BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 7

Into the TOP FIFTY we roar on our special critical moped, with us briefly pausing to remind patrons that only TV shows which began in the years 2000-2009 are getting included here, so don’t expect to see The Sopranos or The Daily Show or Countryfile.

Yes, you read that correctly. Popular children's television programme Doctor Who is only at number fifty.  Not only that, but we've decided it falls within the remit of our listing, as we've decided that Doctor Who began in 2005. Now, admittedly, we've partly done that because it'll irritate the sort of people who get way too precious about such matters, but mainly because it was a proper reboot of the franchise, and is therefore eligible. On a similar tip, we could have included the rebooted updates of Crossroads, the Ving Rhames version of Kojak and the Al Bundy version of Dragnet, only we haven't, because they were all rubbish.

Anyway, to nick a phrase from brilliant early 1980s Dicky Howlett one-off Marvel UK comic book Channel 33⅓, Doctor Whom. It has been a tricky programme to place in the rundown, mainly because the quality of the show since it returned has been massively variable. Had the standard remained anywhere near as high as the five best episodes (which, putting our spod hats on, we'd say are "The Unquiet Dead", "The Empty Child", "The Doctor Dances", "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink"), it'd be sitting quite comfortably in the top three. Sadly, far too many episodes have been packed with annoying plot resolutions where the Doctor points his sodding sonic screwdriver at the problem he wants to go away, or says "hang on, if I can just reverse the polarity on this [otherwise harmless object]...", so number fifty it is.

As any geek worth their black T-shirt with an ironic in-joke printed on the front will tell you, 80% of our five best episodes come from the head of soon-to-be head writer Steven Moffat, so it's likely the programme will become much, much better from the new year onwards. Heck, even if Moffat panics and simply re-uses a load of plots from Press Gang, it'll still be brilliant. If nothing else, he'll avoid having the entire globe attacked by Daleks and/or Cybermen at the end of each series, only for everyone on the planet to forget all about it the next time it happens.

Written by Simon Day and Andrew Collings Off Of Podcasts, this was surely one of the least BBC Three-friendly BBC Three sitcoms to ever be given a full series. Grass involved over-friendly Londoner Billy Bleach (Simon Day reprising his character from The Fast Show) inadvertantly witnessing a gangland slaying, and subsequently relocating to a sleepy rural village on the witness protection programme, finding himself placed in the care of dozy village bobby PC Harriet (Robert Wilfort, who we'd noticed not long afterwards in a Channel Four comedy pilot doing a sarcastic but enjoyable impersonation of Ross Noble, and who we haven't seen much since. Possibly Ross Noble has had him killed).

There's a lot more to the plot than that, involving the couple of CID officers sent from the big smoke to keen an eye on things, the attractive lady vet Billy repeatedly tries to woo, the slightly eerie child prodigy, the enigmatic poacher, fellow Fast Showee Mark Williams as the pretentious city boy trying to win the locals round to his gastropub idea, and his philosophical head chef, which go some way to explaining just how involved it all was. In fact, the show could have been hugely enjoyable even if the central character Billy hadn't been there at all, seeing as the supporting characters had such thoroughly well rounded personalities. Sounds like a trite things to say, but all too often we’ve had to put up with sitcoms where Character A is ‘this’ type of person, Char B is ‘that’ type of person, and so on, and so on. In Grass for example, the CID officers didn't just slot into the good cop/bad cop-shaped holes - one was a modern Blairite detective always ready to consider the bigger picture and use the training from all the courses he’d been on, while the other was a middle-aged detective who'd seen more of the world, was something of a traditionalist, but was also coming to terms with having recently come out of the closet, and getting used to his gay relationship with the first CID officer.

So, with all that that going on, one might expect the central character plucked straight from The Fast Show to be a little jarring, with him spouting a catchphrase every couple of minutes. Not a bit of it, the setting allowed the character of Billy Bleach to flourish, allowing for some nice interplay between him and PC Harriet, first when the pair are muddling through sharing a cottage together, and later when the CID officers arrive and duly treat the duo like a pair naughty kids, sending them to their bunkbeds early.

It really was a brilliant little show, quite unfairly treated by BBC Three - fellow Fast Show spin-off 'Swiss Toni' seemed to have much more attention lavished on it by the digital channel, despite that not being anywhere near as good. Grass probably would have been more at home on BBC Four, but hopefully it'll one day turn up on Dave, allowing more people to see just how good it really was.

Yeah, she figuratively died on her arse when she did that highly-priced live show in London, and indeed fared about as badly when she guested on both …Buzzcocks and 8 Out Of 10 Cats (as seems to be the case for every US stand-up who comes over here to promote something, only to discover where ‘they’ have a 'chat show circuit' we have a 'panel show circuit', where they're expected to understand jokes about X-Factor and Atomic Kitten). But here's the thing: The Sarah Silverman Program was brilliant.

To the casual viewer, it might well have come over as another half-baked attempt to shock (albeit within the framework of Comedy Central's language and decency guidelines, so the writers couldn't just have someone saying 'fuck' every three minutes). It was actually quite a lot cleverer than that, with almost all of the offensive lines coming from the relentlessly optimistic and whimsically naïve character of Sarah. One episode sees Sarah debating with a black waiter at her local coffee shop about who has the hardest time in American society - black people or Jewish people. To try and see things from his perspective, Sarah innocently aims to get first-hand experience of what it's like to be black in 21st century America - by spending a day wearing blackface. The appalled and disgusted reactions she receives from everyone leads her to assume that everyone else is racist. Think of it as like Mike Leigh's "Happy Go Lucky", but with jokes about fanny farts. It's possibly quite telling that three of the main players (Silverman, Brian Posehn and Jay Johnson) were involved in the majestic Mr Show, to which The Sarah Silverman Program exhibits a very similar feel.

Bonus fact for fans of the show at number 50: One episode sees Brian Posehn's character become obsessed with a campy British sci-fi DVD boxset, in which the lead role is played by a certain Christopher Eccleston.

It might just be the people we went to school with, but as far as we were aware, out of Newman and Baddiel, it was Rob Newman that everyone liked the best. However, possibly due to the fact Newman had never shared a flat with Frank Skinner, when “Robert Newman's A History Of Oil“ appeared on More4 in 2006, it was the first time we'd seen him do something new on TV for aaaages. About thirteen years, by our watches, which for some reason have a “how long was it since Robert Newman last did something new on telly” setting.

A History Of Oil helped prove just what a shame that was, what with Newman having spent the time since '...In Pieces' becoming a sort of funny Mark Thomas, if you can imagine such a thing. This programme looked at the history of... oh, you've guessed. Very illuminating it was too, making a number of very interesting points, such as how oil in Iraq was one of the primary reasons behind the First World War. But - and here's where Newman took a very different approach to Mark Thomas - it was also very funny, as opposed to just being very self-satisfied about the bits where receptionists got bullied.

The entire shebang can be seen on YouTube, starting from here.

See also: The History Of The World Backwards (BBC Four 2007). This being Newman’s ‘proper’ TV comeback, this had a lot of really nice ideas – not least of all the central premise of “what would history be like if time ran backwards?” – but did lack a certain something special. Still an interesting programme, but not quite ‘there’. Pity.

Sealab 2020 was an early 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon show about an underwater research base. Pretty much in the Captain Planet vein, it aimed to teach the kids about the need to respect marine life, and the sea, and whatnot. It didn't really succeed in those aims, and was cancelled after just sixteen episodes were made, only thirteen of which were actually broadcast.

Arriving almost thirty years later, Sealab 2021 visited the crew a year later. By this time, the crew have become more than a little sceptical about their mission, if not entirely stir crazy. They tend to spend the majority of their time arsing about, having extended conversations about what they'd be like if they were robots, killing each other, or trying to take over the world. Coming from the brains of Adam Reed and Matt Thompson (previously mentioned in our list for their later work Frisky Dingo), .you've got to admire the concept of a show lampooning a kids cartoon from three decades previous,  that practically no-one remembered anyway.  It'd be like someone in this country putting together a sitcom where DJ Kat went on to become a shambling alcoholic.

We might be excused of giving our descriptive powers the day off when we say this, but all you really need to know is that Sealab 2021 is absolutely fanfuckingtastically brilliant. For one thing - in a manner similar to World Of Pub (see earlier in the list) - most episodes end with the Sealab facility being destroyed and everyone getting killed. For another thing, it has played host to some of the most majestically demented episodes ever seen of any television programme since the BBC stopped letting Spike Milligan make any. Case in point, the episode quite innocently titled "Vacation" - it needs to be seen in full to get the full impact, and luckily you can do just that here.

Go on, watch it. It’ll give you something to do until the next episode of BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s.

BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 6

As we steam toward the halfway point of our rundown, here are numbers 54 to 51. We’ll try not to ramble on as much as we did yesterday.

One thing that often irks us is when infuriating broadsheet columnists – such as Damian Thompson of the Torygraph – have a bit of a pop at Twitter’s Stephen Fry. “He’s not as clever as he thinks he is!”, they’ll occasionally whinny, deftly stopping themselves just before they type “after all, I’m cleverer than him! Look, my parents sent me to this really expensive school, and I’ve got my own newspaper column, so why doesn’t everyone love me instead? Waaah”.

