It’s no secret that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are expecting their second baby. What they might have been trying to keep secret is that when the time is right for the royal bundle to arrive, Prince William knows exactly who to call. While the Queen stands ready to lend a helping hand when […]
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You’d think, given the recent headline grabbing events surrounding the filming of Top Gear, there would be a memo circulating with instructions around BBC Broadcasting House that Jeremy Clarkson’s name mustn’t be mentioned at the BBC. When that happens, life and art will officially blur as evidenced in the case of the new series of the […]
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Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway has been a staple of British Television for over 15 years. Returning in 2016 for their 13th series, the live variety show is hosted by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, a.k.a. Ant & Dec. Their shows have not only been a fixture on British television since 1994 when they […]
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The ITV comedy satire series, Newzoids, is no Spitting Image but, then again, not much is. Not to say, in any way, that it’s not funny. It’s just a different show and a different time. While it will, undoubtedly, suffer from endless comparisons, Newzoids deserves a chance given the fact that satire is much harder in […]
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Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise had a professional partnership that lasted for more than 4 decades, from 1941 until Eric Morcambe’s death in 1984. One of the most famous Morecambe and Wise routines from their annual Christmas show was their comic parody of Gene Kelly’s ‘Singing in the Rain’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3GqaQkhuYw This week’s Tellyspotting #TBT happens […]
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Britain’s Royal Mail rolled out a long-overdue collection of stamps celebrating British comedy greats on Wednesday, April 1. Thankfully, this was no April Fools Day joke. The brilliant set features British comedy greats from the 1950s to the modern day, from Norman Wisdom and Morecambe and Wise to Spike Milligan and Victoria Wood. Stamps featuring […]
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With the mysterious script chronicled in the book, Fawlty Towers – A Worshiper’s Companion, a lost, never-before-broadcast 13th episode of the classic British comedy, Fawlty Towers, has been discovered. Swedish author, Lars Holger Holm, admits that he viewed the mysterious 13th episode in 1999 in the London flat of an individual from the Editorial Department who worked […]
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Even though it was 1975, it seems like it was just yesterday that I was standing in line at the Esquire Theatre in Dallas for the ‘world premiere’ of this unknown film called Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After about an hour in line, they handed each of us coconuts and moved us inside. […]
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Even though they had me at ‘starring Patrick Stewart’, the fact that the new Starz scripted comedy series, Blunt Talk, comes from the mind palace of series creator Jonathan Ames (Bored to Death), who will also executive produce along with Seth MacFarlane, Tristram Shapeero and Stephanie Davis, is all the more reason to check it […]
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I may be in the minority here, but one of my most favorite British situation comedies of all-time is Open All Hours. Written by Roy Clarke (Last of the Summer Wine, Keeping Up Appearances) and starring comedy legends Ronnie Barker and David Jason, Open All Hours ‘premiered’ in 1973 as a last-minute addition to Barker’s comedy anthology series, Seven […]
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