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The one good thing Channel 5 ever did was the British version of The Mole, which was absolute genius but died after two years because no fucker watched it because it was on Channel 5  (The presenter, Glenn Hugill, later took a light-entertainment Endemol format and, as executive producer, turned it into this. Can't think of a more deserving bloke to get the success.)
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Sep 6, 2010 17:16
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I hate to say things like "remember, this is America we're talking about". But, um, remember, this is America we're talking about. Besides, it also puts him squarely in the sights of Jon & John on the Daily Show, and I've been waiting patiently for him to get a proper kicking from that quarter ever since he first showed signs of starting to catch on over there.
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Sep 8, 2010 18:12
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Afterdark posted:Looking at the BBC news websites picture about the episode you think that was about to happen. I dont know if the person who chose that image was going for suspense or simply taking the piss. Director: Cut! Sir Ian: Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian.
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Sep 10, 2010 13:07
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slotbadger posted:Also, our American friends make such a noise about Stewart and Colbert. We have to remember that we have loving Paxman. If Paxman was as influential to current affairs here as Stewart and Colbert are to current affairs there, we'd be a hell of a lot better off...
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Oct 2, 2010 04:12
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James Blunt's always struck me as a decent bloke since I saw this great interview with him where someone had a passive-aggressive pop at his hiring a backing band and general lack of street cred, and he came back with something along the lines of "well yeah but I've never pretended to have street cred, I was an Army officer, and then I left, and I'd enjoyed playing guitar so I wanted to be in a band, but when you're an officer in the Life Guards you don't exactly have many muso friends..."
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Oct 20, 2010 00:49
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Unless I missed something, Piers Morgan never ran a front-page story claiming that 95 people had been killed by their own mates and then beat up and urinated on people trying to save the lives of the dead, nor did he run a front-page story openly celebrating the deaths of 320 foreigners in one of the more ridiculous wars of the 20th century. He's a complete plonker, to be sure, but even he's not in Mackenzie's league.
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Nov 30, 2010 20:35
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lorn Wayne posted:Do any of you think the Partridge movie would work? I mean Ianucci pulled it off with 'In The Loop' as a 'The Thick of It' spinoff but jeez, he must be pulling out all stops with this one. Don't worry, the lad's got a foot like a traction engine.
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Dec 11, 2010 03:00
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Cichlid the Loach posted:Somehow the way Sam says "You don't need a plate, it's in a basket," cracks me the hell up, every time. It reminds me of nothing so much as the way a British tourist reacts to a stupid foreigner who doesn't understand when he asks the way to the beach; repeat yourself slower and louder until one of you gives up in desperation.
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Dec 14, 2010 12:22
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I strongly advise that you give it more of a chance.
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Dec 17, 2010 12:50
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hookerbot 5000 posted:He was, the 'Sons and Daughters of England' bit still makes me laugh to think about it. "Rubbish!" *chuck* *smash!* *wince* What a guy.
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Dec 22, 2010 15:19
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King Crab posted:Man, I don't get all the Micheal Macintyre hate that's going on here. He seems to really love what he is doing and I think it gives him a great energy. See, what I (and a lot of people) can't stand is that guy who's already laughing at his own punchlines 30 seconds before they come along, and Michael Macintyre is that guy. He's got some great jokes (the one that sticks with me is the piece about trying to spend Scottish money in English supermarkets), but I just can't stand the preening, self-satisfied way in which he tells them. I do object to a comedian who's apparently not secure enough in his own material to trust that it's actually funny; the vibe I get off Macintyre is a constant narrative of "this is funny! I'm funny, me! I'm being incredibly incredibly funny now!"
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Jan 4, 2011 23:36
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Watching the Boosh for me has always been like watching a bunch of old school-mates in the pub. They've been mates for so long that they've got all their jokes and riffs and references that have them absolutely falling about laughing, and everyone else in the pub is looking round, trying to work out where the joke was supposed to be. They're clearly having a great deal of fun, but that doesn't mean it's automatically funny for everyone else.