One of the reasons Fry is so disarming is that when it comes to programmes like ‘Stephen Fry In America’, you can’t help but feel that despite him being a really quite clever chap, he’s there to learn from all the new experiences and the new people just as much as he’s there to make a TV series and write a best-selling book. Now, we might be wrong in that assumption (it wouldn’t be the first time. After all, we’re idiots), but it’s his willingness to Get Involved that makes him likeable, while lots of other people would merely arrive at a set of assumptions that happen to keep in with their blinkered world view, despite there being plenty of evidence to the contrary if they moved from behind a desk. You know, like your Jan Moirs, Richard Littlejohns and Damian Thompsons of the world. Or us, as that’s what we’re doing in this very paragraph. But, as we’ve said, we cheerily admit we’re idiots.

Oh, and given Fry visited all fifty states for the making of the programme, why on earth was it only six episodes long? Come on, the BBC. It should at least have been a thirteen parter, though we’ll cut you some slack for not censoring a bit where the word “fuck” could clearly be seen in graffiti on an establishing shot in one episode’s 7pm BBC Two same-week repeat.

Completing a brace of affable factmongers, here’s Andrew Marr, and his History Of Modern Britain. Taking what could be called (by us, here, now) a surprisingly accessible look at Britain’s post-war history, the series saw Marr visiting not just the more obvious landmarks that shaped 21st Century Britain – the stock exchanges, or the dockyards – but also the unexpected – the spot on Harrowdown Hill where the body of Dr David Kelly was found, or revisiting that tiny London flat which sold for a fortune in the 1980s. It was this comprehensive approach which made the series so very compelling.

Quite splendidly, the entire series can be viewed in full on Google Video:
episode one | episode two | episode three | episode four | episode five
 

Now, no-one really likes to admit it. but is there anything finer in life than seeing someone who deserves it getting a great big bollocking? You might counter with “well, raising a child is a little bit more enjoyable than that, you cynical git”, but you’d be lying.  Seeing someone else getting an industrial strength ticking-off is always fun, only in reality you have to be all “Oh, I should probably leave the room” and avoid-eye-contact-y.

Well, thanks to Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you can see people getting loudly rebuked in the comfort of your own home. You can even rewind the best, loudest, bollockingest bits over and over again on your Sky+ box, imagining that you’re Gordon Ramsay, and that the luckless head chef represents everyone you’ve ever worked with, and yeah, who was it who mixed up the fax machine and the shredder for a year’s worth of invoices now, eh fucko? Eh? ANSWER ME! But then, that’d be taking things a little bit too far, and you should probably start seeing Dr Mayhew again.

Actually, of course, the main enjoyment from the show actually comes from seeing struggling restaurateurs manage to turn their businesses around, thanks to the helpful if sweary advice from Ramsay. It’s really quite uplifting seeing a small restaurant keep on the same staff, not need any additional investment, and still manage to make a silk purse from the mouldy old pigs ears at the back of the freezer, all because Ramsay reinvigorated a disenfranchised kitchen staff and added (or removed) a few dishes to the menu. Though admittedly, we only started watching it to see people getting shouted at.

You’d never guess just how hard it is to be so wonderfully stupid. This Canadian sitcom centred on the antics of Ron (played by Jeff Kassel) and Pete (played by Steve Markle taking on the human form of Tommy Scott from Space). What with both being dumb and shiftless, they make ends meet by becoming human guinea pigs for product testing facility Testico. Yep, ‘Testico’. That’s about the level – we’re talking Bottom meets Jackass basically, and that’s a good thing.

Each episode would centre on a single product being tested on the pair, and the subsequent consequences. So, one episode sees the pair take an experimental drug that temporarily removes their ability to feel pain. Ignoring all warnings from the doctors, as soon as they’re let out on the street, the pair decide to neck enough of the pills to keep them pain-free for a solid week. Ron instantly decides to become a low-rent daredevil, while Pete starts dating an attractive dominatrix who just loves guys with dangerously sturdy piercings ‘down there’. The rest of the episode basically writes itself, and unless you’ve a heart of solid stone, you’ll have cried laughing at least three times by the end of it.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the programme is the lengths the lead actors have to go to. For example, in one episode the luckless Pete messes up a prank involving an experimental solvent, and spends almost the entire episode with his face glued to Ron’s bare arse. And Ron certainly isn’t going to stop having regular sex with his new girlfriend after a minor setback like that. We think you’ll find that is proper “I-had-to-watch-it-through-my-fingers” comedy, folks.

Sadly, the show didn’t make it past the end of the first season (can’t imagine why), but we implore you to track down at least one episode of the show. While it’s very much the televisual equivalent of a greasy chicken kebab after a hard night’s drinking, it’s one of the best kept comedy secrets of the last decade.

 

And so, into the Top 50 we go. Join us again tomorrow (probably) for the next part of our increasingly fractured rundown.

BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 5

As a few entries in this list have suggested, one of the things ITV can still do to impress us is to look back over its own history. What with 2005 being the 50th anniversary of the network, ITV Plc saw fit to treat us to an entire half-century’s worth of lookbackery.

Oh, lookbackery is so a word.

The flagship programme from amongst these celebrations was the Bragg-helmed “The Story of ITV: The People’s Channel”, a multi-part documentary series looking at the successes of the channel on a genre-by-genre basis. There was even a tie-in book for the series (by Simon Cherry, published by Reynolds & Hearn, ISBN 1-903111 98-6 – we’ve a copy of it to hand, you see). All in all, the series made a pretty good case of reminding everyone just why ITV used to be the nation’s most popular channel. Tellingly, when it came to the most recent years of ITV’s life thus far, it was mainly about the various pop talent shows and ‘…Millionaire’. In the case of the episode on comedy, the example used to highlight the network’s continued commitment to mirth was… Frank Skinner’s ‘Shane’ – the same Frank Skinner’s ‘Shane’ that flopped so badly, the pre-emptively produced second series was made yet never broadcast. Even worse, we don’t think TV Burp even got a mention.

See also: ITV50, the regional shows (ITV1, 2005). In many ways, these were an even better way of showcasing the history of ITV, with each region putting out a retrospective of their own output. This gave viewers a brilliant chance to take in the histories of all the regional outposts they’d likely only ever seen on occasional holidaying  visits to other parts of the UK – a rare treat for those of us who’d read the references in TV Cream to such figures as Harry Gration and Gus Honeybun. Entertainingly, the only ITV region to have actually been on air for the entire fifty years was London, meaning all of the other big regional celebrations had to kick off with lines like “of course, ITV have only been serving the Border region for forty-four years” which is the kind of thing we like seeing happen, because we’re odd. We’re assuming that the thinking behind that was, if ITV Plc have their way, by the time most regions actually do reach their 50th anniversaries, there won’t be any regional ITV channels left to celebrate.

However – and any description of a large-scale ITV project in the 21st century just has to contain a ‘however’ – any goodwill was piddled up the fence by all of the regional celebratory shows being sneaked out quietly on a Sunday afternoon, and they didn’t even make the most of all that effort by putting any of them out nationally on ITV3, meaning TV spods like us had to patiently wait for someone to put them all on UK Nova. Oh, ITV. An hour a day for a fortnight, at 1am on ITV3? Not even that?

Also see also: MTV: 15 Years In Europe (MTV, 2002). Another look back, this time from the perspective of a network with a somewhat less than rich history. That didn’t mean that MTV didn’t make an effort, putting together fresh interviews with big names from the golden age of MTV Europe, along with some brilliant clippage, such as the slightly misguided live Christmas (or maybe New Years Eve, we don’t have our tape of it to hand) special with guest presenters Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, from the tail end of the 1980s. Free from the grip of the BBC, Rik and Ade put on explosive and expletive-strewn performance (such as Mayall introducing a song with the words “Now, he’s not just a fuckcunt, but he’s also a cuntfuck!”), ending with the duo demolishing the very-much-not-designed-to-be-demolished set.

As with the ITV retrospectives, once the documentary reached a certain point, things took a much duller turn. While the first two-thirds of the programme had been marvelling in how lively, fresh and exciting MTV Europe had been in the early days (Ray Cokes! Front 242 on daytime rotation! Half of the adverts being in German!), once it made the split to MTV UK & Ireland, MTV France, MTV Germany et al, there wasn’t much left to say, other than “well, we couldn’t really afford original programming for each nation, so we bunged on a bunch of American MTV shows and hoped for the best. Ooh, but we do still have the MTV Europe Awards! Which, er, is usually hosted by an American, and all the nominations are usually American”. A shame, both for the sake of the documentary, and for the channel itself.
 

You know when you’re really, really looking forward to a new programme? And there’s a new sitcom coming, and it’s based in the world of IT, and it’s actually performed in front of a studio audience, and it’s being written by Graham “Black Books Father Ted The All-New Alexei Sayle Show Dr Crawshaft’s World Of Pop” Linehan, and Chris Morris is in it? It’s pretty much destined to seem a little disappointing, isn’t it?

