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

ask Johnny Speight how many morals he corrected thru the medium of Alf Garnett

whatever promoter thought irish people would gaf about such average and quintessentially british shit needs their head examined

liverpool joke in there somewhere

not necessarily a good one

best exploration of this i've ever encountered is trevor griffiths' COMEDIANS (1975), a stage play which became a TV play in 1979

it was a (highly complex) dissection of the role and content of working class comedy as it existed in clubs and had been transferring to TV: of what was reactionary and what wasn't, of of what constituted escape from a class trap and what constituted expression of a class perspective (the setting is a group of would-bes in manchester auditioning for a talent scout who might get them onto TV, the narrative is who comrpomises and how)

it featured a proto-punk figure -- a stand-up who literally shaves his head to manifest as a skinhead, whose act is almost intolerably dark (and not, on the page, all that funny) -- who was acknowledged as an inspiration by several of the pioneer alt.comedians, and talked up as such by (for example) long-forgotten SWP skinhead/popstar/nme critic X.Moore, as a hero of non-compromise

which is odd in retrospect, bcz he was a fictional character (and played by omnipresent latterday liberal niceguy jonathan pryce)

anyway, i too basically read the play in an x.moore accent for years -- until it struck me one read-thru that griffiths' portrait of price was really *not* that sympathetic (GP is isolated -- eg split from his wife -- embittered and evidently antagonistically bite-the-hand-that-feeds, including his mentor, who he genuinely respects, and is the play's more obvious centre of sympathetic gravity: absolute absence of compromise is its own kind of escapism)

i'd be up to see a revival, actually -- sadly the topic has dated less than it looked as if it was going to in the early 80s (except that stand-up is now much more middle-class, largely as a consequence of alt.comedy)

(a couple of the characters in the play are manchester irish, one is manchester jewish, griffiths/price/pryce are all welsh, interestingly)

I don't remember the Price character as being all that sympathetic, but then X. Moore was from a public school background, so he was coming at it from a different angle.

SWP too, I think.

haha i love the tv version of that play! think it's on youtube.

xpost

(xp) Ooops yeah, mentioned already. Whatever happened to btw... X Moore/Chris Dean that is, not the SWP.

thats a good post mark but that play sounds awful

i reckon you'd like it.

It is very 70s.

its got monologues from teachers about the etc i mean i dont think its me

also yermans final routine ah here

it's good i think, i like trevor griffiths, he's a man to understand the dialectic blah blah

x.moore (real name chris dean) moved to paris in 1988 and was never heard of again, acc.all reports. This was news to me (except for the last sentence): "After the Redskins split Chris Dean put together a new band under the name of P-Mod. Not much is known about P-Mod but they did record some studio demos. After P-Mod Chris disappeared to France"

P-Mod! This has made me very happy (in an OMG no! kind of a way)

Like P-Funk I'm guessing.

I saw the Redskins getting beaten up by stage-invading Nazi skinheads during the GLC's 'Jobs for a Change' festival on the South Bank in 1984 (also on the bill: The Smiths. Also beaten up: poor old Hank Wangford).

I fancied starting a band called F-Punk for a while.

also on the bill stage joining in with the Nazi skinheads: The Smiths

LOL

Like P-Funk except better bcz mod is better than funk

brb c/ping this^^^ to post on kerr's FB

keep it on there imo

Keep It On There - was that a Redskins song?

Keep On Keepin' On!

disappearing in Paris is a pretty extreme way of getting the SWP to stop sending you newspapers

Or "Town Called Malice", to give its proper title. (xp)

Redskins also had a song called "Kick Over The Statues", which a friend of mine misheard as "King Kong and the Statues".

That's the only other one I know. Title that is, no idea what it goes like. I'd hazard a guess it might be a bit like the Jam though.

I like that Redskins album quite a lot in all its shouty earnest 80s SWP-touting finery

The Ex (not to be confused with etc) described the LP "the historic compromise between the socialist international and london records"

lol it is 12 years since i last posted this info (except i got it wrong that time): The Redskins, Classic or Dud !

(why do i remember this nonsense: bcz it is a v funny* riff on the branding of the (quotes wikipedia for speed) "political alliance and accommodation between the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1970s")

*yes

adding, since this is the rolling uk comedy thread, that "neither washington nor moscow" is available on spotify

it is "angular"

I've seen Murray talk about the divide in his audience knows about him. He thinks people are overly presumptuous about what people take from his shows. I think he enjoys playing with people who don't understand the act and seeing the moment when some people realise.

I like some of his stuff but it is unsettling to see the way some of the audience responds. There's definitely a lot of people on youtube liking the Landlord's views.

Divide in what his audience knows about him.

Apparently he got some kippers angry at him after some interview and greeted the abuse he got for it on social media with a blanket spam "thanks for being a fan and joining this community! I'll keep you updated on my activities".

That being said once you do a doc series on your fave war movies you are leaning into it a little bit.

Detectorists appears to be on again from Monday, bbc2. Episode 1 of 6 and not marked as a repeat.

Series 1 apparently.

Yes, thanks.

Why could neither the guardian nor the freeview epg mention this?

they know you've been buying a daily coffee instead of quality journalism and they want revenge

(it was a print copy of the guardian fwiw)

Count Arthur Strong begins again on Friday too. He's very devisive though.

I'm pro the television programme, although I always disliked him on the radio. There, that's the news you need to know.

So I've just watched all of Peep Show from beginning to end. I'm confused and not sure whether I like it or hate it. What do ILX think of it?

I mean it's definitely sharply literate about 21st century Britain (well, London tbh) but on the other hand it seems to be pushing this proper cunty message which I can't quite decipher

whats on the other hand about that

not entirely certain what that 'but' is doing there

xpost with darragh!

Good shout.

I mean it totally skewers the Mark and Jez types of malformed people. It 'nails it'. Neither of them two are that exaggerated.

But then Mark gets mugged by/the house gets burgled by a character that's a 'feral youth' straight out of the papers.

I'm not sure it has a 'message', but it certainly presents an unremittingly cynical view of life, which is just the ticket if you're in the (bad) mood.

I think the "message" such as it exists is just a classic British sitcom one: characters brought down because of their inherent flaws and obliviousness towards same.

I've noticed quite a gender divide regarding Mitchell's character in that a lot of my female friends tend to react to his antics with "hahaha, why would he do that?" while a lot of my male friends, and myself, feel physically uncomfortable watching because we know exactly how the character gets to the ill-advised reasoning that makes him think things are a good idea, and feel very "there but for the grace of god" about it.