In 1979, the idea for Life of Brian came about when members of Monty Python were promoting their previous film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Eric Idle joked that their next project would be called “Jesus Christ: Lust For Glory”, and his fellow Python realized that no one had ever made a comedy about […]
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No reason to post this other than we all need a bit of a laugh today as we begin to close the book on 2020! As Silly Walks signs encouraging people to make the Ministry of Silly Walks proud as they venture out on their daily walk are popping up around the world there is […]
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Upstart Crow — “Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow: A Lockdown Christmas 1603”, will echo real events of the 17th Century, when the plague – or black death – hit Europe in a series of waves spanning hundreds of years. Although the nature of the disease and its transmission were not known and misunderstood, isolation and social distancing were employed to combat the outbreaks. Sound a little bit familiar?
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Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…even in 2020! The Vicar Of Dibley, the classic comedy starring Dawn French, will return with The Vicar of Dibley in Lockdown, a series of lockdown specials as part of the BBC’s festive holiday line-up this year. Created and written by Four Weddings And A Funeral writer Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, the series of three 10-minute […]
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Full disclosure, I didn’t need to see results of a study to tell me that The IT Crowd had the most ‘laughs per minute’ in a recent survey conducted by OnBuy.com. The U.K. online marketplace surveyed 2,325 fans and asked them to name the top 10 funniest British sitcoms of all time. That said, I will quietly […]
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Call Me Kat, based on the brilliant British situation comedy, Miranda, is headed to Fox in….(bear with)…January 2021. The new Jim Parsons/Mayim Bialik produced series, stars Bialik as Kat, a 39-year-old woman who struggles to prove to her mother that you don’t need to have everything you want to be happy, and uses the money her parents had […]
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From Jimmy Anderson in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin to Ben Parkinson in Butterflies to Lionel Hardcastle in As Time Goes By, Geoffrey Palmer has been a constant fixture in our collective British comedy lives for the better part of four decades with these three series alone. Palmer, who had numerous guest roles in series such as Doctor Who, Inspector Morse, Blackadder Goes Forth, Poirot, Ashes to Ashes and Rev, had perhaps his most well-known guest starring role as Dr Price in “The Kipper and the Corpse” episode of Fawlty Towers in 1979. With a celebrated career that spanned seven decades, Palmer, who turned 93 years young in June of this year, passed away peacefully at his home on Thursday, 5 November.
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Just like Auntie Mame talked of the world ‘needing a little Christmas’, it seems like the world’s ability to make it through the remaining weeks of 2020 is going to hinge on ‘needing a little funny’ very soon. PBS has just that tonight with the premiere of One Man, Two Guvnors on Great Performances.
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You could easily argue that the character of Gareth Blackstock, the chef/owner of the two Michelin star, Le Château Anglais in the British situation comedy, Chef, was defined as much by a simple but brilliantly written three-minute tirade against an individual dining at the restaurant for his indiscriminate use of salt before tasting his dinner as he […]
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What better way to celebrate John Cleese’s 81st birthday, belated or otherwise, than with a look back at, perhaps, the two most classic clips from the greatest British comedy of all time, Fawlty Towers.
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