Indeed, it did take us a while to warm to The IT Crowd, but by the time the second series got into full swing (after the “Moss and the German” ep, if you’re counting), we were won over. Admittedly, it can suffer from Duff Episode Syndrome occasionally (we didn’t find ourselves enjoying the haunting-Adam-Buxton or introducing-Matt-Berry episodes nearly as much as other people seemed to), but as the series goes on, the laughs are falling from our mouths increasingly quickly, as if, oh, we don’t know, someone had installed a faster Laughter Card running Direct X 11 in our brains. Or. Some. Thing.

One thing that relentlessly bugs us about US sitcoms – even ones that we really like – is that the characters in the vast majority of them are, at the very least, comfortably off. Yes, we know such shows are there for the purposes of escapism, and if a cafe waitress happens to look like Jennifer Aniston and can easily afford a huge New York apartment (“ah, but Rachel shared that apartment!” – A reader missing the point) it’s okay because it’s NOT REAL, But really – what are the most popular sitcoms of all time in the UK? Steptoe & Son, Fools & Horses, Porridge, Open All Hours – all about people basically struggling to get by, making the most of a bad lot. Even accounting for Dad’s Army or Fawlty Towers, they look at people stuck in a situation they’d rather not be in (either living in wartime Britain, or running a not-successful-enough hotel).

Now, look at most US (live-action) sitcoms. While there are pesky examples like MASH or Cheers to undermine this, for the most part they centre on really quite successful people who merely don’t have everything going their way. Soap, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, 30 Rock or Frasier are all brilliant shows, but you never really get the feeling any of the characters are ever really trapped in their surroundings. Sure, the main characters may feel ego-bound to do whatever they do to cause mayhem in 22-minute syndicated bursts, but they could just as easily sell up for an easier life in Idaho. The marvellous Everybody Hates Chris takes a more British approach to comedy, looking at the fortunes of a hard-working but financially struggling black family in 1980s Brooklyn, with the action centred on eldest child Chris – who, of course, will grow up to be millionaire comedian and actor Chris Rock, but ignore that for now.

A sadly underrated show over here – not helped by being buried on Five and Five US, and often having its more hard-hitting lines censored to boot (including the pivotal use of the word ‘nigger’ by the school bully towards Chris in the first episode, which pretty much sets up the dynamic between the pair from that point on) – it’s another great example of the kind of tightly plotted, cleverly scripted, brilliantly casted US sitcom that we’re really going to need to think up some more decorative prose for by the end of this rundown.

The central character of Chris (played winningly by Tyler James Williams) is handled magnificently, being a fundamentally good, well mannered and honest kid who ends up in all manner of scrapes through little fault of his own. It’s the well-rounded characters making up the rest of his family – indeed, the regular characters from the neighbourhood – that help this show stand out from the crowd. Rochelle, the sassy, intimidating and fiercely protective mother. Julius, industrious, easygoing but frugal father. Drew, younger and  to the almost-imperceptible annoyance of Chris, bigger and more popular of the two brothers. And finally, Tonya, youngest of the three children, perpetual antagonist for her two brothers and a relentless attention-addict, always likely to win her parents over in the event of any argument. All brilliantly written characters, and all played wonderfully by the cast.

On a superficial level, the streets of Brooklyn, New York don’t have much in common with small villages on the outskirts of Wrexham, north Wales, which is where we happened to grow up. However, with us being of a similar age to Chris Rock, we can see a lot of the families we grew up amongst in the Rock family and their neighbours. People struggling to get by, people preferring to rip people off friends and neighbours instead of struggling, hard kids in school looking to distract themselves from the problems in their own home lives by taking it out on anyone unlucky enough to be deemed different, it’s all really quite uncanny. If we had an ounce of talent, we might even consider writing our own “Married For Life”-style spin-off for ITV.

(Oh, and please don’t leave a comment along the lines of “Well, [American Sitcom X] is just like that too! Why haven’t you mentioned [American Sitcom X]? Eh?”. We’re only at number 58, and we probably will mention it. Assuming by “[American Sitcom X]” you don’t mean a whimsical spin-off of the Ed Norton race-hate drama.)
 

The first programme from south of the equator on our list, and one of the few to actually make it to a mainstream channel over here – several ‘best of’ shows (stripped of the more Aussie- centric content) were broadcast on BBC Four earlier on this year.

Coming from Australian satire troupe ‘The Chaser’ (think ‘The Onion’ or ‘National Lampoon’), ‘War…’ was the follow-up to their ABC-broadcast news spoof CNNNN (Chaser NoN-stop News Network), and took a (slightly) more traditional, studio-audience led approach **LAZY GENERALISATION ALERT**, think a sort of “Saturday Night Armistice meets Fantasy Football League, meets Trigger Happy TV”.

Much of what BBC Four viewers would see of the show centred on the “ha ha, aren’t members of the public/drones who work in retail/public figures of authority” aspects of the show, making it seem – at its worst – little better than Balls Of fucking Steel (case in point, the skit where a Chaserbloke walked into shops wearing a balaclava and a hidden camera, causing blameless staff to panic, fearing they were being robbed). This was a bit of a shame, really, as much of the original show centred on Australian current affairs, with often-entertaining consequences. For example, in 2006 a story had broken in the Australian press about a student who had hugged then-PM John Howard whilst holding a screwdriver. The Chaser team decided to check the level of security surrounding the PM, by sending Chaserbloke Craig Reucassel out to hug Howard during one of his morning constitutionals. Whilst holding a large (if plastic) battleaxe. Reucassel managed to succeed in his task, and subsequently tried to up the ante by trying again on another morning, but this time with a running chainsaw, albeit to a less successful outcome.

Similar stunts were a large part of the show (along with sketches that carried a lesser risk of imprisonment, such as where Andrew Hansen would write angry letters – under a false name - to the ABC, complaining about sketches in the show, and broadcasting the subsequent replies), especially so in election-themed spin-off The Chaser Decides. At the time of the 2007 Australian elections, the actions of the Chaser team were deemed interesting enough to merit a special report on BBC News 24 in the UK (we noticed the report on a Sunday morning, in a cafe that had its television’s sound turned down, so we’ve no idea what was being said. Still, that’s first person research from us, right there).

Possibly the team’s most high-profile stunt (discounting the pointless tabloid-filling bluster over the hugely rubbish anyway “Make A Realistic Wish” sketch) saw the crew visit the 2007 APEC Leaders Summit  in Sydney, under the guise of a fake Canadian delegation. Using rented limousines adorned with the Canadian flag, and waving faked ID passes at security, the Chasers were able to breach the APEC restricted zone, and stop outside the hotel where US President George W Bush (remember him?) was staying. It was only when a Chaserbloke dressed as Osama bin Laden emerged from the back of the rented limo that this particular “jig” was very much “up”. The two Chaserblokes fronting the stunt, along with nine crew members, were detained, questioned and charged by New South Wales Police, under an act which carried a maximum six month prison sentence. Now, while the charges were finally dropped (helped, we’re quite sure, by the overwhelming public approval for the team’s actions, and the fact lax security was largely to blame for them getting as far at they did), we’re quite sure Alex Zane, Olivia Lee, Mark Dolan, Neg Dupree, Toju Okoradudu, Dawn Porter et al would literally shit themselves before trying to pull a similar stunt. “Balls Of Steel”? Balls of marzipan, more like.

We first looked at Land Girls back in September, in a very rare “actual update about an actual television programme being broadcast at the moment” update. And we can see why – to our cost, this rundown has reminded us just how long it bloody takes to ‘form opinions’ and ‘write sentences’ about TV programmes. Someone really ought to have warned us. The sooner we can go back to just posting a YouTube clip of Ceefax On View and saying something sarcastic about Michael McIntye every four days, the better. Anyway, Land Girls. This is what we’d said at the time:

“The trailer managed to confuse us on Sunday night, with what seemed to be a relatively expensive WWII period drama being shown at the surely-it-must-be-a-Bank-Holiday time of 5.15pm, but no, that’s the timeslot for it. And in our defence, we’d spent around 80% of Sunday in bed drowning in a sea of the most devilishly feverish visions – the concept of cricket or toast would probably have had us similarly floundered by the time we finally made it to the sofa. It’s on every weekday this, er, week at that time, suggesting it’s geared towards elder children.

Not a bit of it. Episode two alone featured 1940s teenage pregnancy and subsequent attempted abortion, a nine-year-old boy selling bootleg whiskey, arguments aplenty, a bar brawl, thwarted equestricide, and three cast members from the magnificent Early Doors to boot. All in the traditional Blue Peter slot.

Despite us just making it sound like First Of The Summer Skins, or BBC Three’s Fuck Off I’m A Civilian Landworker, it’s all handled as sensibly as if it had been filtered through the typewriter ribbons of Michael O’Neill and Jeremy Seabrook. All the characters you’d expect to find in a classic BBC children’s drama are there:

The plucky teenage girl who’d lied about her age in order to help with the war effort, spunky and idealistic, and who’d think nothing of marching into the American soldiers’ mess to demand they improve the lot of their black compatriots.

Her steadying influence of an older sister (Christine Bottomley, below left), ready to pluckily corner any American GIs who’d try to take advantage of her young sis, and prod their chests so hard their medals will leave indentations in their ribcage.

