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Samizdata quote of the day “For as long as I can remember, I have been shouting at my TV screen. Possibly the first occasion would have been circa 1971, in sheer irritation at the infuriating, self-defeatingly named kiddie programme Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead? Perhaps it was even earlier than that. Though I liked Teddy, I used to find Andy Pandy incredibly wet. Bill and Ben were incomprehensible. The Clangers whistled too much. ZsaZsa the Cat and Kiki the Frog were quite maddening in the way they ganged up on Hector the Dog. As for Florence in the Magic Roundabout, what a goodie-goodie!”
– James Delingpole
I would say that one of the great benefits of blogging has been that where before a person would get dangerously high blood pressure watching or hearing some drivel on the TV or radio, now they can work off this rage by blogging about it.
Apologies to non-UK readers who may not get the children’s TV references in the quote. That is why Wikipedia was invented!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I presume you mean Wikipedia.
Or is 1970’s UK children’s television programming THAT embarrassing that information it’s a state secret?
Don’t worry, it was the 70’s: The Decade where noone got out of with their dignity intact.
How very true Johnathan. I have just been sharing an anecdote from my distant past over on CCIZ, and getting a piece of deep hurt off my chest.
Lord oh lorks! Delers has it spot on. People complained when Tellytubbies came out that it was dumbing down, but compared to the patronising gibberish my generation of kids had to put up with, it is bloody Shakespeare!
Bill and Ben, check. Andy bloody Pandy, check. He missed a couple though (perhaps he’s a tad younger than me) For real rubbish, you couldn’t beat Rag Tag and Bobtail and the Woodentops.
People still watch TV?
My thoughts exactly! Television? How quaint!
Bill and Ben might not have had the clearest diction but the narrator made it obvious what was going on. The one where the hen pecked their boots free from cement just in time for them to get back into the flowerpots before the gardener got back from his lunch break was my favourite.
When I was 4 Andy Pandy was the first TV programme I made a conscious decision not to watch.
Most UK-produced children’s TV of that era was the most ghastly pablum, either crushingly earnest in its saintly goodiness, or completely insane. The Magic Roundabout looked like it was made during a bad acid trip. Yes, I know it was made in France, but the BBC showed it for a decade or more. Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men? The Wombles? It was the last gasp or the Reithian mindset at the BBC.
The only children’s programmes worth watching – the ones that you ran all the way home to be sure you didn’t miss them – were either made in the USA, or made with a strong US sensibility – by which I mean, anything that Gerry and Sylvia Anderson produced.
Some of the best children’s programmes ever made in the UK in the 60s and 70s were actually intended for adults. ‘The Goodies’ may be in a class by itself in that it may be the only TV comedy show actually responsible for the death of a viewer from laughter. (Shameless name-drop ahead) US TV personality Jesse James once told me that he saw “The Goodies’ for the first time in the late 70’s, when he was a pre-teen, and was dumbstruck by just how funny the show was – in a way never seen on US children’s television.
Whether this shows that UK adults of that period were childlike, or UK children of that period were especially mature, I could not say . . . .
Ecky Thump, anybody?
llater,
llamas
llamas, I did a search for “The Goodies” on Youtube and found this. Maybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t seem to be a kids program.
I did find Ecky Thump, too. I’m in no danger of death by laughter.
The Goodies.
Ok I shall proceed to shoot some sacred cows now (sorry Hindus).
The Goodies and Monty Python came from the same stable, namely the radio programme, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. It had Cleese and Garden and Oddie and Brooke Taylor. All were Oxbridge graduates, all were funny with a mixture of old fashioned British Music hall and a surreal edge to it gleaned from Spike Milligan and the Goons. Even Graham Chapman and Eric Idle were involved writing scripts for it.
So they were basically the same people with the same type of humour. The big difference in my mind was that Python would leave you slack jawed with it’s cleverness, but not actually laughing, whereas the Goodies would have you rolling about on the carpet clutching your stomach.
In short, the Goodies made you laugh and Python made you think you were cool and clever.
Well Python is now an icon, and the Goodies criminally never get shown. They were on tv last year because it was an annivesary or something, and they had a boxed set out of the shows, but the Beeb seems to hate them for some reason. They showed a couple of episodes and they stood up really well as far as I am concerned. But don’t hold your breath for any more repeats.
