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

(it also revealed that DaisyMae's shouting out 'I LOVE THIS' in the trailer wasn't her enjoying herself but was part of what seemed like a trauma-inducing task)

How do we feel about 'Only Connect'?

― Maresn3st, Monday, 9 November 2020 21:07 (three weeks ago) link

It's a good game show, it's not a comedy at all.

― chap, Monday, 9 November 2020 21:54 (three weeks ago) link

this show rules, ty

Since I moved to NZ I miss Only Connect more than any other British TV show

Only Connect gets put on youtube p consistently

Shit you're right, I just found a channel with all the latest series on. Thanks!

Enjoy!

Dunno if anyone else does it, but there's a guy (and it is a guy) called wheelsongenius who puts all of Only Connect up after broadcast, so that's the guy to subscribe to.

Yeah that's the channel I found

Ayo, thanks for turning me on to Only Connect. I'm terrible at it but it's great fun without all the whoopdeediddlyay bullshit of QI

You get better at it the more you watch it. I hadn't the first clue the first few times I watched it, but you pick up the rhythm before long.

lol my partner HATES it, she has no idea what's going on and has a hard time with that.

only connect : possibly the lowest budget for a tv show ever.
despite having never got a question right, i still really enjoy it whenever i happen to end up watching it.

The entire budget is blown on the giant Winnebago in the studio car park that David Mitchell hangs out in during filming for him and Victoria to go and have lunch in so they don't have to hang out with filthy civilians.

decent eating options are limited in Cardiff to be fair

My partner loves Only Connect but I find it so so so very hard, except for the missing vowels round and the music rounds.

Unrelated, but we watched Daniel Kitson's streamed live show from the Union Chapel on Tuesday, and it was wonderful, moving and very very funny. I'd never seen his stuff before, but he was excellent.

Only Connect does belong on the UK comedy thread for that weird moment at the end of every ep where Coren-Mitchell tells a shite joke into the void, prime anti-comedy imo.

heavily redolent of those video gags at the end of hignify

yeah, OC talk seems slightly offtopic here when we all know it should be offtopic in the university challenge thread 8)

classic taskmaster stitch-up last night on richard herring which backfired when he nailed it. nice to see Histor as well.

Have never seen Taskmaster but keep meaning to watch it based on talk here. Is it ok to jump straight in to the current season or would it be best to start at the beginning?

current season is 80% through now. i'd start at the start of a season, but the season doesn't really matter, although people do have favourites (all4 has them all apparently)

bob mortimer was good, i liked lisa tarbuck and rose matefeo and sally phillips. can't think of a bad series tbh.

I agree with Koogs. If pushed I'd probably start with the series that had James Acaster on. We watched one show at random from somewhere late-on (might have even been the season before last) and thought it was good enough to start from the very beginning.

Thanks - and yeah, when I said jump in I meant from the first episode of the current season

Unrelated, but we watched Daniel Kitson's streamed live show from the Union Chapel on Tuesday, and it was wonderful, moving and very very funny. I'd never seen his stuff before, but he was excellent.

Yeah, it was exactly what we needed - when did you buy the ticket? We tried to buy two and by the time I realised that it's one per purchase the queue for Jen to get a second was quite long - and then we realised that we could make do with one.

the Acaster / Knappett / Wang / Godliman / Gilbert series might just edge it as my favourite. Gilbert in the cupboard was o_O

Yes - I think the in-show discussions in that series were often hilarious: the bit when Wang brought in the wooden box puzzle sticks in the mind.

Watched the Gregory Church (Daniel Kitson) recording earlier in lockdown. Not seen Kitson for years but he was always a good bet.

yeah, OC talk seems slightly offtopic here when we all know it should be offtopic in the university challenge thread 8)

Speaking of which, forks, do you watch? easily available on YouTube and obligatory viewing, if only to shout at nerdy students failing to recognize pop songs. Plus there's a celebrity xmas version where Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden gets really sad over failing to identify Fine Young Cannibals.

James Acaster, Lou Sanders and others playing D&D online for Comic Relief tonight at 19:30 btw.

The first season of Taskmaster is a good place to start, but the Acaster/Gilbert and Mortimer/Phillips ones are gold.

Incidentally, Rosalind (of "fucking nightmare" fame) was a contestant on The Chase the other day. Darragh didn't know who she was.

Daniel, i tried university challenge a few times and found it a bit too dry and crotchety for my taste. will likely embrace it in my sixties.

Yeah, it was exactly what we needed - when did you buy the ticket? We tried to buy two and by the time I realised that it's one per purchase the queue for Jen to get a second was quite long - and then we realised that we could make do with one.

I'm not sure - my partner sorted the tickets out. Though we started out watching on two separate laptops, as they advised, but they were a microsecond out of sync with each other so we just watched it on one in the end, which didn't seem to make any real difference to the experience.

most of the talk about worzel gummidge last christmas was on the whochurch thread but there's some on here so...

new episode this year, Saucy Nancy, which was Babs Windsor's character in the old series. Christmas Eve.

other xmas specials that might be worth watching include Motherland, Taskmaster (with actors, which might lose something), Upstart Crow, Frankie Boyle. Pascoe moves into Romesh / Rhod territory with her job placement thing (includes a trip to see father christmas who she claims gave her covid)

Is that a new Upstart Crow Christmas special, do you know? I realize I could look for myself, but that is not the spirit of things.

other xmas specials that might be worth watching include Motherland, Taskmaster (with actors, which might lose something), Upstart Crow, Frankie Boyle. Pascoe moves into Romesh / Rhod territory with her job placement thing (includes a trip to see father christmas who she claims gave her covid)

― koogs

And Ghosts!

