricter') level of discernment.

-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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'the thick of it' will be back, later in the year, and so will 'peep show'.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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but in a another more accurate sense...
-- mark s (mar...), January 15th, 2007. (mark s) (later)

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but then i do like Harry Hill so it's apples and roundabouts.
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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rubbish
-- RJG (RJ...), January 15th, 2007. (RJG) (later)

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so you keep saying
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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RJG's TV Burp
-- Dom Passantino (juror...), January 15th, 2007. (Dom Passantino) (later)

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Hmm. I was only talking about currently-running comedy shows. If Peep Show returns for a fourth bite at the cherry (and TTOI for a second), I will only be too delighted. Of course, the one I'm really looking out for is Nathan Barley II.
-- You've Got Scourage On Your Breath (papiermachealamphibia...), January 15th, 2007. (Haberdager) (later)

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i think it would be a big ask for there to be a 'great' uk comedy series to be running all 52 weeks of the year. i have low standards perhaps; but i don't ask for a 'great' film each month either.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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of course i too want 'nathan barley' back.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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They could drop scissors on a dog's head this time.
-- Dom Passantino (juror...), January 15th, 2007. (Dom Passantino) (later)

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uh, rose-tinted view there i reckon - but at least it was generating interesting discussion.
one episode of Screen Wipe a month would be good. ditto TV Burp.

-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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ha ha Dom OTM
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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Unread Messages
as with 'green wing', take away the hype and the expectation it'll live up to 'the day today' and 'nathan barley' was 23 minutes well-spent. i lolled anyway.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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i didn't laugh more than i did laugh etc.
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

And Screen Wipe rocks.

it was good, but not 300 times better than 'nathan barley'.

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steve otm

this happened in the show except he thought she turned out not be under-age (at which point NB thinking it now okay to pretend she WAS under-age was actually quite a clever little point about...something or other).

i did hate NB but yes no less than anyone else around him.

Actually, scratch that, that's not the idea at all. It's funny caricatures falling into situations and scrambling to return to the status quo whilst simultaneously being trapped; a very old-fashioned sitcom thread. I certainly didn't feel that is was trying to make a big insightful statement about something, at least, nothing larger than "it's better to like something than to dislike something."

'THIR-FUCKING-TEEN'.

In fairness, I guess originally Barley wasn't really a character, just a cipher, and in making him human Morriss and Brooker made him more, er, human. I just don't think that made for great comedy. It wasn't sharp enough to be genuine satire and it wasn't silly enough to be knockabout comedy. It was just 'dark'.

I doubt whether Channel 4 enforced any 'nicening'.
You know, maybe Barley always looked like that in Brooker's head, and if you boil the actions in any of the episodes down to the kind of 3-sentence description that you would find in TV Go Home, it wouldn't be that different. But TVGH gave the impression that Barley was a cartoonishly horrible amoral grotesque, and that's not what we got in the TV show. We got 'idiots'. I hoped it would be either venemous or ridiculous and it was neither.

pt. I

pt. II

i lolled?

Oh okay, I didn't read the website so I didn't know what was supposed to happen, I only saw (and liked) what did.

'TDT' radio show was 1992. he was doing big things on london radio about then too.

'blue jam' dropped at the arse-end of '97 and was hot into the double-nine.

for me it went bad with 'jam' but then i was a student contrarian at the time, maybe i missed out.

it's just that there was a looong hiatus between the underwhelming 'brass eye '01' and 'nathan barley'.

ie 'on the hour' (in b4 sotcaa smackdown).

ie 'on the hour' (in b4 sotcaa smackdown).

on which Morris had only as much if not less input than Lee, Herring, Marber, Baynham etc. [/sotcaa swot]

fig 1
the day today = bends
brass eye = ok computer
blue jam = kid a
jam = amnesiac
BES = hail to the thief
nathan barley / it crowd = the eraser

as a team they really were a 90s Python only with a much more 'subliminal' influence on everything after (they're all known but not really as celebrated as Python gang were after they disbanded). i know the comparisons only stretch so far.