And yes the Goodies did appeal to children, because the humour is inherently silly and slapstick. Kids get it right away, but it wasn’t meant to be just a kids show, but for every age group.
Python on the other hand was aimed squarely at pseudo intellectual students.
All were Oxbridge graduates, all were funny with a mixture of old fashioned British Music hall and a surreal edge to it gleaned from Spike Milligan and the Goons.
All Cambridge, and all Footlights, actually. Most of British comedy came from there at that point.
The Goodies were shown endlessly on Australian television, and we all thought they were hilarious. They possibly still are, but I haven’t lived there for a while.
Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe … Google “the Goon Show” … I have yet to find an American equivalent …
“I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” was repeatably funny, not just funny-once … they managed to bring particular phrases into use week after week, and a lot of the time, one would realise that they had done so, entertainingly, yet again, without being predictable …
I suspect that my own favourite character in that show was the Dowager Duchess, Lady Constance de Coverlet – who, in one form or another, would manage to utter (in classic dowager-speech/tone/timbre) something along the lines of “You’ll never catch me ! You’ll never catch me ! Faster ! Faster !! Or you’ll never catch me !” … (sort of a Cougar Rampant Pursuant, so to speak, as it were, to coin a pharase, dontcha know …) …
OK … *NOW* I’m feeling OLD !
(grin)
How much of the episode pointed out by by Alisa’s link does one have to watch before it starts getting funny? I watched for a minute or so not including the “crazy fun” credits – man, three bobbies on a bicycle! – and it all seemed pretty lame.
I’m serious, by the way. I’ll go back and give it a shot, if it really does get funnier, it just didn’t look like it was going to.
It’s OK to shout at your TV- you’re only in real trouble when it answers back! (re. ‘1984’)
And you’d better watch out- HollyWood will soon be mining kids’ shows for new movies plots! I wouldn’t have thought that International Rescue could be turned into a bad movie, but it was! We’re all lucky that HW hasn’t (yet) made “Skippy the Butch Kangaroo”!
jdm, I actually ran the whole thing (admittedly, I was doing some other things at the time) and didn’t find any of it funny. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, or an artifact of those strange times (Shawn is right: no one got out of that decade with his dignity intact), or just me (I was never a fan of Benny Hill, either). But I do have a soft spot for Monty Python, and especially John Cleese; I’m glad he’s still around, as funny as ever.
Well, I would have been in my very early teens when the Goodies were being aired. I didn’t find them particularly funny, but it really wasn’t ‘adult’ TV. My parents didn’t have to worry about me hearing words like ‘masturbation’, ‘poof’ and ‘clitoris’ with Tim, Graeme and Bill, and 30 minutes of stop-frame slapstick chase sequence by a bunch of nutters with delusions of grandeur was pretty harmless. It was like Banana Splits or The Monkees but without the crappy music and teenyboppers.
When you only have 3 TV channels, you take your entertainment where you can find it. Good grief, there seemed to be a lot of allegedly funny stuff on TV, but really (and I suspect I risk an epic fisking here) – only a small portion of any given Monty Python episode was funny, same with Benny Hill, Harry Worth, Norman Wisdom, Sid James (oh, the list spews on like some tiny polymath reciting pi). And don’t get me started on the more conventional sitcoms such as the utterly crapulent ‘Are You Being Served’.
Round about the late 70’s Spike Milligan made it back onto the box with ‘Q3’ and subsequent series, and bugger me, it’s as though they followed the same dictum as Monty Python, that you just couldn’t, mustn’t air a show that was drop-dead funny for the whole 27 minutes because – well, someone might drop dead.
If there’s one thing that gobsmacks me about the US, it’s the veneration in which Monty Python is held. And Benny Hill; because while I revel in sticking two fingers up at political correctness, I just can’t see why his stuff is so well received over here among the septics. It’s as inexplicable as the French love of Jerry bloody Lewis.
Just goes to show – there’s nowt so queer as folks.
On the Gerry Anderson topic, I was disappointed to find that Gerry revived Captain Scarlet as a CGI project, making 13 episodes in 2007 or something like that, which were aired in teeny tiny bits on Saturday Morning kid’s TV. I managed to get hold of a set of UK DVDs and re-encode them in NTSC (for personal use), and the thing was fantastic. If you missed it, and you have fond memories of Supermarionation, try and catch an episode or two.
I immediately thought of Python when I watched that, RAB.
