Ooh... that's dated badly

[kokamoa]

...and Zoe Wanamaker, by all accounts.

They were right though, it was poop.

I thought it was great during the early years with Kris Marshall in it.

[My Name Is Ian]

Basically it was a conscious decision to create a sitcom in the US style, with long-running characters and a "writers room" style creative environment rather than the work of one or two people putting out six episodes a year.

There was a definite move towards trying to Americanise comedy and light entertainment in this country from the mid-1980s on. You've got ITV buying and remaking American sitcoms, usually with diastrous consequences, like Brighton Belles or Married for Life, and these repeated attempts to make "talk shows" a thing. I mean Jesus, TVS bought Mary Tyler Moore's production company. They were all desperate for a Letterman, or a Seinfeld, or whatever.

But then, 2.4 Children was written deliberately by committee and it still has this slightly more cynical tone that kind of marks it out as British. On the whole, as mentioned above, the domestic audience was getting older and more conservative, and just ripping of American ideas was never going to be enough on its own.

That thing with Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker, well, I just wasn't persuaded by them as a couple in the slightest. It didn;t offend my sensibilities, I don't think, I just didn't think it was funny.

[Lobachevsky]

I have a recollection that Up the Elephant and Round the Castle* was in the midweek 8pm slot on ITV.

*What does that even mean? I get the reference to the place, but as a title I've never understood it.

[Lobachevsky]

I loved Citizen Smith when I was at school.

peter Vaughan was outstanding and the long running gag of the girlfriends min calling Wolfie, Foxy never got old.

the title sequence was always better than the show though.

[Simon G]

I've heard of, but never seen, Citizen Smith. Is there a reason it was never repeated?

[3 Colours Red]

I've heard of, but never seen, Citizen Smith. Is there a reason it was never repeated?

It was - I remember the BBC repeating it well into the 90s (Genome confirms showings in 1993 but I'm reasonably sure they went on later than that because I can picture watching it on a TV we only got in 1995).

And if you really want a Robert Lindsay sitcom recommendation, watch Nightingales. Lots of surreal plotlines and fourth-wall breaking.

[Snake Plissken]

Citizen Smith is on Forces TV regularly. Maybe even this week. As is Nightingales.

[NHH]

Indeed. Boots also fulfills the "quite smart in the '70s but looks badly outdated now" classification.

Indeed - private equity does that to a business, sadly.

[NHH]

I've got about twenty Giles annuals (it's a collection I'll complete one day, but I haven't had the physical space to build up large collections of books for while), and they're wonderful. For me, the really poignant thing about them is that he probably carried on drawing for a little too long, and you can really see the deterioration in quality of the last few. I went back to them a couple of years ago and they haven't aged as badly as you'd probably expect Daily Express cartoons from half a century ago to have done.

There's a cafe/bar near where we live where there's loads of Giles on the wall. The thing that I can't get my head around is that they're just not funny, at all. It's not that I don't like the humour or think it now out of place, but that I can't see it, at all. It's like a 1980s ITV sitcom in being completely without any actual comedy, but now I realise that's because it was aimed at a middle-class English audience I just had no understanding of.

The comment about Farage et al wanting to turn the clock back to the 1970s is interesting, seeing how it's the decade I'd like to turn the clock to, too. I like the economic quality, the rich selling off their country piles to avoid inheritance tax and ruinous running costs, the mainstreaming of the 60s from Carnaby Street to the High Street and the sheer palpable sense that everything is in flux. Sure, British Leyland cars were shit, but no shitter than British cars had been prior to this; the British car industry was awful and had shitness in its DNA because of the godawful quality of British management and it's obsession with class and status and being pissed as a fart by noon (something that carried across management everywhere).

I like the 70s too because it wasn't clear that what was about to happen would happen, so there's doubtless an idea that if we could do it again slightly differently, we'd avoid the terrible political end, but it is intriguing that the Farage lot don't locate their year-zero at 1979, which was still racist, misogynist but by which time the high watermark of British social democracy had been reached and was draining away.