After Python there seemed to be quite a gap between something like that and early 80s 'alternative' 'edgy' stuff (Comic Strip etc.), only a handful of decent well crafted sitcoms in the 70s - which seems stranger and stranger looking back. perhaps we're seeing a similar effect even now with Whitehouse having killed laughtrack sketchom only for it's reanimated corpse to stalk the lands taller than ever before in Little Britain and Tate. Gervais is an anomaly with ridiculous carte blanche but can take 'credit' for pushing 'reality comedy' into mainstream. The conventional sitcoms remains thwarted, no show in that vein unable to command mass appeal of even mid 90s predecessors.

i think you're gonna have a very different perspective than me tbh, my dad knew about him before i did via radio 4 and he basically made me watch 'the day today', and then there was the radio one music show which was a revelation -- but also not infallible. so yeah the post-jam mystique is a bit lame, but it really is a recent development within his career, and arguably it ended with 'nathan barley' anyway.

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or the Mel C.

Yes, his very best work is probably behind him but I have a lot of time for most of his stuff post-BE. It was the "utter shit"/"I turned it off during the ad break" reaction of many posters on the SOTCAA/NotBBC/CaB forums to the BE P43d0 Special back in 2001 that made me realise that I just wasn't going to hack it as one of that crowd. Maybe I'm too easily amused.

cook - morris
miller - marber
moore - coogan (ok it breaks down a bit here)
bennett - iannucci (wheels: off)

but he's still sort of otm.

iannucci has come back from post-TDT mediocrity (imo) to awesomeness. to be fair he's more of a producer than the other stuff but even still.

'TMWRNJ' has never been underrated on this talkboard.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40897000/jpg/_40897670_crackpipe203spl.jpg

xp

Whither Lionel Nimrod?

xp

also surely the true inheritors of brass eye are balls of steel and the friday night project. in a roundabout kinda way. alex zane mocking anne frank writer is speak yr brain fed through the millenial vice mentaility.

you made me sick up a little

when Celeb BB finishes what will they do. show a film?

rly?

my recollection of the 1990s (which is pretty good!) is that they always showed 'friends' and 'frasier' on fridays.

and now Ugly Betty. my point is they can't show JUST American shows on a Friday night.

is Entourage really as good/bad as people keep suggesting?

cosign, it should have been a lock.

Anne Widdiecomb vs The Hoodies was funny last night. but i don't think that counts as comedy. actually, it did have a brasseye feel about it.

main reason i keep watching.

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agreed. it's aged v well.

what saves The IT Crowd is those typical Linehan/Matthews flourishes here and there.

one other good thing about Morris which I miss in this Gervais-dominated period was his media reticence (which he claimed was thrust upon him i.e. people were too scared to talk to him or just assumed he wouldn't want to).

Annually Retentive was frustrating because Rob Brydon seemed to be ruining his own great ideas half the time, even if most of them were based on Sanders, David etc.

better then peep show say i.

funny how forgotten eddie izzard is. he was a lot more prominent than any of the people we're fellating on this thread at the time.

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saying 'what am i fuckin noddy', not so much.

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it is in our house (yes even today i'm afraid).

'it's outrrrAGEOUS'

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=64446617

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r68/daveinarave/ske.gif

this dude looks like a certain ilx poster.

*mainly just because i enjoy the accents

Father Ted, Fawlty Towers and Peep Show is in my book the holy trinity of Britcom.

I haven't heard the CD, just get bit torrent and download the whole thing, it's the only way to hear it.

I've never seen much of Blue Jam. just wasn't that bothered. then i saw the Adam & Joe pisstake and felt validated.

LOL@Adam and Joe. They weren't really piss-takes, I thought they were quite affectionate, myself. Their Jam was superb, it has to be said.

the opening music is an 'triguing montage. sly and the family stone ('time') also appear in it.

Well, indeed. The actual visuals were always best-left to the imagination, and the television version dropped all the music, which robbed BJ of its soul (if not its content).

Blue Jam was fantastic, jam less so.

otm

but you could say similar about massive attack and their influence on dido.

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it's the new Saturday Night With Lee Hurst or whatever that was called.

You are hinting towards something I myself crave. It's quite a good way of putting it, although perhaps simply 'progressive comedy' might suffice better.