A plucky pre-teen scallywag happy to aid the scam-hungry farmer (Mark Benton) with some wizard carrot-related wheezes.

A nosey parker Sergeant willing to spend as much time peeking into the business of his own men as carrying out his duties. If this were being made in 1983, he’d be played by Stephen Lewis.

The Lord Of The Manor – a well-meaning war hero who is always on hand with a word of cheery encouragement or some first-aid tips gleaned from his time in the Somme

The deceitful Lady Of The Manor, on hand to pass on the valuable lesson to children that at least 50% of posh people throughout history were evil (legal note: may not be true).

The perpetually cheery (and plucky) midlands girl who refuses to dwell on the hand life has dealt her, lest it cause her to waver from her land-tending duties.

The superficially plucky land girl who is probably Up To No Good, We’ll Wager.

And at least half a dozen more characters more interesting and well-rounded that you’d find in a great deal of post-watershed dramas. We’re happy to make that judgement call after seeing just one-and-a-half episodes, and recommend everyone visit the Land Girls iPlayer page to dip into it. Go on, do it now.”

Now, admittedly, that iPlayer link won’t work any more (unless the BBC repeat the show over the Christmas break, which they should, because it was brilliant), but us posting all that does save us the effort of coming up with something new to say. Phew for that! Oh, and we were being a little disingenuous with the “on in the Children’s BBC slot” angle, but no-one really picked up on it anyway. So: phew for that, too.

 

A programme that could incorrectly be labelled as “landfill documentary” by anyone not bothering to actually watch the programmes themselves. Now, that grouping could quite conceivably include the BBC bean counters who’d seen the proposed outline for the show, and who’d said “Really? Is that what you’re doing? A series of historical documentaries focusing on individual 24-hour periods? Here’s some money from the back of our couch to make it with. And we expect change”. You see, despite the programmes in question – taking in subjects such as “The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand”, “The Birth of Israel”, “The Resignation of Nixon” or “Hiroshima” – having rather grandiose remits, especially as most one-hour episodes took in two such subjects, there clearly wasn’t that much of a budget to play with.

For example, while the flagship BBC One docudrama on the bombing of Hiroshima (from 2005, winner of a BAFTA and an International Emmy) was narrated by John Hurt, used a huge cast of actors and interviewees, employed impressive CGI and went out in a prime-time Sunday night slot, the episode of Days That Shook The World covering the same topic (series one, episode four) doesn’t even warrant its own IMDB page.

That kinds of messes up our comparison of the relative cast sizes, but we will categorically state that despite costing a fraction of the amount to make, and despite containing only a handful of players taking on the pivotal roles in the reconstructions of the events of that day (in both cases, taking in the human cost on both sides of the blast,), Days That Shook The World was able to tell the same story every bit as well. Indeed, the concentration on stating the facts so comprehensively – from both sides wherever possible, of course, belying Johnny Rotten’s assertion that “history is just the winners saying what a bad bunch the losers were” – was to the credit of the people behind the strand, in most cases tasked with boiling down a hugely pivotal 24 hours in global history to a half-hour slot, from which can a few minutes be easily edited out? After all, we want to cram these onto Discovery as well, so we need the space for commercials. Thanks, loves.

 

 

Cripes, we’ve managed to drone on for ages, there. Why didn’t we just make this a top twenty, eh? Then we could just have spent the remainder of the month posting YouTube videos or links to other, much better, websites and relaxing. Not to mention how angry everyone is going to be when they realise they’ve sat through ninety-nine entries just to discover we’ve put The Sunday Night Project at number one… Bah! Anyway, check back tomorrow, when we’ll update anew, with an as yet undetermined quantity of entries on our list…

The Thick Of It: That Huge Shocking Revelation

Last night’s episode of The Thick Of It,eh? Bloody hell! Who could have possibly seen that coming?

Yes, getting to see inside Malcolm Tucker’s front room! But it doesn’t end there…

Malcolm Tucker’s DVD collection! So, what’s there?

Well, from what we can recognise the spines of:

Taxi Driver
The Departed
Layer Cake
The Godfather Trilogy (?)
Lethal Weapon Box Set (?)
Brotherhood
Memento
R-Point
Titanic
The Italian Job
School Of Rock
Hot Fuzz
Shaun of the Dead
Meet The Parents
24
Citizen Kane
Outnumbered
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
The Shield

Now, clearly, the contents of the DVD shelf clearly weren’t actually on the physical shelves of the fictional character Malcolm Tucker, more that they happened to be in the residence the crew were filming in, but you’ve got to enjoy the thought of him getting in after a hard day’s bollockings, only to pour a glass of scotch and to plonk South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut on his DVD player.

Also, anything interesting happen in the rest of the programme? We stopped watching it after five minutes.

BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 4

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed we failed to update the rundown yesterday. As punishment, we’ve compiled a double update, taking in numbers eighty to sixty-one. Additionally, we’ve just given ourselves a Chinese burn. Ow.

Going out live after ITV’s matches from Euro 2000, the first series of this show made for very interesting viewing. No plan, just Frank and Dave being witty on a couch? Count us in. As the series progressed, especially once it had become pre-recorded, it became a bit less essential, but for ITV to take the risk of showing it in the first place it deserves to be here.

Notable moment: During the live Comic Relief mini-episode of the show in 2005, Frank pointed out “now we’re going to see a film about some of the work Comic Relief does. Aw, I always hate those, they always ruin the mood”, thereby making a point everyone had been thinking for years but had been too polite to say out loud.
 

    Moffat-penned Saturday night horror. How could it fail? Well, it did try at times, most notably when Hyde (played by Jimmy Nesbitt wearing slightly scary contact lenses and slightly mad hair) turned back into Jekyll (played by Jimmy Nesbitt without the slightly scary contact lenses and with slighly less mad hair), causing any witnesses to wonder aloud “hey, who are you? And where did that scary maniac disappear to?”

Maybe we’re being a little harsh. Jekyll was a great little show. It’s available at a laughably cheap price on DVD, too. Check it out. (If nothing else, you doing so would make us feel a bit better about skimming over this entry somewhat.)

Yeah, we know. It’s full of self-obsessed idiots, only idiots watch it, we don’t watch it in our house, et-bloody-cetera. Despite all of the received opinion on the show – and we’d love to know what percentage of people who love to complain about the show have actually watched it – there has been a lot to like about Big Brother over the last decade. While people would generally concentrate on the more disagreeable participants – Nasty Nick, Jade, Charley, Ziggy, or bigot-tits herself Danielle Lloyd – they tend to skip over the people who were in the majority (at least until the slightly more desperate later series when the ratings began to slip), the ones you’d probably taken an instant dislike to at the start, and ended up liking once they were able to be themselves.

It’s as if in this short attention span era, the most disagreeable thing about Big Brother is the way we’d need to watch it for at least eight hours each week to decide whether we should be hating these people or not. After all, who’s got the time for that? Luckily of course, we’ve got the tabloids to tell us who to hate. “PAGE ONE EXCLUSIVE: BB MEL IN EVIL RACIST OUTBURST, BURN HER! BURN THE WITCH! Page six: Muslims are evil and are taking over Britain.” You know the drill.

While we’ll admit we stopped watching Deal Or No Deal a long, long time ago, we still admire DOND(UK) for sticking with its rather lo-fi approach, especially when compared to the bombastic American and Australian versions. We could go into it in more depth, but instead we’ll point you towards this superb Bothers Bar review of the show from 2005.

 

One of the most underrated sitcoms of the decade, we’d say. World Of Pub was a great programme with a wonderful premise. Each episode would start and end in much the same way. Pub landlord Barry (Phil Cornwell), working alongside his idiot brother Garry (Peter Serafinowicz), would bemoan the lack of customers in his boozer. Regular barfly Dodgy Phil (Kevin Eldon) would come up with a plan to improve the fortunes of the pub. The plan would be hatched, carried out, events would ensue, and the pub would be destroyed in the final scene. Every week. It’s hard not to love a sitcom with that premise, frankly.

 

Yes, yes. It might have merely been a clip show, the new material the duo performed wasn’t very good, and a few of the chosen archive sketches turned out to be a little disappointing and all that, but it was brilliant to see them back together one last time, wasn’t it? Additionally, it was nice to see Ronnie B and Ronnie C modestly offer the lion’s share of credit for their favourite skits to the writers.

See also: The Smith & Jones Sketchbook, suggesting this might have been a become a new strand for bygone double acts (and hopefully not just a repeat of the revolving door approach to the hosts of Commercial Breakdown). That turned out not to be the case, cruelly depriving the nation of The Lee & Herring Sketchbook.

While we might not be big fans of David Letterman, we’ve got to admit his production company Worldwide Pants sure knows how to find gold. Case in point – The Knights Of Prosperity, a sadly short-lived ABC comedy following a bunch of misfits who come up with a plan to rob Mick Jagger, and other celebrities once Plan A inevitably goes awry.