Berba makes a good point about the racial element. Everything I read about this moment in the US makes it abundantly clear that race is the main faultline on which everything factures (others are more subtle and existential, such as boomers realising in the late 60s that even well paid factory jobs with holidays and pensions and leisure still required spending 40% of your life on a production line and the generation gap that opened out with their unions and parents who couldn't understand what they were whining for). There's a tendency to say the UK doesn't have a race problem like the US but BLM makes it abundantly clear how bollocks this is. I think it's precisely in cultural artefacts like On The Buses that you find the evidence of this.

[My Name Is Ian]

Well yes, a middle-class audience from half a century ago. It's likely that a sizeable proportion of the Express readership of the 50s or 60s would have been born in the 19th century.

I'm primarily there for the historical artifact nature of them and the actual artwork, which is definitely a cut above any other newspaper cartoonist of the time. I agree that there's not a great deal to laugh at about them, but humour dates pretty badly, on the whole, and topical humour from the past can be the most impenetrable of all.

I don't think Leyland cars were bad because they were nationalised, as an aside. As I said above, I grew up with a feeling that I should think was pretty commonplace at the time, that if you bought anything that with moving parts or which required electricity, there was no guarantee that it would work from new, or that or it wouldn't stop working again pretty soon after you bought it.

It was the same in America, and it was the biggest reason why Japanese car and electronics manufacturers were able to clean up in both the UK and the USA during that decade. One thing I do remember of the late 1970s was being woken up by a chorus of people trying to get their cars started in the morning to get to work in the middle of those bitterly cold winters. For all the racist doggerel about Japanese cars at the time, I'm pretty certain they regularly won most of the reliability tests.

But Farage would have been in his element in the middle of the 1970s. He'd have been all over that weird far-right, Ross McWhirter, Hughie Green, Jimmy out of Reggie Perrin world of hoping for (or waiting for) the 'flag to go up'.

And when race does appear appear in these shows, it's always presented as either a joke or a problem. By the early 1970s, the depictions of race in UK comedy had been Til Death Us Do Part, Curry & Chips (and whatever other bullshit Spike Milligan came up with), Love Thy Neighbour, and cameos of cheap, shitty stereotypes from time to time.

Charlie Williams, Kenny Lynch, and Lenny Henry all had to go through the same thing. They all had their variation on the "If you don't laugh louder I'll move in next door to you" line, and I don't know how it must have felt to have to say that about yourself.

The Fosters was the first UK sitcom with an all black cast and that was 1976, and Channel 4's first sitcom, No Problem!, which started at the beginning of 1983, had one too, but Desmond's didn't start until 1989 and sketch comedy didn't join in until 1991, with The Real McCoy. Stephen K Amos used to have a bit in his act about how it was "one in, one out" for black comedians on the TV, and how he'd have to wait for Lenry Henry to die before he got any chance of a TV series of his own.

But even Williams, Lynch, Henry, Norman Beaton and Amos were men. Women of colour in comedy in this country were invisible until, what, the 1990s? I can't think of any prior to Meera Syal or Gina Yashere, and they remain pretty underrepresented in this country to this day.

[Satchmo Distel]

Good interview here with Corinne Skinner-Carter, who was in 'Empire Road', about the struggles of black female actors:

https://archive.voice-online.co.uk/a...skinner-carter

I think black women were only accepted as singers in the 70s, or portraying wives or sex workers in problematic scenarios (e.g. Mixed Blessings). A black female child actor would play an African princess at some point.

[Jah Womble]

And if you really want a Robert Lindsay sitcom recommendation, watch Nightingales. Lots of surreal plotlines and fourth-wall breaking.

Lindsay’s finest moment for me was GBH, the Bleasdale comic-drama from the early nineties.

Pretty sure that hasn’t ever been repeated. (Or if it has, it passed me by.)

[My Name Is Ian]

I think black women were only accepted as singers in the 70s, or portraying wives or sex workers in problematic scenarios (e.g. Mixed Blessings). A black female child actor would play an African princess at some point.

I was pondering this morning that there were routes into TV in other areas for women of colour that didn't seem to exist in comedy during the 1970s and 1980s. Floella Benjamin and Ayshea Brough found work in kids TV, while Moira Stuart and Barbara Blake Hannah (the first black woman on British TV in a non-entertainment role, as a news reporter for Thames TV in 1968) both got places through the news. My assumption is that TV comedy and light entertainment were overly dependent on Footlights, the Northern club circuit and what was left of the music hall for their 'talent', none of which would have been very welcoming environments for black women, to say the least.