Blue Jam is not comedy of embarrassment, it is comedy of helplessnes and weakness. To claim that it's had any effect on Gervais (who I regard as a charlatan, a funny man but a charlatan) is almost heresy in my eyes.

Nighty Night just didn't have the same vibe. Like Jam, it was dark, but Blue Jam really is something else entirely. Don't base your opinions on the CD, invest some time in the whole thing. Seventeen hour-long comedy concept albums, each one a work of crazed genius.

how does it make helplessness/weakness actually funny? just via surrealism and the inappropriate happening?

"So Roger, I hear you've got a ten-inch cock..."

it also shows what happens when people who look at the world differently clash with those who conform (and therein lies the greater part of its subversion).

you may be right but still not seeing how these convert to roffles, other than in the latter's case the obvious juxtaposition and subsequent confounding of expectations (which isn't/doesn't have to be done dark of course).

i mean a woman crying and when asked what's wrong saying 'i can't feel my cock' IS/was funny provided it's done with the right tone but beyond that it just didn't do it for me...

i think i'll stick with family guy.

i think a big problem is, for me anyway, often the funny comes before the thinking. i admire the satirical intent of brass eye but to be honest richard blackwood saying "i feel suggestible now" or the purves grundy "me oh myra bit" are just funny cos well i'm not sure. or mark heap swearing at a cow, it didn't make me thing about "people who look at the world differently clash with those who conform" but it made me laugh a lot.

You've chosen one of the more obtuse, wilfully 'outrageous' sketches. The majority of BJ has some grounding in logic. Not the logic of any other show, mind.

I mean, the monologues were a slower, richer source of hyuks but, still, there wasn't a point at which I thought, "Oh yes! I was feeling faintly nauseated there for a while but NOW I see how he's challenging convention - ha ha ha!" It was all pretty amusin' to me.

I was talking about this 'sketch' on the TV version (as I hadn't heard it on the radio show). But funny because I do tend to prefer logic/realism in my comedy now (at least I do when it's comedy set in our real world e.g. Peep Show, Extras). But I do need to listen and watch the shows properly to really be sure of all this.

I found it as immediate in its lollacity and rofflage as yr undark tellyMorris.

I think Morris has always traded this way e.g. laughs for the puerile gags (road sign called 'Youngbottom Ride' on the BE TV special) as big if not bigger than the ones reserved for the actual 'satire'. He seems to love the puerile as much as anyone else really.

but an extra on the Jam DVD, in which genuine audience response was played over the sketch. As it turns out, most of this response was hysterical laughter. It gave one of the darkest, most disturbing sketches of recent times a feelgood, 'comedy classic' aura, as we and the audience laughed along to a couple of parents reacting to the rape and murder of their son as if it were a cracked flowerpot (the aforementioned Cann pulling off an astonishing performance). This brilliant challenge to what instant, hilarious, laugh-out-loud comedy COULD be is what makes both BJ and Jam so great IMO.

again isn't this just 'let's confound expectations in a rather obvious way whilst using brutal subject matter for added punch' or am i still missing something? i suppose years later it might not seem as impressive because of copycats, internet stuff etc. but still.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you here, but by "genuine audience response" you don't actually mean a recorded response to this sketch, do you? Because it's obviously not - it's canned. I thought it was a fairly cheap gimmick, provoked (possibly) by the response of audience members to playback of BJ sketches at Battersea Arts Centre in '98 (where his brother is/was artistic director) - polite, simpering laughter which Morris apparently thought kinda depressing.

I sort of admire your zeal, Scourage, and I'm sure you're quite sincere in your enthusiasms but trumpeting the show's cultural subversions and its "brilliant challenge[s]" isn't, I don't think, going to convince the sceptics that it's funny. It's one of the hardest (and most futile) undertakings, that of selling a piece of comedy based on its perceived importance and innovation. Having said that, quoting funny lines out of context (another popular approach) doesn't work either. I suppose that's why I find your fandom a bit uncomfortable - you're championing something to people who aren't interested in terms I don't really recognise.

We can't really re-create the conditions in which you or I encountered BJ upon original broadcast for anyone else, so don't be surprised if someone goes away from this thread, downloads a couple of eps and is underwhelmed.

