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Like To Watch Bad TV Comedy Shows? Beware Of Disastrous Consequences

August 1, 2009

Like To Watch Bad TV Comedy Shows? Beware Of Disastrous ConsequencesBy chance I stumbled a couple of days ago on a repeat of the programme on the box listing the top 50 supposedly funniest TV comedy moments of all time. As voted by the British viewers. The programme was half way through, so I caught only the top twenty best moments – out of the list of fifty.

Oh what a shame, I hear some of you saying who might have seen the whole programme. It was such great fun and the hilarious moments were chosen from some of the best TV comedy shows ever. Not to mention that the whole thing was presented by that comedy genius himself, Richard Wilson, of One Foot In The Grave fame.

Yeah, sure, I say to that, sarcastically. Judging by the top twenty comedy moments that I have seen I do not really think that I have missed anything worthwhile from the previous batch.

But let ut for once be serious about TV comedy in Britain. I have no desire to tell you about all those supposedly greatest comedy moments that had been included in the programme. Tastes differ, as they say. They differ greatly, I would even add. But I am still puzzled by the way so many people in Britain seem to be impressed by second and even third rate TV comedy shows, both old and new.

How is it, for example, that a situation comedy like Dad’s Army is considered brilliant? Is it that people just go along with the flow, so to speak, or are they actually quite content with that sort of undemanding humour that they get? For the life of me I could never understand all the excitement surrounding Dad’s Army. The script is usually embarrassingly bad, the acting is abysmal and the so-called jokes and puns are not really proper jokes and puns, are they? Not to mention that all the so-called ‘lovable characters’ look like total idiots and do not seem to understand the simplest of things said to them.

Another total mystery to me is the success of Fawlty Towers. What is exactly so great about it? It is a typical farce, scripted and filmed in a hurry, with very few funny lines in it and most actors not really doing a good job. But just listen to all the adoration and all the praise showered on it. So that you know, the show has been voted the Greatest British Television Programme by the British Film Institute (BFI).

How sad is that and what should it tell us about the people who inhabit the BFI? Do they have a sense of humour? Or do they simply want to look original. You know, choose some obscure programme and praise it endlessly?

And then, of course, there is the Monty Python Flying Circus, that sacred cow of British TV comedy, the analogue of the Beatles in pop music. No one is allowed to say anything bad about it. We are told that it is the greatest thing ever to have hit the small screen. Period.

Well, I beg to differ. I think that the show has its brilliant moments – there is no denying it – but overall it is quite disappointing, repetitive and predictable. There are way too many scenes that are solely based on raising a cheap laugh and the obsession with members of the cast dressing up as women and talking in silly, high pitched voices is, quite frankly, irritating. The supposedly hilarious cartoons are mostly not funny at all. It is crass, in your face humour at its worst.

And what is so great about Little Britain? I mention it here because it has a lot of Monty Python in it. Little Britain has been praised to such an extent that you would think that it is something out of this world. I am sorry, but it is not. It is politically correct to the extreme – otherwise the Labour government in Britain would have never jumped on the appreciation wagon so quickly. It is also repetitive, often too predictable and it has too many scenes where men dress up as women and talk in silly voices.

And the whole idea that the juvenile delinquent, Vicky Pollard, is some great new comedy creation is nonsense. It is pure buffoonery; it is a blatant attempt to appeal to the lowest possible taste. You cannot understand most of what this so-called ‘brilliant’ character says anyway. That cannot be funny, can it?

I also find it very strange that Absolutely Fabulous has a cult following in Britain and even in America. What is so funny about it? It is tragic, actually. Both main heroines overact in every single scene. I repeat: IN EVERY SINGLE SCENE. This is an achievement in itself.

Joanna Lumley might be a good person in life but she has no acting skills. None at all. Just like Jenifer Saunders, by the way. The whole show is just one long disaster, with two leading women pretending to be funny and eccentric. The dialogues are totally irrelevant and meaningless. It just is not comedy. It is amateurish buffoonery, if such a thing exists.

And now I come to Ricky Gervais of The Office fame. He had two slots in the top twenty greatest British TV comedy moments that I have seen. He might have even featured somewhere in the previous thirty moments but, as I have already explained, I missed them.

In my opinion, Ricky has absolutely no feel for humour. He would not be able to be funny even if somebody put a gun to his head and said: ‘If you don’t come up with a decent joke in the next thirty seconds I’ll pull the trigger and blow your brains out.’ Under such circumstances, I suspect, even Prime Minister Gordon Brown might have pulled off something close to funny. But I bet you that Ricky would have not been able to save his life. Nope, dead he would be now, brains splattered all over his short, overweight body.

Gervais had the best clip in the programme from his ‘highly acclaimed’ show The Office: the stupid dancing routine performed by the office’s manager whose name escapes me. I personally think that The Office smacks of amateurism and total lack of imagination. It is a gathering of non-entities who lead a boring existences in an office in Slough, of all places.

I have to be honest: I have never been able to watch a single episode of The Office in full. I just could not do it. It is more fun looking a paint dry. There is much more excitement in it. Honest. How on earth did the American viewers fall for that crap and a U.S. version made for TV, I would never be able to explain.

By the way, the presenter of the programme containing the best comedy moments, Richard Wilson, had managed to get a clip from One Foot In The Grave into the top twenty. It was some stupid scene with him as Victor Mildrew picking up a small dog instead of a phone handset. Don not ask me why and how the dog got there. I am no big fan of One Foot In The Grave and its main character. I find it extremely boring and unfunny. In fact, it should never have been made at all. Would have been better for everyone.

So what is the big deal, you may ask, if people like to watch bad TV comedy shows in Britain? Where is the harm in that? Well, let me tell where the problem lies: if you do not have a decent sense of humour and cannot distinguish what is funny and what is not you gradually start to lose all sense of reality.

Want an example? How about the British people voting in Blair three times in a row? How was that for having no sense of humour? I can understand when he had won for the first time. He was simply lucky then and got in because the Tories went into meltdown. But what about the second time? How humourless could you be to vote for a creep like that for the second time?

And as for the third time, well, it was actually quite tragic, considering the illegal war and other stuff. It just proved that many people in Britain have lost their sense of humour completely.

And now the British pay the price for this: they have Gordon Brown as their Prime Minister. And look at the sort of rubbish the Brits post on twitter?

Oh, don’t get me going.

– End –

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