more Myers English-taking-the-piss-out-of
sfunny because it's true
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Okay, let's see how things had shifted, in terms of the canon, slightly more than a decade after the 1974 appraisal by the critics of t... -
Onto the third installment of this series - the NME 's list of the Greatest Albums of All Time, published on October 2 1993. Here, it... -
I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular mo...
The Last Anglophile.
ReplyDeleteHe could have sold this song to Supergrass or Elastica, they'd have bitten his hand off for a tune this good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HF3x67VK9o
Sounds like it would have suited Jet or the Hives better but yeah excellent time travel
DeleteThe view through the other end of the telescope:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L4IrgZHvzk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lf0A3JuxjU
The Day Today is part of this whole swathe of British TV that I completely missed having moved to the UK, a long period before BBC America started picking up some stuff and ages before streaming made almost everything from anywhere accessible.
DeleteOnly just catching up with some of the missed stuff now - for instance finally watched Nathan Barley. Saw one episode of Jam. Still not seen Brass Eye.
It's not just Chris Morris, there's loads of things I missed - it's like a strange form of cultural amputation, something that should be part of my televisual make-up as a Brit, but instead there's a big gap.
I'm not quite sure what the American perspective on SNL is. As far as I understand, Americans accept it as aggressively mediocre, yet somehow a Petri dish for the breeding of comedians that enter the national consciousness (not that such a promotion necessarily indicates quality).
ReplyDeleteHow on earth were Americans knowledgeable enough about British kids TV to clock the (lightweight) parody? Fun fact: the most successful comedy import to the US is Keeping Up Appearances, in terms of viewership.
Myers is Canadian so that brings him closer to UK, but I think he also spent part of his youth in the UK. Any opportunity to do an English accent would be seized.
DeleteSNL has had good phases over the year, when it was worth watching - the hit rate in terms of sketches would be 50/50 and they had some clever ones that caught the cultural moment. But they had this notorious problem of making a sketch too long, something initially funny would just be wrung dry. (I think they even did a meta-sketch about this too-long-sketch syndrome).
Live comedy on stage in front of an audience but also TV cameras, and trying to integrate a different guest in the ensemble each week, is probably challenging. But yeah after the original (i'm told) classic SNL, the writing has been very variable and when it's bad, it's really gruesomely bad.
Mind you, if you compare the original late 70s SNL with what was mainstream fare in the UK at around the same time - like Mike Yarwood Xmas specials, one of which I foolishly tried to watch the other day - you can see why it might have been considered edgy and groundbreaking.
Ah I was wrong about him growing up in UK but his parents were both English immigrants to Canada.
DeleteWhen I was teaching ESL in South Korea, on Christmas Day I insisted my American girlfriend and I watch Wallace and Gromit. The Wrong Trousers is a practically flawless work of art.
DeleteActually, one sore point I have to jab at the venerated Seinfeld (other than the herpeslike annoyance of Kramer) is the idea that it was innovative because it was about nothing. It was already a staple of the classic British sitcom that they'd have an episode (for budgetary reasons) where the main character would just be at home all day and over the half-hour episode drive themselves insane.
ReplyDeleteLove Seinfeld but yes you are right about that. The other week I remembered the existence of Eric Sykes and found myself watching his show Sykes (with Hatti Jacques) and that is essentially about a man doing nothing much at all - getting exercised about extremely inane and minor annoyances, disagreements with neighbours (including a snobby one played to type by Richard Wattis) etc etc.
DeleteI had to turn it off after 10 minutes. I did quite enjoy his modern slapstick outing The Plank, though.
If you want to look further into the origins, arguably the first British sitcom (and the first sitcom about nothing) was literary: The Diary of a Nobody, the Punch serial that became a comic novel in 1892. That would make the Yanks a century behind the Brits.
DeleteAh look, David Stubbs makes exactly that point in this out-take from his new history of Brit comedy, Different Times https://davidstubbs.net/from-diary-of-a-nobody-to-jeeves-and-wodehouse-to-j/?fbclid=IwAR2SsKbUg3vn1VkWlwIX4_a4db3dPXeADay9ZA5bUrolbtw0trhTnzFgZOg
Delete"If there’s a literary cornerstone for the sensibility of 20th century British comedy, it’s The Diary Of A Nobody, the creation of George Grossmith and brother Weedon, who provided the mournful pen and ink illustrations which accompany the text"