It’s often said that the best formula for comedy is to base it on “the idiot who knows nothing, and the idiot who knows everything”. ‘Knights…‘ took things a step further, being based on one idiot who knows everything, and five other idiots of varying intelligence. For a programme where the premise is based entirely on stupidity, the writing was remarkably tight, with the episodes being expertly plotted and deftly scripted. Sadly, it wasn’t enough of a hit with viewers. and after being messed around with by the network (it was cancelled after nine episodes, rescued, then cancelled again two episodes later), ended up with just thirteen episodes in the can.

The first animated show on the list, Frisky Dingo was something we’d describe as – if you threatened to kill our family - Superman meets Seinfeld. The central plot (at least for the first season) revolved around megalomaniacal supervillain Killface and his super-heroic nemesis Awesome X, but the main humour came from the demented turns each episode could – but wouldn’t always - take. The entire first episode revolves around Killface meeting with the marketing team he’d just kidnapped, exploring how best to publicise his plan of crashing the Earth into the Sun.  The entire second episode saw Xander Crews (narcissistic alter ego of Awesome X) pondering how he can avoid hanging up his cape, in order to avoid running the corporation he’d inherited.

As the series progresses, the plot flits between the mundane and the ridiculous. One episode sees Killface finally activating his Annihilatrix - it malfunctions, merely moving the earth three feet further away from the sun, thereby ending global warming. As a result, he becomes a national hero and decides to run for President. Meanwhile, Xander Crews finds himself destitute, resorting to boiling used hypodermic needles and selling them back to the homeless.

Coming from the minds of Adam Reed and Matt Thompson – creators of Sealab 2021 – the jokes flow thick and fast throughout each episode (“Put some glitter on this and fax it out.” “You can’t fax glitter!” “Well, not with that attitude…”), and make the region one DVD boxsets well worth investigating.

 

Another fond studio-audience based glance at a show everyone used to love, and probably still would if anyone ever bothered repeating it. Excellent to see this on the air, but aside from a single repeat showing of the ‘Winter Olympics’ episode about a week and a half later, the Beeb still don’t seem to show us any of The Goodies.

 

For our money, videoGaiden was – and still is – the best videogaming programme ever broadcast in the UK, taking in the assumed knowledge of its audience, quickfire humour and cheery in-jocularity of magazines like Your Sinclair, Zero and Amiga Power at their best. And it was all aimed at grown-ups, too. Despite it receiving hugely favourable feedback from its viewership, it exists no longer, never making it out of the BBC Two Scotland region. Maybe if Rab and Ryan had put on Charlie Brooker masks throughout each episode, it’d probably be running on BBC Four even now.

See also: Thumb Candy (E4, 2001). Iain Lee looks at the history of videogames, and is surprisingly non-thumpable for the entire duration of this one-off documentary.

Also see also: Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe (BBC Four, 2009). But then we’ll guess you already know all about that.

 

And not, of course, “Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights”, no matter what the DVD cover says. What with Kay’s subsequent actions (taking sole credit for Phoenix Nights despite Neil Fitzmaurice and Dave Spikey being co-creators and co-writers of it, releasing a DVD of the same stand-up set every year, using the plot of a Max & Paddy episode to mean-spiritedly flick V-signs at Dave Spikey, etc, etc), it almost comes as a surprise how good the first series of Phoenix Nights really was. Give it another go. Go on, here’s one of the episodes on YouTube, right here.

By the time series two rolled around, some of the magic had gone, especially in the case of the final few episodes, which practically served as pilots for underwhelming spin-off Max & Paddy’s Road To Nowhere. However, that doesn’t diminish the majesty of the first series, which we think didn’t even have anyone using the words “garlic” and “bread” together in the same sentence.

 

More from PlayUK, this was a prime example in Doing Things Properly. Aside from just mentioning the Sex Pistols quite often, implying that all music in 1976 was Prog Rock, and showing that archive footage of thousands of full bin liners in a London park because the all bin men had been on strike, this ten part series (ten part!) covered everything from the Pistols to Crass, Sniffin’ Glue to Oi!, Billy Bragg to Sonic Youth, and all points in between. It also played host to lots of interesting pieces from the archive, such as a young Gary Bushell on Newsnight flailing under questioning as to why his record label had put out an Oi compilation clearly inspired by Nazi party sloganeering, or highlighting just how bloody rubbish Limp Bizkit were.

The full series can be viewed from here.

 

Any series which opens with Kevin Eldon, clad in a red Lycra outfit with a huge question mark on his front, running around a field screaming “What am I?” over and over again, must be good. It’s one of the principle laws of television comedy. Simon Munnery’s alter-ego The League Against Tedium fronted this magnificently bewildering programme, atop a transit van slash battleship in a series of car parks and a big hat. The title sequence of each episode consisted of a voice over informing the viewers how they are shaven monkeys, arse-mouths, army surplus and such before a series of surreal vignettes (such as Kombat Opera, or 24 Hour News Read By A Man Who’s Been Up For 24 Hours – an early TV outing for Johnny Vegas). For the most part the show would comprise cracking dialogue from the baroque mouth of League.

“It is said that at the age of fifty-five, each man becomes that which he most despised at the age of twenty-five. I live in constant fear, lest I should become a badly organised coach trip to Cleethorpes.”

Sadly, Attention Scum fell foul of that most annoying of curses – being commissioned by someone’s predecessor. By the time the show had been made and ready for broadcast, there was a new Mayor Of BBC Two (or whoever gets to decide these things), who didn’t much like the idea of the show, and it was dropped haphazardly onto the schedule so as to be out of the way before anyone would notice. Annoying, but there you go.

Here is episode one. Of it.

“If a million monkeys were given a million typewriters… why, that would be the inter-net!”

Based on the diaries of Kenneth Williams, Fantabulosa! saw Michael Sheen play the role of Williams quite magnificently. As far as we can remember, this was the first of several impressive BBC Four dramas looking at the lives of well-regarded British comedians of yesteryear, but was easily the best.

Pop Fact! Michael Sheen is actually undertaking a massive project where he is due to take on the role of every single notable public figure from the British Isles between the years of 1958 and 1998. We can’t wait until 2037, when he’s pencilled in for “Thought Of A Number: The Johnny Ball Story”.

More archive clippery, but this took things a little further than asking Radio 1 daytime jocks just how much they liked it when David Brent did that dance. Comedy Map Of Britain went on the road around the UK, checking on locales important to the back stories of artists as varied as (deep breath*) Angus Deayton, Anton Rodgers, Arthur Smith, Hale and Pace, Bill Bailey, Chris Moyles, the Chuckle Brothers, Dudley Moore, Eric Idle, Graham Fellows, Hugh Grant, Ian Hislop, Ian Lavender, Jim Davidson, Jon Culshaw, Mark Thomas, Maureen Lipman, Michael Palin,  Terry Jones, Paul Merton, Richard Whiteley, Ricky Gervais, Ronni Ancona, Rowan Atkinson, Roy Chubby Brown, Steve Coogan, Syd Little and Eddie Large. Even the stories on the comedians we haven’t got much time for proved to be interesting – we even found ourselves enjoying the part where Leigh Francis visited the house he’d lived in as a teenager, finding some of his early cardboard masks still in the attic.

(*’Deep breath as we copy and paste all those names in from Wikipedia’, admittedly.)

 

If there’s a ever a place for “programme suffering the worst scheduling slot ever” in the Guinness Book Of Records, we imagine Biffovision would be in with a shout for it. The first showing of this BBC Three pilot first went out at 3.15am on a Tuesday morning. And was listed in the EPG as being a repeat showing of Two Pints of Lager. Surprisingly then, it didn’t attract that many viewers, and wasn’t picked up for a full series.

That’s a massive, massive shame, as we thought it was one of the most promising comedy shows of the last decade. Coming from the minds of Paul Rose and Tim Moore, the men behind seminal Teletext magazine Digitiser, Biffovision took the form of a surreal 1980s kids show where literally anything could happen. Yes, literally anything. The show also spiralled off into what seemed to be more traditional sketches, but which often ended in a less-than-traditional way (“these aren’t even my real hands!”), and while there were a number of cracks in the show you’d hope would have been Polyfilla’ed up before reaching a full series, it all works really well.

The pilot did finally get a repeat in a slightly more reasonable slot (at midnight), and watching it again on YouTube, even now we can’t help but be impressed by the relentless energy and sheer verve of the thing. It could have been a worthy companion to The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer, but it seems what with the show not being instantly applicable to that all-important key BBC Three demographic, maybe it never, ever stood a chance.

If you’ve never seen Biffovision, we urge you to remedy this now. There’s probably a 60-70% chance you’ll hate it, but that’ll be all your fault for being wrong.

See also: Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX. Another BBC Three pilot not picked up because it contains at least one joke people under 25 might not get. Though, oddly, it’s fine when Family Guy spends half of each episode referring to 1980s pop culture.

A two-parter looking at the history of swearing on television, along with the now standard explanation of why there isn’t any surviving footage of Kenneth Tynan saying Britain’s first televised ‘fuck’ over a montage of furious tabloid headlines. Key moment: Felix Dennis refusing to be proud of being the first person to say ‘cunt’ on TV.

See also: The C-Word: How We Came To Swear By It. Will “Thick Of It” Smith takes a look at the history of fuck’s more offensive brother. The programme quite nicely made the point that certain sections of society are still happy to get on their high horse over its use. by highlighting the Daily Mail’s pre-emptive outrage over the programme itself.