Genre - Ambient comedy

not quite prog then.

Er, some pleasure for the audience? Some gauge of how effective the material was for the creators? I dunno, why do anything ever? They were all on the floor on cushions in complete darkness, apparently. I imagine it was all rather awkward. Apart from the ubiquitous snogging couple.

anyway... LJ's point kinda hold i think the comedy programs held in the most affection tend not to be simply 'cos of the roffles. there's also a gender thing. there's a certain generalization about the ladies liking lolz only as a side order to soapiness or "feeling good" friends or green wing tend to be produced as evidence. there's a real covert thread of that in c & b world. cf there thread on upcoming stand up josie long. theory is kinda bollocks cos loads of gurls like family guy which is like the most unemotional program ever.

back to the main point. the way LJ regards chris morris is kinda like the way "the nation" regards only fools and horses: a non comedic element has become, in talking about it at least, the chief reason for the cherishing of it. possibly.

Father Ted and The Day Today use 'dumbness' in a manner that almost entirely removes the stupidity, because they do it with such unremitting poise.

'Peep Show' is intelligent with regard to the subjects it handles, but I never notice the actual jokes being that esoteric.

joek

that sort of thing just doesn't happen in yer standard sitcom

he achieved this a lot better with The IT Crowd it would seem. i don't think he'd actually be capable of writing a 'stupid' Roy Clarke-esque sitcom.

(I'll admit to having not seen either of the first two in 20+ years - they could be dross misremembered as understated gems with cracking performances).

- the doctor who has eleborate swearwords
- 'he killed the man'
- '--brackets--'
- rothko
- 'i work in the warm arts'
- 4ft car
- '...can't you just' (louis knows what i mean)
- the dance charts -- hackneyed but still funny

but also to repeat it was half a *music show*, and worked on those terms. think of it like steve wright in the wee hours or something.

Ah there was often comedy gold to be found there. Favourite ever was insults from Huey of the Fun Lovin' criminals:

You still pushing your jaw each way but westwards? You're raising my pressure quickstyle my friend, upside like a doped joker. i'm gonna cut you open so far you'll be up all night stitchin' your backpipe together just so you can start weepin'! You're gonna need eleven different kinds of treatment! You'll be tryin' to find ice till there's no more ice!

(from memory, tragically)

roffle all the way home . . .

Enrique's list is good, and contains (just about) two of my top-3 BJ moments...

3) Series 1 Episode 4, 25:10. The sprightly, uptempo groove accompanying Michael Alexander St.John's dance countdown suddenly morphs (in the radio equivalent of bone-spaceship in 2001:ASO) seamlessly into Lennon's '#9 Dream'.

2) Series 2 Episode 4, 27:59. The Rothko monologue ends. Accompanied by the melancholic, chilled middle-eight of Madonna's 'Ray Of Light', although you don't know that at this stage. As the monologue ends, the building, throbbing intro to the actual song bounces into gear, and as the last word is spoken, Madonna's heavenly voice takes up the baton. As a moment of sadness into happiness it is unparalleled.

1) Series 2, Episode 1, 34:18.

"Well, we'll just have to get used to it being just the two of us again."

"Mmmmmmm..."

Bear in mind that I probably hate LB more than almost every single other person on earth, so I am speaking with an element of bias, but frankly, to blame CM for them is I think ridiculous.

citation required.

there's a dvd extra on the LB dvds that is them talking about their influences but sadly(!) i haven't seen it. i have them down more as Dick Emery copyists.

1 Jagger, Louis, posted at Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number, 19 January 2007

xpost

steve otm there.

MAN: What's he want now, eh?

[Him from next door enters - he's a stereotyped Pakistani character.]

HIM: Ah, Mr Eddie. I was wondering if I could be borrowing a cup of sugar for my lunch.

MAN: What's he say?

WOMAN: He said he wants you to give him a punch.

MAN: Ah. [He does so.]

HIM: Oooh, ooh! You misunderstanding me, I am asking for sugar. That is why I am here.

MAN: I can't understand a bleedin' word he's saying!

WOMAN: He says he wants you to give him a thick ear.

MAN: Oh, right. [He obliges.]