That said, it doesnt sound very much like Barbara Blake Hannah's experience was anything but appalling as well:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-54623417

[slackster]

Lindsay’s finest moment for me was GBH, the Bleasdale comic-drama from the early nineties.

Pretty sure that hasn’t ever been repeated. (Or if it has, it passed me by.)

GBH is on Britbox at the mo, as is a lot (not all by a long chalk, mind) of British terrestial tv classics.

[Jah Womble]

Oh, okay - did not know that.

I rather balk at Britbox and the like, tbh, but good to know that others can watch it, at least.

[slackster]

Yeah, six quid a month (on top of other subscriptions) for Beeb repeats which used to crop up on IPlayer isn't great. But at least the ITV and C4 shows on there are ad-free, so that's something.

[My Name Is Ian]

Britbox is the only streaming service we don't have, because most of the stuff I'd want I'd already got. Actually - and thanks in no small part to this thread - I invested in a couple of new hard drives last week and have been ripping as much as I can onto them. Once they start putting a lot of stuff on there that can't be found anywhere else, I'll probably join up too.

[3 Colours Red]

Once they start putting a lot of stuff on there that can't be found anywhere else, I'll probably join up too.

Yeah, you never know when you find something on YouTube how long it'll last. It wasn't that long ago that we had that recommendations thread and you mentioned Cleops' channel which was an absolute goldmine of all kinds of random crap. Now gone of course.

I've got at least 3TB of drive space filled up with various rips from YouTube, Archive.org and torrents. Looks like I need more as the bars on them in Windows Explorer have all turned red.

[My Name Is Ian]

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that you have to grab the weird stuff when it shows up because it might well not be there tomorrow. I've got 5tb here now, all backed up, with a third back up of the *really* important stuff - which may be reduced to TOTP, Air Crash Investigation, Match of the Day, and The Big Match - in the cloud.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

I've done the full run of Breaking Bad in the last couple of weeks so before launching into Better Call Saul I need to decompress a bit, so as well as progressing with Newhart (and following a YouTube rabbit hole from it) I'm watching the first Battle of the Network Stars from 1976. Even as someone raised on Superstars and It's A Knockout I am finding it incredible. Ron Howard smoking a fag, Farrah Fawcett playing golf, Telly Savalas arguing about the rules, everyone resplendent in Adidas. Adrienne Barbeau is now racing the mother from Little House on the Prairie on an obstacle course.

Howard Cosell has a habit of putting his hand behind his interviewee's neck, and has just done it to dimunitive former gymnast Cathy Rigby, and she looked terrified.

I haven't got to the end to see how this pans out, but at the start it said that each member of the winning team would be getting 20,000 dollars, and there was no "to give to the charity of their choice" at the end.

[Patrick Thistle]

We are rewatching Futurama at the moment. The episode we watched today had Bender becoming an "Ultimate Robot Fighter", parodying wrestling. He started out as Bender the Offender, loved by the crowd, but then the people running the spectacle decided to change his persona to The Gender Bender, dressed in a pink tutu and "threatening your sexuality". I said to Mrs Thistle how I didn't think they'd write that story now and she agreed. The episode was only 20 years old.

[Gerontophile]

OK, I haven't opened this one, but it already looks like I am in for the evening. I have a 'lasaga'* near the oven, and ready to ... go!

(Google the Tweet. It's funnier than it should be.)

*edit Ah, right. I forgot I was even a contributor to this.

[Patrick Thistle]

We are rewatching Futurama at the moment. The episode we watched today had Bender becoming an "Ultimate Robot Fighter", parodying wrestling. He started out as Bender the Offender, loved by the crowd, but then the people running the spectacle decided to change his persona to The Gender Bender, dressed in a pink tutu and "threatening your sexuality". I said to Mrs Thistle how I didn't think they'd write that story now and she agreed. The episode was only 20 years old.

Still watching through Futurama. Reached "Bend Her" where Bender gets a sex change to compete in the Olympics as a fembot. Felt uncomfortable watching it, tbh.

[Stumpy Pepys]

My assumption is that TV comedy and light entertainment were overly dependent on Footlights, the Northern club circuit and what was left of the music hall for their 'talent',

Butlins Redcoats too.