 

The kind of show we always love to see on our screens, this eight part series looked at different aspects of L.E. over the years. Each episode of The Story Of Light Entertainment concentrated on individual Light Ent genres, such as double acts and impressionists, even spending an entire show on stars of the radio – a laudable thing for a modern day TV show, we’re saying.

Happily, the talking heads on offer tended to be more on the ‘know what the hell they’re on about’ side of the fence (Beadle, Yarwood, Large), even if we did have to put up with Avid bloody Merrion adding absolutely nothing to proceedings.

From the same corner of BBC Scotland that brought us Comedy Connections, That Was The Week We Watched sneaks in ahead of that show due to its broader (but paradoxically, narrower) appeal of concentrating on a specific weeks viewing from the past, with scheduling info and clips aplenty. And yes, we were utterly spellbound by the beautifully rendered CGI recreation of pages from the Radio and TV Times.

 

Beating the similarly themed Swap Shop retrospective in our list because Tiswas was much better than Swap Shop. Is there a “Best Of Swap Shop” on DVD? No, there isn’t. This is precisely the thing ITV should be putting out on Saturday nights more often, no matter than the eighteen million X Factor viewers think.

 

Blimey, all that was hard work. Expect 60-51 on Monday!

BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 3

 

Cracking on with this, we’re going to go with ten entries a day from hereon in. Mainly because it’ll free up more time for us to bore everyone with hugely esoteric fare about “BrokenTV’s Top Ten Discontinued Snack Foods 2000-2009” and the like, but we suppose it’ll also make each daily visit a bit more worthwhile for you lot, our several readers. That’s also a good thing, in a way, we guess.

 

Pre-empting Peep Show by several years, ‘The Mitchell and Webb Situation’ went out relatively unnoticed on much-missed digital channel Play UK, before finally being sneaked out on middle-of-the-night BBC Two in 2008. Especially when compared to some of the sketch comedies that have hit the main channels since this first went to air, that’s a bit of a shame (speaking of which, don’t hold your breath for The Kevin Bishop Show, Revolver or Velvet Soup on this rundown, 'kay?). What you’ve got here is pretty much That Mitchell And Webb Look on a reduced budget, so while several of the filler sketches fall a little flat, for the main part the standard of writing wins the day. Look, here’s a clip of a running sketch from the first episode.

See also: Play UK (nee UK Play) in general. Foolishly launched as a digital-only channel in 1998, back when only a few hundred thousand TV geeks had digital TV, it pumped a load of money into all-new programming (almost entirely made by channel part-owners The BBC). Helped by the channel’s other main bad decision – being placed in the '”music” section of Sky’s EPG due to its daytime output being mostly music-based, but depriving it of a prime slot in the “entertainment” section – many of the shows on offer didn’t get the audience they deserved, what with the channel being shoved on the far end of channels like ‘The Box’. By the time Play UK made the move to the “entertainment” section in 2001, it was at the arse-end of that section – not very conductive to ‘passing trade’ (as it were), and the channel closed a year later. It was probably relaunched as UK Repeats Of Changing Rooms, we imagine.

One of the main reasons we’d fight to the death to protect the licence fee is because BBC Four are always likely to commission documentary series like this one. Well, not ‘fight to the death’ as such, but we’d probably take a minor scar on a part of our bodies that’s usually covered by clothing. Comic Britannia was a lovely Iannucci-voiced three-part series, with each episode looking at a different ‘type’ of comic book borne of Old Blimey. Episode one (“The Fun Factory”) was of the greatest interest to us, what with it centring on the likes of The Beano, Whizzer & Chips et al, but the other parts, looking at the comics aimed squarely at each gender, followed by a look at more ‘grown-up’ comics such as Watchmen were both just as entertaining. Admittedly, it’s the simple thought of giving a good few minutes airtime to people saying how ace Leo Baxendale was that helped cement this show’s place in the top hundred.

Twitter’s funniest man wasn’t always restricted to being witty in sub-140 character bursts, of course. Peter “Quick, Copy-Paste His Surname From Somewhere” Serafinowicz’s sketch show wasn’t pure gold by any means – sketches such as the lamentable “You’re A C**t” X-Factor spoof, Gay Holmes or the Clone Brother sketch (which admittedly did have the “argument-bargument” line) fell utterly flat in our living room – but overall, it’s hard to watch this and not be a little mystified why Serafinowicz hadn’t been given his own show earlier. Also, he’d help cement our theory that the entertainers who are the very best at doing impressions seldom restrict themselves to just being ‘impressionists’. See also: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Rob Newman. Yeah, flip you, Culshaw.

For fairly understandable reasons, Chris Langham won’t be picking up too many cheques for repeat fees these days. Sadly, that means this one-off BBC Two docudrama isn’t likely to get much of a re-airing any time soon, and that’s a huge shame.

Despite being one of the most lauded authors of the 20th century, and despite him actually working for the BBC at one point, there isn’t a single surviving  frame of George Orwell in any film or TV archive in the world. When it came to trying to put all this into a television film, Chris Durlacher came up with the approach of ‘inventing’ a series of scenes featuring Orwell, but making sure that every word uttered by his depiction of Orwell had originally been written by the man himself. As a result, Orwell (played by Chris Langham) appears in scenes such as a never-actually-happened episode of Face To Face, or documentary films on his chosen subjects – such as serving in Burma, the Spanish Civil War, or highlighting poverty in Paris and London.

In short, it’s a remarkable piece of television, and you do kind of suspect that were it not for the identity of the lead actor being used as a stick for the Mail and Express to beat the BBC with, it would crop up more frequently in repeat form on BBC Four.

 

The Real Hustle pretty much created itself a new genre when it hit the digital spectrum in 2006: “factual TV you should be terrified of not watching”. After all, if you didn’t watch each episode, would you have known about the popular scams therein? Each episode ended up revealing at the very least one moment of “Buh! Of course! I’d better bloody look out for that in future”, often more. Admittedly, some of the scams pulled weren’t much of a threat – the one about people wandering into PC World and downloading the software from demo PCs to USB drives was a bit daft – but the vast majority of them were frighteningly plausible. After all, we’re probably not the only ones to be visiting elderly relatives when they’ve received a cold call from from someone claiming to be be The Red Cross, and can they have your debit card details….? Hey, hang on….*

As time went on, the central scamsmiths fell pray to their own popularity, meaning their undercover identities could be too easily rumbled (in much the same way Donal MacIntyre’s had in 1999’s MacIntyre Undercover). This meant the programme relocated overseas for the most recent series, to Las Vegas and beyond, but sadly (at least for us) this has meant the original appeal has become slightly diluted.

Personally, we’d only tuned into it because we’d thought it’d be an animated spin-off from ‘Hustle’, in the same way ‘Ghostbusters’ led to ‘The Real Ghostbusters’. (nb. Not really. We couldn’t stand ‘Hustle’.)

(*And yes, admittedly, said cold callers could well be The actual Red Cross, but… really: flip right off! If you’re an actual charity phoning people (who, in the case of The Actual Elderly Relatives We’re Talking About, already voluntarily give to The Red Cross), don’t. Give people the free will to contribute if they wish to, don’t badger them into it. If you do, you’re a bunch of shitbags. Yes, you are. Yes, even if you are a charity. This is the thing we think, if you do the thing we’ve just said.. You heard.)

In the pre-show publicity (at least the parts of it where Lee hadn’t penned articles under a false name saying how his show was going to be rubbish and people should just watch Michael McIntyre instead), Stewart Lee expressed his hope that his Comedy Vehicle would be a return to the days of Dave Allen on a stool being brilliant. As it turned out, he wasn’t quite right (if nothing else, Lee’s show didn’t include jokes with rape as a punchline, unlike Dave Allen*), but Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was a very good show nonetheless.

We might be pissing in the face of received comedy wisdom here, but when he’s doing a live gig, Stewart Lee does have an unhappy habit of making forty minutes material last for two hours, doesn’t he? In his 41st Best Stand-Up Ever set, his Tom O’Connor ‘Sardine’ bit seemed to take up about 40% of the show. It was probably a lot less - we didn’t time it or compile a graph or anything - but it seemed to be about that much. But when given a number (that number being ‘six’. Not sure why we’ve said ‘a number’. Maybe we’re merely trying to increase the word count) of half-hour slots to fill, he was able to be a little tighter. Okay, maybe the stand-up on our screen was a little bit too tight, what with the programme including cutaway scenes merely reaffirming the point he’d just made without even bothering to include an extra gag, but the fact each episode seemed to whizz by so quickly was testament to the quality of Lee’s stand-up.

(*This is true, sadly. As the BBC Two repeat run of Dave Allen At Large in 2005 showed, there was once an Allen sketch where a young woman is drowning in a swimming pool, repeatedly shouting “help!” to notify people of her plight. The lifeguard (played by Allen) duly dives in to save her, and pulls her to the side of the pool. The lifeguard then carries her to a changing room (off camera) and begins molesting her, causing her to shout “help! help!” all over again. And that was the punchline. Really. Frigging hell. All credit to BBC Two for showing the episode uncut meaning we’re able to make up our own minds on the matter, of course, but bloody hell. Still, at least he didn’t say something rude about the Queen, eh?)

