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    #2
    One of my mothers best friends was Brendan's aunt, I never met him but my Mam did and thought the world of him. By all accounts he seems to have been a great bloke and Frank Sinatra's favourite comedian bizarrely.

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      #3
      What a line that is. There must have been squillions of characters in shows who are as obnoxious and selfish as Fr Stack but he's in such a position of strength he just comes right out and says it. Smashing into the fourth wall and even chuckling a bit as he delivers it.

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        #4
        That's because he did a gig entertaining Sinatra, liza minelli and sammy davis jr back in I think 1987,. I have vague memories of him being a big fan of Haughey, but I think that may have been an artifact of the times. I think you can see from his episode in Father Ted there was a lot more to him than the drunken father of the bride speech, or Bottler. He came along at a time where there wasn't the outlets in Ireland for him to spread his wings. Instead he wound up touring the ageing diaspora in the US, and going through the same rut. Had he been born 20 or 30 years later he would have had many more opportunities.

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          #5
          Originally posted by Kevin S View Post
          What a line that is. There must have been squillions of characters in shows who are as obnoxious and selfish as Fr Stack but he's in such a position of strength he just comes right out and says it. Smashing into the fourth wall and even chuckling a bit as he delivers it.
          It's the distilled primal roar of the Baby Boomer Generation. it's the following 20 years of politics in the anglophone world crammed into a single sentence. It covers both Brexit and Trump.

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            #6
            Father Ted had that same knack of producing simple but great quotable "lines to be applied elsewhere in life" as Withnail. "And now, onto the liars" and "that would be an ecumenical matter" being others. Shame Graham Linehan has since revealed himself to be a bit of an arse

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              #7
              Originally posted by E10 Rifle View Post
              Shame Graham Linehan has since revealed himself to be a bit of an arse
              Understatement of the century, that one.

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                #8
                Shame Graham Linehan has since revealed himself to be a bit of an arse

                I think it's more he's turned into an arse late in life. I don't think he could have done the things he did if he was like that all along. He suddenly, and without any warning became interested in shitting on trans people, and with a surprising level of intensity.

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                  I think it's more he's turned into an arse late in life. I don't think he could have done the things he did if he was like that all along.
                  Either that or Arthur Mathews wrote all the funny bits and for some reason indulged the transphobic cunt. That's what I tell myself anyway - makes it a bit easier to still enjoy their work.

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                    #10
                    Linehan was a truly fucking appalling music journalist and film reviewer for Select in the early 90s. I'm calling Mathews as the genius too.

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                      #11
                      I think that you can take from Black Books and the IT crowd that Linehan is the one who turned it from a script into a functional working TV comedy. That's the really hard bit.

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                        #12
                        I can't watch the IT crowd for any length of time because I am allergic to Chris O'Dowd, and The point is not that it is funny or even good. it's that it's a relatively well constructed, structurally competent sitcom, which is the step that has killed all other irish attempts at televised comedy. That's the thing linehan is good at.

                        i'm not sure about the dylan moran bit.Firstly you need to remember that Dylan Moran the person and Dylan Moran the comic persona are two different and separate things. Also Middle class is a stretch. His father was a house carpenter, in 70's and 80's Navan, and his mother worked in a bar. He left school at 16, at the height of our first bankruptcy. I mean he's not exactly Jim Royle right now, but he's not exactly Jack Whitehall either. In terms of socio-economic status and upbringing, He may well be the most working class person under 50 in UK entertainment. The most working class person in UK entertainment is Liam Cunningham.

                        Also I sent my sister your bit about Monster. She had a good giggle. She would take serious issue with your interpretation of This joke.. To her mind (which has a misogyny hairtrigger) this joke is about highlighting the absurdity of gender roles by inverting them, and the offending line is in her opinion a joke against himself and also a cue that what follows is meant to be taken as absurd. If she thought otherwise she wouldn't have bought me a ticket to go and see dylan moran with a couple of her friends a couple of weeks ago. (I couldn't go so she gave her ticket to another one of her friends and they all had a good catch up and traded stories about their time working with each other in Amnesty, and on the repeal the 8th campaign. As I said, hairtrigger response to misogyny.) Also where did you get the idea that you're supposed to sympathize or agree with Bernard Black. He's an emotionally stunted manchild, and misanthropic monster. I'd call him the Irish Steptoe, if Wilfred Bramble wasn't from dublin. And it's not 90% of people he has a problem with, it's all of them. It's also clear that this is always unreasonable. This is the perfect example. If anything you're supposed to sympathize with the bill Bailey character, for having to put up with the other two neurotic loons.

                        Also there is no point in comparing uk comedy shows and US comedy shows, because they are entirely different things. UK comedy shows have at most three series of six episodes, are written by two or three people at most, have a cast of about five, and have to cram a lot into a very short space of time and have a budget of about a tenner. An American Tv show will have 20 episodes a series, go on for a decade, have a cast of at least 10, about 100 writers, and employ about a thousand people. They're just not the same thing. It's like comparing 10 years of coronation street with an episode of the scottish version, Taggart.

                        Also...
                        All of this perhaps wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the almost fanatical devotion to being a cunt that Linehan displays on social media. When he's not spouting transphobia with the force of a geyser on one of the Solar System's outer moons he's indulging in pure FBPE, "Corbyn is a threat to our way of life" bollocks or, hilariously, declaring he's going to quit Twitter in protest at its continued tolerance of Donald Trump. I mean, does he even read his own tweets back to himself? I love the idea of the senior executives at Twitter finally banning Trump because some comedy writer 20 years past his heyday has threatened to close his account otherwise.

                        This is still consistent with him having completely lost his fucking mind relatively recently. Surely This happens often enough in this country for you to be aware of the phenomenon?
                        Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 13-07-2019, 20:19.

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                          #13
                          Back when I was doing standup, the BBC had one of those every couple of decade moments where it realises that perhaps people outside of Oxbridge should be allowed to do this "BBC radio/television comedy" thing and set up the BBC Northern Comedy Unit*. They had a night at the Frog and Bucket and arranged Fred Barron ("My Family", "Larry Sanders"), that one who Did Two Pints Of Lager and Graham Linehan to be sort of talking heads giving advice. I went along because of curiosity and the fact that I had an idea that might be an ideal setting for a sitcom based on my last proper jobs. And most importantly, the promise of some free drinks.

                          It was a good night, and each talking head gave advice and I was quite encouraged. Until Linehan answered a question on future projects with "Well, I'm currently working on this idea for a comedy set within an IT department".

                          I saw my One Great Idea disappear into the bin of eternity.

                          *Which is where Ideal came from.

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