Drat, meant to mention Ghosts. Thx.

That is a new upstart crow, heard Mitchell talking about it on some show or other, filmed during covid, about the 1603 plague...

the xmas tv program is a universal thing for brit tv, huh? I thought it was just doc who.

is upstart crow any good? this is the first i've ever heard of it.

Upstart Crow has had "better than Ben Elton's last 2-3 decades of television but not great" reviews. I'll check out the plague special though.

I thought it was just doc who.

Until 2005, the only time Dr Who ever had a Christmas special was when in 1965, that week's episode (of 46 eps that year) happened to fall on Christmas Day. So they completely paused an ongoing 12-or-13-episode Dalek epic to do a crossover with a BBC cop show in the first act, a comedy runaround in an American silent film in the second, and then have a big Christmas feast in which the Doctor tipsily toasted the viewers at home:

https://www.assignmentx.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/01DrWhoXmasList1.jpg

Russell T. Davies getting the show a Christmas special the first year of nu-Who was a huge coup in placing it as a broad, popular, general audience show.



(Steven Moffat had to return twice after completing his run with a grand finale in 2015 just so the production could hold onto the prized slot: Despite signing on as showrunner that year, Chris Chibnall was not going to get around to writing any for a couple of years, so Moffat returned to write a 2017 series, his third for Peter Capaldi. Partway through shooting that, he realised there was no plan for a 2016 special, so threw together the superhero-movie one with Matt Lucas as Nardole in it, then added him into the rest of the 2017 series, shooting a couple of cutaways to drop into the early episodes.

(Having then wrapped up the Capaldi era with a big two-parter about growth, overcoming fear of death, and full of multiple themes of death being an opportunity for change & rebirth & new forms of existence to flourish, it turned out that Chibnall still wasn't going to be ready to have Capaldi turn into Jodie Whitaker that year, so Moffat had to add on another Christmas special in which Capaldi and another old dude painfully held off on, and complained about, dying for another hour before letting go, to make sure again that the series would not lose the big family ratings bonanza slot after 13 years.

(Chibnall then decided not to bother with it after all, instead going for a New Year's special so that the title would be an injoke for fans of 1983-87 Who, when he had been in a fanclub. The next year he didn't get around to writing a special at all, but this coming New Year's will feature a sequel to that 2018 one, which has itself been on the shelf since 2018.)

(Prized vs "universal" bcz with four main FTA channels, there's not room for many titles to get a special during the week, let alone on Christmas day prime-time. It's declined as a sure-fire all-demographics hit slot in the last couple of years as multiple screens have become more common in households, etc, but eg James Corden's sitcom did a ten-years-later reunion special last Christmas, and became the highest-rating festive programme in eleven years.)

that's a lot of background, thanks! i didn't even know james corden had a sitcom!
Upstart Crow, i've discovered, has a laugh track. Hard pass.

Why u maek Cheers cry

just bcz it's further context for forks, not bcz it's especially interesting otherwise:

Corden did lots of TV/film/stage/showbiz things before moving to America for his first talk show; the sitcom Gavin & Stacey was his biggest non-stage-acting hit, created & written entirely by him and co-star Ruth Jones, who played the title characters' best pals.

The first two series ran on BBC Three, but grew enough that it got a Christmas special on BBC One in 2008, then the third & final series moved to BBC1 and was scheduled so the last two eps both ran as festive programming, on Christmas 2009 and NYD 2010, plus a retrospective/outtakes special after the latter.

before getting reggie watts paid, i knew him as a theater guy and somebody who a lot of people on ILX hated.

(on the NY theatre tip, Corden won the Tony, Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle award for Best Actor in 2012, reprising the lead he'd originated in One Man, Two Guv'nors. He'd previously been to Broadway in the original cast of The History Boys, but didn't get any of its 20-odd awards. I hope ppl just hated Reggie bcz they didn't like his work, not bcz he was an IRL creep to ilx0rs. {British ppl tend to hate Corden for a combo of his work, one-time ubiquity, and documented IRL assholishness. In LA he seems to be keeping the latter to disregard for staff, including attempted union-busting.})

Upstart Crow is all about the ensemble cast imo. Suffers a bit from being written by Elton but the last Christmas special, Shakespeare does A Christmas Carol was clever. "Marlowe was alive: to begin with"

who was Reggie a creep to? I've met him a couple of times and he was a nice guy.

I'm saying I hope that it was not NYC ILX FLX hating him for IRL reasons

let me rephrase: "before he got reggie watts paid, i knew Corden as a theater guy and somebody who a lot of people on ILX hated."

ahhhhh!

(I totally forgot RW (left a gig as a fake bandleader on a fake talk show to be) was Corden's bandleader and was misinterpreting that obv)

Upstart Crow, i've discovered, has a laugh track. Hard pass.

I abandoned the third Alan Partridge series because of the intrusive audience laughs. Whether they were live audience or laugh track I don't know, but they were ALL I COULD HEAR in some scenes and were really annoying. I don't really notice the Upstart Crow laughs at all.