HIM: Oooow, ooooh!

which makes a point, and a good one, about representations of race in current affairs broadcasting. 'little britain' isn't in the same game, let alone the same ballpark.

this is what i've been trying to say. the workings of, say, 'brass eye' are incalculably more interesting than the dumb-as-shit plodding idiocy of LB. to compare the two is futile.

answer to steve's question: Bill Bailey

still the greatest (if you bear in mind its importance and the effect it had as well as its quality) single episode of television there has ever been.

"These images were deemed too shocking to show. That we do so tonight is only with the proviso..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#History

hey it's wikipedia but y know...

Dumb comedy = Not Going Out. An entire show based around the premise of using as much of Lee Mack's standup (generally unfunny) and Tim Vine's standup (hit and miss, usually fairly amusing) routines and then fashioning a ridiculously bad plot around them. Basically, it is extremely shite, but can also raise a giggle. But you'd be better watching Tim Vine doing stand-up rather than Tim Vine shoe-horning his stand-up into a ludicrous domestic sitcom.

"tabby cat - can live with that
if it's leopardy - you're in jeopardy
except you know it doesn't actually work in the southern hemisphere..."

I missed the Xmas ep :(

so uh Shilpa Fuckawillah or Shilpa Poppadum for the next series of Little Britian?

There was a new comedy series on BBC 3 last night called Thieves Like Us. I could not really pay attention as I was engaged in conversation, but it featured the Goldie lookalike from The Smoking Room. Perhaps we can see a BBC 3 mafia beginning to form, what with the rise and rise of Myfanwy off Little Britain, etc.

Anyway, was this programme any good? It involved nicking tellies, like on Max and Paddy.

http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/pokey34_2.gif

http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/pokey34_3.gif

josie doesn't strike me as being any different from anyone else with a myspace page and a wry, mildly self-deprecating sense of humour.

And Ms Long is anything but wry. It was like being in a room with an overexcited hippie. I'm not doing a good job of explaining why I liked her show, am I?

Cleo has admitted that she is hoping for her own sketch show following her stint in the Celebrity Big Brother house.

The actress wants to follow in the footsteps of Catherine Tate after introducing the nation to some of her characters over the past three weeks.

"I'd love to launch a new comedy show with really wacky characters, like a cross between Little Britain and Catherine Tate. I think the time is right for something new," Cleo told the Daily Star last night.

"The characters I brought in with me - like Tiara the Tart and Dorothy Montgomery the biscuit tycoon's wife - were done deliberately because I was hoping there was a producer out there looking for new ideas."

Asked about failing to make Big Brother laugh in the comedy task, she added: "That was embarrassing. I died on my a**e in the Diary Room. I think they stitched me up. I was certainly funnier than some of the others."

Defend the indefensible: Josie Long

I'd love to launch a new comedy show with really wacky characters, like a cross between Little Britain and Catherine Tate. I think the time is right for something new

Does anyone see anything wrong with this? Also anyone who uses the word "wacky" as an aspirational concept tends to not be worth listening to.

A cross between Little Britain and Catherine Tate would, to paraphrase Stuart Braithwaite, implode with pure evil.

Well, indeed. Marcello and his red button to thread (in three seconds).

I could not find the Oh Monsieur Le Fopp You Are Spoiling Us thread.

Commentaries are pretty good though.

Radio 4's Down the Line with Gary Bellamy

a) Fuck me this is brilliant
b) Why was Felix Dexter never a true star, he had a window of opportunity in about 95/96 to make it as a comedy A-liner
c) Wow, Rhys Thomas and Lucy Montgomery in something that isn't complete shit
d) Paul Whitehouse is, pound for pound, the best comedy performer of his generation, six lengths ahead of yr Morrises and Ianuccis
e) "Do you know if Foxton's is owned by Bruce Foxton of The Jam?"

he did a pilot exec-produced by whitehouse and higson. it didn't get taken up and he joined the RSC. anil gupta says he didn't have enough big noises on his side at the bbc.

Performer, yes. No doubt about that.

xp

"comedy-writing? 'ardest game in the world. done it meself, 40 years, man and boy..."

