If you been with Tellyspotting as a P1 since Day 1, or if you have joined the conversation at any point over the course of the last ten years, you are probably acutely aware of my lack of tolerance for poorly done American television remakes of British television output. This holds true mostly in the […]
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Easily the funniest comedy of all-time, the 12 episodes (yes, there were only 12) of Fawlty Towers are nothing short of comedy perfection comprised of brilliant line after brilliant line and unmatched to this day, some 45+ years after its premiere in 1975. Not only is it a masterclass of comedy writing and performance, the series […]
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Red Nose Day has to be the single most brilliant example known to man and/or woman of how an entire country demonstrates the ability to rally around a charitable cause. To label Red Nose Day in the UK as a cultural phenomenon is doing it an injustice. It’s an institution.
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These R.I.P. posts seems to be coming at an alarmingly fast rate these days and while all of them are devastating to those of us that have literally grown up on British comedy and drama, this one painfully hits home as the wonderfully brilliant Trevor Peacock has died. Known as the lovable but bumbling Jim […]
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You may not know his name but anyone that has followed the careers of Nigel Tufnel, Derek Smalls and David St. Hubbins, a.k.a. Spinal Tap, the world’s greatest fictional English heavy metal band, will definitely know his work as Ian Faith, the manager of the band in This is Spinal Tap. Tony Hendra, forever known as the man who ‘shrunk Stonehenge’ for the bands title song, “Stonehenge” died late last week in Yonkers, NY at the age of 79 after battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) since 2019.
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Given the events of the last year, you’re probably at a point where you feel like you are either living in the middle of a sitcom or more like a nightmare. Nightmare aside, if you’ve ever thought, as I’m sure we all have at one time or another, 1) this would make a great sitcom or, […]
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Aside from the obvious much more important reasoning of ‘flattening the curve’, ‘slowing the spread of the virus’ and vaccinating as much of the world’s population as possible, if anything good has come from the last year of the off-again, on-again mandated ‘sheltering at home’ lockdown, it’s the steady flow of creativity from the creative […]
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One of the few upsides of this past week of sub-zero temperatures, loss of electricity for millions of people and the possibility of broken pipes in our collective futures, is the opportunity to send good wishes for a very happy birthday to the brilliant Dame Patricia Routledge, who turned 92 on Wednesday. While Hyacinth would […]
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What innocently started out as a play by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields (i.e. Mischief Theatre) has quietly turned into a go-to binge watch series during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Play That Goes Wrong was followed up with two Mischief Theatre television specials, an adaptation of Peter Pan Goes Wrong (performed by Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society) and a sequel titled A Christmas […]
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Rowan Atkinson turns 66 today. Thankfully, for us, the comedic genius chose to put neither his degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Newcastle University nor his degree of MSc in Electrical Engineering from The Queen’s College, Oxford to use. His true calling became more clear after gaining national attention as member of The Oxford Revue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1976.
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