See also: The lovely Red Button extras for the programme, where Lee would improvise banter with Armando Iannucci about the subject of each night’s episode, intercut with out-takes from the studio recording. For the last two episodes, Lee also quite generously broadcast highlights of the warm-up acts used for some of the shows. That’s certainly the first time we’ve seen that done (mainly because no-one had bothered switching on the cameras for the warm-up acts before now, we presume), but something we wish more comedy shows would do. Oh? What’s that? We’re stuck with forced joyless discussions between a Phill Jupitus and Noel Fielding who’d rather be in the pub on our Red Button channel? Ah.

Don’t also see: Time Trumpet. Despite the involvement of Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee and Adam Buxton, and despite it following on from the brilliant (but somehow not on this list) ‘2004: The Stupid Version’, it was a bit crap.

More BBC Four fantasticness. If you were going to put together an hour-long documentary on a videogame for BBC Four, what would you choose? Half-Life? Ico? The Grand Theft Auto series could probably stretch to a whole hour? Mario? No, try that one where the shapes drop onto each other.

Yes, Tetris. One of the lynchpins of the channel’s Hard Drive Heaven series (despite – GEEK HAT ON! – no version of Tetris we know needing to be installed to a hard drive to run), Tetris: From Russia With Love looked at the slightly surprising history behind the puzzle game. If nothing else, the fact the programme highlighted a huge legal tussle between Robert Maxwell and Nintendo makes it worth watching. Oh, and it’s also worth us mentioning that Tetris topped the list of (long-forgotten videogaming website) Xbollox’s Top 100 Videogames Of All-Time. That might just seem like we’re trying to force everyone to read something we wrote back when we were any good, but we’d like to state that Stu Campbell once called that article “the best list of Top 100 Games not done by me” (on the old Edge forum, we think, though we can’t be clear on the actual syntax he’d used at the time. What’s that? No-one cares? Oh).

Representing precisely the kind of 9pm-10pm Saturday night documentary-on-a-slightly-lightweight-topic pioneered by ‘I Love 19[decade][year]’ at the turn of the century, The Smash Hits Story looked at arguably the most brilliantly 1980s publication there ever was (yes, it ran from 1978 to 2006, we know). Inspiring everything from lame copyists ‘No1’ and ‘Fast Forward’ to the mighty Your Sinclair, The Smash Hits Story looked at the peak years of this publishing phenomenon, and commendably treated the last ten years or so of it’s publication with commendable short shrift. Just as when we’re allowed to to do a documentary on the NME, we’ll only bother covering up to 1998. It’ll happen, just you wait.

Special ironic post-script: the plug was pulled on Smash Hits just in time to miss the reigns of La Roux, Ladyhawke, Annie, Lady GaGa, Florence, Saturdays and Hot Chip. But there was a mini-comeback for Michael Jackson once he was dead, so well done there.

Possibly the bravest scheduling of the decade. Come December 2001, merely a few months after 9/11, the whole topic of “New York” was still very much off-limits for TV comedy. Remember how brave it’d seemed when Frank Skinner had shown his brilliant “You’ve Bin Laden” video out-take sketch only a few weeks earlier? Well, with hindsight, Skinner’s sketch was at about the same level as The Dandy publishing “Addie and Hermy” strips circa 1940, while – if you were an idiot, admittedly – this show could be seen as making gags about the holocaust in 1939.

In actual fact, this show had been recorded well before the events of September 11th 2001 – a fact the Channel Five continuity announcer went to great pains to point out before each episode – but even this hadn’t been the case, Sadowitz (who, to their eternal credit, the nascent C5 seemed to have chosen as their flagship comic, what with The Jerry Atrick Show, The People Versus and all that) surely wouldn’t have shirked from telling it like it was. The first episode ended with Sadowitz berating man-mountain WWF manager Johnny Valiant over the fakery of wresting, with furious condequences, and the remainder of the series pretty much went on from there.

 

In a decade where more people than ever have access to the non-traditional channels, the amount of interesting repeats seems to be lower than ever before. While UK Gold launched on the back of The Innes Book Of Records, Morning Sarge and KYTV, where are we now? Only Fools And Horses, Porridge and The Vicar Of Dibley on a constant loop. For shame.

Luckily, ITV4 felt fit to buck this trend – even if it were only on the daytime and early evening schedules, with verbatim repeats of not just The Big Match, but also occasional offerings from the other 1970s ITV regions, mainly Granada’s Barry Davies/Elton Welsby-helmed “The Kick-Off Match” (Wrexham vs Sunderland? Yay! We suspect Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground was the only one still readily identifiable from these repeat broadcasts). All this was brilliant to see, not least for the most minor of factors, like the way Big Match host Brian Moore always kept a big beige telephone on his desk, in case the gallery needed to contact him, or the way Moore would always read out the full names and addresses of competition winners: “Congratulations to Mrs Edna Smith of 27 St George Road, Leicester! You’re the winner of two tickets to the European Cup Final in Munich next May.” Quite how Mrs Edna Smith reacted on getting home from Munich two days after the European Cup Final only to find she’d been burgled, TV history hasn’t deemed fit to record.

Pertinent postscript: Kudos to Twitter’s @Custard_Socks for noticing this - repeats of The Big Match Revisited are currently running on Men And Motors on Wednesday nights. Y’know, at the exact same time either Champions League highlights are being shown on ITV1, or League Cup highlights are being shown on BBC One. Remind us, why did we forget that Men And Motors still exists again?

 

Tomorrow (or: “later today”, given how late it is), 80-71.

BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 2

While we’d like to spend a little time musing on the way BBC North-West and Granada* have failed to heed our advice and simply fallen off-air at the end of their analogue tenure, we’re instead going to crack on with:

(*Though, really… Granada? You used to give a flying crap about things! You just collapsed off-air in the middle of a film no-one cares about. If you still had an ounce of decorum, you’d have summoned up a roll-call of continuity announcers, like Colin Weston, Richard, Judy, Bob Greaves, Lucy Meacock, and the rest… for shame.)

 

There have been quite a lot of “wry looks at unusual people” from just beneath Louis Theroux’s faux-concerned brow over the last decade, but it’s this which has stayed in our memory. Louis And The Nazis saw Theroux visit California, specifically the home of the man dubbed “the most dangerous racist in America”, Tom Metzger, in order to see just what makes him tick. Tick with bilious bigoted fury.

While Metzher spent most of the programme trying to be polite and well-mannered (as racists tend to do when appearing in documentaries), one pivotal scene of the documentary saw him, alongside his family, angrily excommunicate Theroux from him home, after Louis courageously refused to reveal whether he was Jewish or not.

See also: Nazi Pop Twins. A 2007 Channel Four documentary where James Quinn travelled to meet Prussian Blue (who were also shown in “Louis And The Nazis”), pretty much the white supremacist answer to Tegan & Sara.

TV’s Believe It Or Not was (what seemed to be) a curious yet enjoyable pair of pilots for Sean Lock. Both programmes dipped into the less remarkable depths of TV history, be they UK-based (such as popping in and out of The Sky At Night’s ill-judged dalliance with cloud-strewn live astronomy) and US-based (Shatner. Rocket Man. That is all). On first transmission, episode one ran from 8pm-9pm, and was a family-friendly flip through the more mockable parts of the television archives. Episode two ran from 9pm-10pm of the same night’s BBC Four schedule, and was an expletive-packed glance at similarly kickable televisual offcuts. With the perpetually quick-witted Lock at the helm, both programmes were as hugely entertaining as you could reasonably expect such a thing to be – maybe Victor Lewis-Smith about fifteen years ago could have handled the show slightly more entertainingly, but only just so.

“Liiiiiiiive astronomyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

Sadly, this hasn’t yet mutated into an actual series. And sadly, it hasn’t stopped people on the internet calling Sean Lock “Sean Locke”.

You know all the things the infuriating Extras decided to pretend was wrong with studio-audience sitcoms? And you know Ash Italia’s ill-considered theory in a Word Magazine article about how British stand-up comedians are incapable of penning half-decent sitcoms? Well, this quite comprehensively slaps the latter around the chops, and kicks the former quite forcedly in the balls. And was it Not Going Out that felt the need to include a teeth-clenching cameo from the star’s top showbiz chum Chris Martin? No, it wasn’t.

So, Not Going Out happily debunked many of the misconceptions about the British sitcom. It had a live studio audience (of course, so did Father Ted and I’m Alan Partridge, but columnists tend to forget that when they’re getting in a lather over The Sodding Office). It was primarily written by a stand-up comedian (of course, so were many prime US sitcoms, but columnists tend to etc). It went out on BBC One (of course, so did Men Behaving Badly, but people seem to have forgotten how good that was when when making lists).

Anyway, to detract from us just finding excuses to attack perceived prejudices, we’ll just note that each episode of Not Going Out contained enough piss-funny lines to win us over, no matter how weak the plot tended to be, or how underused Miranda Hart was once she was written in as a proper character. If nothing else, in this age of “relentless promotion before the first episode of each series, fingers crossed most viewers stick around for episode two”, Not Going Out saw its audience grow episode by episode, despite never really being promoted by the BBC. So, naturally, it was axed before series three had finished. Hey, that’s marketing for you. Expect the final, Christmas themed episode on your screen over the end of this month, unless the BBC One schedulers are even more clueless than even we’d fear think.