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Jan 19, 2011 19:56
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The Daily Show is biting satire pretending to be harmless comedy. 10 O'Clock Live is harmless comedy pretending to be biting satire. Best exemplified by the opening segment, in which Jimmy Carr talks about the issues of the week, complete with amusing pictures and captions (except on the other side of the screen and without the Daily Show's bodged-together charm)...but then does a bunch of HIGNFY-guest-comedian-one-liners. There's no attempt to point out anything interesting about Johnson's resignation or Balls's appointments, just a dick joke. It's such a ridiculous miscalculation. There's virtually no actual satire going on. Ian Hislop's definition, "the exposure of vice, folly and humbug", is as good as any, and it took fully 25 minutes for Listen to Mitchell to do some actual satire (he does a very good British version of Lewis Black). And then along came the next segment, which was just four people in the pub at about pint two and a half, putting the world to rights. And then Brooker did some more just-about sub-Newswipe satire at 32 minutes, and that's yer lot. I also hope that they'll find their feet as the run goes on, but right now this is less the Daily Show and more the Half-Hour News Hour, which fell down exactly the same pit. Melche posted:And honestly I don't know why they thought it would - interviews about big issues by people who have no special knowledge about those issues or skill at doing interviews. Ian Hislop or someone could do it, but why did they think Mitchell and Carr could? He could barely keep that interview in line without everyone talking over each other, let alone make anything funny out of it. I mean, interviewing's a real skill, live interviewing doubly so, I dunno why they thought they could magically do it. It seems they've seen Jon Stewart interviewing politicians and said "okay, let's interview politicians". They've completely missed the point by trying to have a comedian do it po-faced and serious and just like every other interview Willets has ever done. That's exactly the opposite way to how Stewart does it; his challenge to a political interviewee is "ok, I know you can do an interview, but can you do an interview and be funny?" Being funny is his home field, it's playing to the major advantage he has over his interviewee. How they think a comedian is going to stand any chance against a politician on the politician's own home ground is utterly beyond me. It reminds me of Donny Tourette having a pop at Bill Bailey on Buzzcocks and getting told by Amstell "I should explain: Bill is a professional comedian. You won't win!" Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Jan 21, 2011 |
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Jan 21, 2011 07:39
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Of course, what they really should do is pay John Bird and John Fortune merry bushels of cash, and turn E4 into The George Parr Channel.
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Jan 22, 2011 04:20
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 Alert for insomniacs: Channel 4 is currently showing Withnail & I. Watch it on their +1 channel right now if you've never seen it before. You'll thank me later.
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Jan 23, 2011 02:13
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Taear posted:And it will never be good again. Without Rob Grant, Doug Naylor just doesn't have the spark. They need each other to be able to write. Doug needs Rob exponentially more than Rob needs Doug. Just read Backwards and Last Human back-to-back to see why this is the case. quote:That said series 8 is definitely better than 7 - Naylor did 7 all on his own and if you watch them both back on the DVDs you can definitely tell. Series 8 at least has moments of greatness. Not so much on the TV when the episodes are split up into parts, but when you watch them all as a lump they're definitely decent. You sure about this? Doug used other writers extensively in S7 (4 writers on 5 out of 8 episodes) and far less in S8 (2 out of 8 episodes and only Paul Alexander)...
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Jan 23, 2011 18:37
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Fatkraken posted:No one likes 1 and 2? For me, I like them both because they're different, and I do fail to understand people who think the show would be better without the first two series, because the later stuff doesn't work nearly as well without those first two years of really establishing the characters properly. I do also think you're slightly selling the later years short in terms of character focus. S3 has Marooned (duh), but it's also got Timeslides (which contains some good exploration of Lister and Rimmer's pasts) and The Last Day. S4 has two episodes with great focus on Kryten (Camille and DNA) and three for Rimmer (Dimension Jump, Justice and Meltdown). S5 has Holoship and Terrorform, both about Rimmer. S6 had rather less, but even S7 had a try with Duct Soup and Blue. There was certainly less of it about, but it's definitely still there. By the way, here is why Wikipedia is brilliant
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Jan 24, 2011 21:02
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 But that's unfair to Murdoch because his online player is poo poo and therefore everyone else's should be poo poo as well
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Jan 25, 2011 17:38
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Is it my imagination, or did the BlackBoxxxBabe look suspiciously like Konnie?
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Jan 25, 2011 23:30
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God forbid he repeat things he's already said if it's relevant to the subject he's discussing, or for the benefit of people who haven't heard him saying them before...
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Jan 26, 2011 13:08
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Just watched 10 O'Clock Live. More actual satire than last week is good, and then you have that thoroughly appalling Campbell interview, which was like watching the curb-stomping scene from American History X on a loop. I don't get why anyone involved thinks that anyone on that show can hang with the likes of Campbell or Willetts in a straight interview.