That's a pretty impressive line-up, no? And that's not even including radio work. Plus seemingly the only awful thing he's even written was Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

what's dispiriting is the competition.

Is Whitehouse really 'full of it' or is this just another projection?

I guess if Johnny Depp calls you the greatest comic actor of the modern age then you'll have trouble keeping it together.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. I actually quite liked "Happiness" but "Help" was just, "Oh look at me, look at all these accents I can do, amn't I great?" - well, no, because your Scottish accent was shite for one. Plus crap serious bits. Not funny enough.

I was gonna start a thread on how great Chris Langham's body of work is as well, but I thought better of it. for. obvious. reasons.

xpost

Obscure comedy that I personally wish was better-known: My Life In Film

like peep show and ted & ralph and down the line!

why shouldn't i be 26?
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 31st, 2007.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

you should--you are
-- RJG (RJ...), January 31st, 2007

-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 31st, 2007

Tracer, what do you mean by small?
Mean yes (altho I wouldn't say Spaced was particularly mean in any way).
Easy? Maybe...they both seem very thoughtfully written and intricate tho.

Favourite Down the Line moment might be from the first series when Whitehouse's Scouse character comes on, says something like 'Alright Gary, I'm a Socialist...' and gets immediately cut off. 'What is the biggest house in France?' runs it close though.

I wouldn't go that far. Spaced is a bit mean about...Aswad.

Discuss.

I wonder what an AV lounge is.

I watched some of The Mighty Boosh live last night and reflected that perhaps it was not worth six quid after all.

Obi-Wan and Luke have let themselves go.

Girls Aloud vs Sugababes - Walk This Way

not very "good"

i saw e01 of 'jam'. i now think that this was the only ep i saw of it first time round (in full at any rate). it's mostly utter shit, and the appalling rape 'joke' towards the end is just... shit. i will persevere, but it's drastically worse than...

'nathan barley'. rewatched first two episodes, and it's great.

'spaced' is still good.

'the day today' is too familiar now' so is 'kmkywap', but in a good way.

funniest bit was the 'who do you think you are?' / 'you don't know you're born' comment. i doubt itv bosses were laughing though.

> do they repeat it?

yes. late night, sometime in the week. (midnight, wednesday night)

And when it's finished, all the "normal" problems look as if they are deliberately bad, for laughs or something.

The bit the other week with the rules for which snakes are poisonous was comedy gold.

Friday sees the return, on BBC Scotland only, of comedy scripted by Jack Doherty and Moray Hunter. A pilot only, mind, but it's a start.

It stars Docherty, Hunter, Morwenna Banks and John Gordon Sinclair (who hasn't actually done anything of note since Fraggle Rock, I don't think, but he gets a free pass for life in my world for Gregory's Girl and That Sinking Feeling)

Looks a bit shit, mind.

no idea what's happened to m banks

brooker needs to make big statements too much.

did noddy mention last week that the absolutely team had some animation thing going out on during the day on ch4? possibly repeats of after midnight stuff?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEkTlabUjyk

Would it really? Not that I have any dirt on Stiller or Steve Martin (both of whom I like) specifically, but it's hardly uncommon for comedians with asshole personas to carry that off into their private life (or, well, what is known of it to the public at large, anyway.) Chevy Chase and assorted 70's SNL cokeheads to thread, you know.

Ok, I don't actually live in the UK, so don't have to swallow as much of Gervais's smugness as you guys do (did hear some of his recent radio stuff, pretty painful), but I was really expecting a bit more from that clip.

"i'm a PC i dominate the home and the office..."

FUCK THE FUCK OFF ARGH!!!

also need more HATE for mitchell and webb apple ads. agrh. unfairly cementing my peep show is overrated pish position. are macs meant to be REALLY UNBEARABLY SMUG?

I need to try and find a t0rr3nt of the show his band did for E4, they showed a clip and it looked utterly ridiculous.

http://www.makestickers.com/images/all_your_base_are_belong_to_us.jpg

"I'm a PC"

http://base58.com/ilx/markmorrison.jpg

"I'm the Mack"

http://base58.com/ilx/policeman.jpg

"Then you're nicke-OWWWWWWW! TASERS!"