He looks and sounds a bit like Andrew Collings. He writes and thinks a bit like us, if you were to believe a reply to one of our posts on the NotBBC comedy forum a couple of years ago (we post there under the less-than-wacky pseudonym ‘Mark’, which presumably led to the confusion). Clearly, the latter isn’t at all appropriate (if nothing else, you’d have to take everything we say, but then replace the words “Shaun Micallef” with “Neil Kinnock” or something), as we’d never be capable of making biographies of Lord Byron, Karl Marx, Thomas Paine or Harriet Tubman accessible to, well, berks like us.

The Mark Steel Lectures was able to take such lofty subjects and make them accessible to the YouTube-video-sized attention spans of Generation X, putting them in the contexts of Room 101 (the Merton-fronted TV show, as opposed Orwell’s original) or the Match Of The Day studio. This led to modern-day dullards like us learning things by deceptive proxy. This is a good thing.

One of our favourite things about BBC Two over the last decade has been their propensity to broadcast programmes like this. It would have been just as easy to run a clip show fronted by a former kids TV presenter wandering around a hamfisted mockup of the Live & Kicking set, but they didn’t do that. Instead, they invited Noel Edmonds to front a retrospective of BBC One’s Saturday morning kids output – in front of a huge studio audience, and alongside his original co-stars – to great effect.

While you could quite justifiably claim such a programme was just a cynical exercise in memory-gland tugging, we’d counter that even the cold mechanical heart of a cyborg Norman Tebbit would have found the phone call from a stricken Tony Hart to be genuinely moving.

BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 1

It’s December, and that means it’s time for AN UPDATE A DAY from your super soaraway BrokenTV, all the way up to Christmas Day. No matter how busy, drunk or lying unconscious in a ditch we are, there’ll be something new on this blog every day. And if you’re going to start something like that, why not start big? Time for:

BrokenTV has called in all of its staff, including all of the staff members who never seem to post any updates to the blog, a cherry picked team of top media players, alongside several major figures from the television industry. Together, they embarked on a week’s stay at a top secret Travelodge and spent a sixty-hour week locked in vitriolic negotiations about just what abbreviation we should be using for the decade that is about to splutter out. “The noughties” has never sounded quite right (indeed, it’s December 2009, and our spell checker still doesn’t recognise it), “the zeroes” sounds too American, and we can’t use “the 2000s” because that’ll leave us nothing to use when we pen our roundup of the century’s television in December 2099. Stay tuned for that, by the way, just ninety years from now. It’ll be a blast.

In the end, the panel settled for “The Oh-Ohs”. Of course, it’s the only decade this century to end with two zeroes, it’s quite catchy, and the panel felt that when uttered, the phrase successfully encapsulated the events of the preceding nine years and eleven months, what with the war, the terrorism and the economic strife and everything. So there you go. “The Oh-Ohs”.

Then we got the work experience kid to cobble together a list of the best hundred telly shows from the decade. We would have asked the panel for their input, but they wouldn’t stop going on about when they’d be allowed to see their families again. That was apart from Mark Lawson, who was desperate keen to stay and help. Of course, we’re not that desperate.

* A quick note on how we’re doing this: to keep things interesting, we’re only including television programmes which have started in the last decade. For example, don’t expect to see The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) in there. On we go!

Ah, high concept television. While it could easily be annoying - imagine an edgy sketch show where the last line of every skit was "I see you've bought a new ladder" - it can often become second nature. For example, when Peep Show started, surely we weren't alone in thinking the entire first-person-view schtick would get timesome by about the third episode. And how wrong we all were, eh?

But this isn't about Peep Show, it’s about (to give the show its full title) ‘Frank Sidebottom’s Proper Telly Show in B/W, With Repeats In Colour’. As you might expect from the title, the first time each programme was broadcast, it was in monochrome, giving the (already pretty lo-fi) programme the feel of being captured on CCTV. When the same-week repeats rolled around, they were in full colour. An utterly pointless conceit, and as such one that we enjoyed seeing quite a lot.

Anyway, the programme itself. Anyone who stayed up too late too frequently in the early 1990s might remember Frank’s Fantastic Shed Show, a decidedly cheap yet cheerful affair going out on the wrong side of midnight on ITV. This is largely the same, but with about a fifth of the budget, meaning your enjoyment of the whole thing will hinge on whether you find Frank Sidebottom entertaining or not. We happen to think he’s endlessly entertaining, more so when the studio guests on ‘Proper Telly Show’ (yes, there were studio guests) didn’t know anything about him. David Soul, for example, clearly didn’t have the foggiest what was going on, and presumably spent most of his off-camera time pondering how long the sixth circle of hell had been in Manchester.

Notable mention: Frank Sidebottom, alongside Little Frank, also starred in Channel M’s overnight test card until the handover to Euronews. This meant the test card would appear as usual, only the centre was taken up by recordings of Frank improvising banter with his puppet alter ego. And best yet, no scary cloth clown in sight. (Second notable mention: We were delighted to notice that Frank appears in the US television commercial for FIFA 10, just the same as he does in the UK version.)

More hi-concept hi-jinkery, this time from the pen (and whatever implement people primarily use to direct things) of Peter “Chicken Lollies!” Baynham. I Am Not An Animal was the Triffic Films-animated tale of a group of highly pseudo-intelligent animals rescued from the laboratory of a vivisectionist, being forced to fend for themselves.

A top-drawer collection of voice artistes lent their voices to the show, including Steve Coogan, Kevin Eldon, Amerlia Bullmore, Julia Davies, Simon Pegg and Arthur Matthews, the latter as a rabbit bred specifically to provide telephone IT support. The main humour to be derived from the show is the relentlessly optimistic yet slightly bewildered nature of the main characters. On first being set free, finding themselves in a field of cows, paternalistic horse Peter remarks how they must be in “[a] weird giant nightclub with an uneven green dancefloor, which the overweight, naked clientele insist on eating”. Similar confusions ensue as our suburban menagerie find their own house, and (unwittingly) avoid capture from their former owners Vivi-Sec UK.

Hardly the most EPG-friendly offering on our list, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! sees the punk illusionists calling, well, bullshit on a number of pseudoscientific notions, fads and misconceptions.

Many, if not all, of the topics should often have a default setting of “bullshit” in the minds of most reasonably thoughtful people, but that doesn’t stop it being an interesting, and useful programme. In an age where far too much television exploits people buying into the myths of “talking to the dead”, alternative medicine or crypto-zoology, it’s kind of comforting to see a programme roundly debunking such things – and showing their workings as they go. As well as swearing quite a lot.

As you might expect, it’s far from being a show for everyone. Penn and Teller’s libertarian viewpoints mean that left-wing prejudices are attacked as often as those from the right, so while Timmy Guardianreader might well lap up episodes focusing on creationism or so-called ‘family values’, he’d be spitting tofu with apoplectic rage at the episodes attacking environmental hysteria, recycling or PETA (well, not ‘apoplectic rage’ as such, but he might mutter something and scratch his beard angrily).

If we do have one problem with the show, it’s that the producers can occasionally be as prone to cherry-picking their ‘evidence’ as those they are attacking. An early episode looked at the ‘myth of secondhand smoke’, which Penn Gillette has since admitted had been misleading. And so would Teller if he hasn’t been in character, presumably.

Given it’s arguably the greatest revelation in communication since the invention of the printing press, it’s surprising there haven’t been many television documentaries taking a look at the history of the internet. Or possibly, given the way we’d said “the printing press” and not “television” in that sentence, not that surprising (because television allowed only a tiny proportion or people to put out their crackpot views to millions, whereas the printing press and internet allowed anyone with the necessary equipment to pump out their demented ideas without fear of censure, like what we’re doing now. If you were wondering).

It seems that for this decade, Download: The True Story Of The Internet is as comprehensive a retelling of the tale as we’re going to get. It’s not absolutely perfect – the slightly odd presentational style of host John Heileman can be a little offputting – but all credit to the producers for having the show helmed by a journalist who has been closely involved with the web from its early days, and he does know what he’s talking about. Just remember, if the show had been made in the UK, it’d probably be hosted by Iain Lee instead. So, think on.

The first episode of ‘Download…’ can be viewed in full on Google Video here.

Quite annoyingly, John Simm doesn’t seemed to have aged a single day over the last ten years. 2000’s Never Never was a two-part drama for Channel Four, written by Tony Marchant. It saw Simm playing John Parlour, a darkly charming loan shark, forever hovering around the residents of a sink estate with the promise of funding a Christmas their kids really deserve, and hey, something special for you as well. After a fashion, karma ends up taking its revenge on Parlour, putting him in a position where he needs to help of his former victims if he is to survive.

Very well written, and as good a performance as you’d expect from Simm, this is a nicely engrossing story that really ought to see an outing on More4.

 

Tune in tomorrow for shows 95-91! Or whatever the web equivalent of ‘tuning in’ is. Click in? Ah, you know what we mean.