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Jan 28, 2011 23:40
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HauntedRobot posted:See normally I'd be pissed off when an interviewee dodges the questions and comes back with rehearsed answers but I think there's two things that set the "serious bits" in 10o'clock apart. One, they seem to be slowly taking the gloves off and ditching some of the politeness to ask some of the stuff people never say. You will never, ever, ever, ever get a comedian to be able to beat a politician or associated hanger-on in a serious interview. It just won't happen. They're too good at serious interviews, otherwise they wouldn't have survived. It doesn't matter what you ask them; even if you do try to say "well hang on a minute, didn't some of your policies suck donkey balls?", they know how to come out of it looking good. Alistair Campbell represents, to me, everything that is wrong with politics and the Labour Party, and yet halfway through that interview I was hoping he'd give Mitchell's lovely questioning the treatment it deserved (and was quite enjoying watching him run rings round the guy). I've said before, I'll say it again; they need to start ripping Jon Stewart off more. Don't challenge Alistair Campbell to seriously justify his time in power, he's spent the entirety of the last 15 years doing that. Challenge him to be funny. He's not used to that. You get that atmosphere going, and you get some repeat guests as they swarm up the greasy pole and/or they think "I can be funny too, this isn't so hard", and then after a time you get moments like Stewart asking John McCain right before his presidential bid "Are you freaking out on us? Because if you're freaking out and you're going into the crazy base world - are you going into crazy base world?" and McCain saying right back "Yeah, I'm afraid so". Stewart can get those results cos he's got his "I'm just a comedian, trying to be funny, please explain things to me O expert" vibe going on, and he gets these people feeling comfortable while in an area they have little experience with, and sometimes he gets something interesting out of them. Right now it's the other way round - the guests are in their element and Mitchell's trying to be comfortable despite not being able to match them on expertise. That's always going to end badly. quote:Secondly, if they DON'T try and answer them, they get a round-the-table kicking later on. Far too often on other shows they just wind up the interview and say "thanks so much for coming on". Here they seem to be saying "what did you think of that guy, then. He was a bit of a slimy oval office". Which just makes the show look petty. Their guy's just been comprehensively outmanouvered, so now after the guest has won the interview and has gone back to the green room and is no longer able to defend himself, they're going to put the boot in? That's not fair at all. You have a guy on your show and he wins, he wins. You can't say "but we know he's a horrible poo poo really." That's cheating.
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Jan 29, 2011 22:43
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Inverse square posted:Cha-ching! Brilliant! Thanks so much... christ, THIS is the reason we have the internet, isn't it? This is the exact reason. I'm still waiting for someone else who watched The Delta Wave... (mid-90s, CITV, kids with psi-powers and a scientist woman called Dr Munro)
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Feb 3, 2011 17:48
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Every bit of stand-up I've seen from Stewart Lee has made him seem incredibly bitter that he's never achieved a lasting mainstream success. This is no exception. I'm sure if someone came along and deconstructed his act in incredibly sarcastic terms it wouldn't seem particularly funny, but unfortunately he's not famous enough for anyone to want to.
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Feb 7, 2011 21:08
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Unkempt posted:I think you mean Ian McShane but that's a lovely image anyway. Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian ACTION COWBOY TELL THE WHORES IF THEIR LEGS AIN'T IN THE AIR THEY'D BETTER BE OFF THEIR ASSES CUT! ...Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian.
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Feb 8, 2011 16:46
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N3RDSTER posted:The piece I read in the Guardian made out that he responded (and that Baker asked it) as if it were more along the lines of "how do you manage to sleep at night with all that pressure?" rather than "there's blood on your hands you monster". Killer for me is the co-host's reaction, which has two absolutely classic signals; she changes the surprised gasp to a cough, and she instinctively goes to cover her mouth in surprise and then changes it into a hair touch.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:35
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thehustler posted:I think I'm in love with Joy from Drop the Dead Donkey. You mean there's people who aren't? 
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Apr 14, 2011 22:50
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Dicky B posted:Tim Vine owns. You know, I could see Spike Milligan or Tommy Cooper doing this. Love it. The music is utter genius.
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Apr 16, 2011 20:22
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Kin posted:Well, everything's going according to plan so far. I've no idea what time it started, i just woke up and caught a glimpse of it as my parents watched it on TV so i'm presuming i've missed some of it and now i'm going to happily sit in my room and either dick around on the xbox or the internet for a few hours until it all fucks off. My plan to sleep through it was interrupted by someone texting me, so I switched it on so I could switch it off again and just caught Kate completely blanking the Unknown Warrior. I didn't know she'd had the Royal lobotomy already.
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Apr 29, 2011 13:31
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There's been a murder!
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May 12, 2011 19:58
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Someone asked for the clip of Merton on Parkinson talking about why Angus had to leave HIGNFY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMXiR089ARQ "The suggestion was that you and Ian had stabbed him in the back..." "Well, we stabbed him in the front!"
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May 23, 2011 13:57
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ChuckDHead posted:Yikes, this looks like what would happen if they'd made Love Thy Neighbour with blackface. His father was an officer in the Indian Army; he was born and grew up there. Some of the Goon Show episodes feature long strings of Hindi obscenities on the grounds that nobody would get them - legend has it that the BBC then began recieving complaints from supposedly respectable old ladies complaining about the offensive language, to which his response was "and how did a respectable old lady find out what those words mean?"
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May 25, 2011 12:54
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The Goon Show. I remain forever amazed that Something Awful as a whole has never discovered it - it's completely wacky and off-the-wall and the title has the word "Goon" in it. Horses, water, et cetera.
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Jun 2, 2011 22:27
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Have you got two and a quarter hours to fill and nothing to fill them with? You could do a lot worse than watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil, an absolutely wonderful mindfucking dystopian classic. It has Jonathan Pryce as an everyman who develops the will to fight against conformity and bureaucracy, Michael Palin giving the film performance of his life, and Robert de Niro as a terrorist repairman. It's on the iPlayer for the next six days, which is a good thing because you may want to watch it more than once. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0079397/Brazil/
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Jun 12, 2011 01:14
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So, did I miss something, or did Shadow Line have precisely one character (Bede) who you could spend more than one rather short sentence describing without having to mention his job and/or function to the plot? This is my issue with the show. Looks gorgeous, great cast, a plot with twists and turns in all the right places...but why should I care about any of the people in it? Why are they doing what they're doing? What's driving them? How do they feel about what's happening to them? Now with Bede, we get all of this. He's the decent man in a dodgy business, he likes everything to go smoothly, he's got a brain on him, he treats his partners with respect and keeps out of the limelight, he doesn't want to get in deep, he just wants to make his money back and provide for his family, then get out. Of course he has to take the lead, but he motivates himself to solve the problems and still plans his early getaway, but ironically he sets everything up so neatly that it's trivial for his less-scrupulous associate to remove him entirely from the picture and take over. Does he even care by the end? His wife means so much to him that it probably isn't an exaggeration to say he's already lost it all, and his betrayal merely serves as the full stop at the end of a finished sentence. We could go on for ages talking about him; but he's the only guy I feel I could hold that kind of a conversation about. The perfect examples are the two sidekicks; there's Jay Wratten, and then that chick who follows Gabriel around but I had to look it up on Wikipedia to find out her name is apparently Lia Honey. All right, Rafe Spall has real charisma and he plays the role really well and I'm looking forward to his scenes in every episode; but what does Wratten actually do? He either trails around after Bede, or he goes to frighten people with his screw-loose manner, and then he takes over at the end. Why does he do any of that? He's clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic - why is that? What's motivating him to do the things he does? Why does he feel unable to trust Bede? How can he be sure that his underlings will follow a nutter? Has he even thought about that? And Lia Honey does even less; she just follows Gabriel about the place and gives him someone to talk to. She ineffectually tails someone and has a nicely-choreographed fight, and then it turns out in the final episode that somehow she's a skilled sharpshooter, and then she shoots Gabriel. Why the hell would she want to do that? Absolutely no clue. Look at most other characters, and you end up in the same place; they're people who do things because the plot demands that they do them.
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Jun 17, 2011 01:53
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I'd settle for John Fortune interviewing George Parr of News Corporation.
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Jul 15, 2011 16:32
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Red7 posted:You would have thought they would have smashed out a special considering whats going on. Ian Hislop must be bouncing off the walls somewhere. Z-Magic posted:The new issue Private Eye can't come soon enough. The last Private Eye appeared on my doormat a day after this all broke and therefore had absolutely nothing about it. I cannot wait for Wednesday.
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Jul 17, 2011 11:28
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Atomic Dog posted:I realised the other day that "I'll be there for you" is probably the bit of popular music I've heard the most times in my life. There's a great bit about the rest of the song they made up in a hurry so they could have a radio hit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S8wBNoiv90
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Aug 4, 2011 11:39
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Here is a special celebrity edition of Incredible Games. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYK-1ICTdYk Yes, it features THE DARK KNIGHT'S LAIR!!!!!!!!!!!
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Aug 7, 2011 15:07
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Anyone else here use to watch Delta Wave on CITV in the mid-90s? Two kids with psi-powers and a female scientist called Munro. Mentioning it is usually really good if I need to demonstrate the concept of a blank look.
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Aug 7, 2011 19:51
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