Indeed, Python was not strictly a comedy show, and to me more often than not it was not really funny – but it was always deliciously weird and cheeky. Although when it was funny, it was ROTFL funny. And of course humor is cultural. I never got Benny Hill either. Faulty Towers, on the other hand…Are You Being Served was funny at that age, but didn’t stand the test of time as far as I can tell.
Laird, that one made the e-mail rounds a while back, but Cleese’s name was never mentioned. Good stuff either way.
Probably the funniest thing I saw as a kid was Vic Reeves “Big Night Out”. It really was odd. I think it was The Stomper on Novelty Island that hooked me but what I really recall was this between Vic and Bob. They are getting increasingly elaborate in insulting each other.
Vic – “You pigeon-chested abattoir creeper”.
Now that’s meant to be the punchline for it does conjure an image but it isn’t because bang on time Bob comes back with,
Bob – “Vic you twat”.
Anyway as far as terrible TV. Does anyone here watch Syfy on Sky? Their movies are shocking. Apart from a whole smorgasbord of crapulence “Titanic 2” featured as a cuspal scene what can only be described as under-water necrophilia. The end credits listed a lot of van Dykes (gotta be!) and thanks for location filming to “Terminal Island Water Treatment Plant”. And the CGI was just chronic.
Believe it or not, the Goodies was aired on American Forces TV overseas in the late 70s (as was Monty Python) and I remember it as being pretty funny, in parts. But then I speak fluent Brit…
I’ll have to disagree, not all British 70’s Children’s Entertainment was patronising,mind-twisting rubbish – I still fondly remember a series of LP records by a zany duo of presenters called Derek and Clive…
I’m pretty sure “Derek and Clive” wasn’t meant as kid-fodder.
Several of the tracks were decidedly … advanced … for 1970’s Childrens’ entertainment.
Thanks for the info, Laird. I agree with your followup comments as well.
I was just concerned I was missing something because I wasn’t giving it much of a chance – which I didn’t.
I was wondering if it’s a bit like music. Much of (Western) rock/pop music is built around the use of the “hook”: something catchy to grab your attention and keep you listening. AC/DC’s is, to me, the preeminent exponent of this. The fact is that much of the music to which I listen (Cuban, for lack of a better term) is the “anti-hook” music. Some pieces or even sub-genres (danzon, in particular) require the listener to stay the course; it (almost) always gets better.
Well perhaps Alisa could have chosen a better example (interesting video site you found there by the way) cos there are lots of better ones there. But even the one chosen had multi layered references in it. To Psycho and many classic British ghost stories, even to Bob Hope’s zombie thing.
I clicked on the Come Dancing one, which when the Goodies programme aired, was about the naffest piece of televison going. The partisipants were always sheet metal workers from Wigan, or bank clerks or hairdressers and the mum of the lady had always sown on a million sequins on by hand. It was always portrayed as gentle and nice, when like Bowls, it was vicious, dirty nasty and corrupt. Funny now that Strictly Come Dancing is such a bit ratings hit.
So have a look at that one for a better example of Goodies humour.
And British humour is always about Class, wheras American humour is about how many punchlines you can get in, in half an hour. Think Steptoe and Son, Till Death us do Part, Bread, Only Fools and Horses and the magnificent Faulty Towers.
As to Cleese, well he is no where near as funny as he was. He is making a bit of an ass of himself with Ads for the AA (automobile Association) in a desperate effort to get some money back that he’s paid out in alimony to all the crazy (except for Connie Booth, who took nothing in settlement) American bints he’s married over the years.
Faulty bloody Showers indeed!
That’s why I started blogging, it has been a great way to ease my stress levels.
What I tend to find with both TV and popular music is that stuff I thought was crap at the time becomes at least mildly fascinating a quarter century or so later.
Example: “Are You Being Served”. At the time it seemed just unbelievably crass, right down to the (at a guess Ronnie Hazlehurst-penned) title music. Now, I catch the odd clip on YouTube or wherever and it seems, I dunno, nostalgic, a gateway to a world of innocence where camp is king. Like the old Carry On films. Or in the sphere of music: Abba (nuff said, probably).
All I remember of The Goodies is that one episode had a villain called Mr Nastiperson, and they did a lot of things with bicycles. I may have laughed a lot at them, or not, I can’t remember.
Real class? For my money, that Pan European series of Robinson Crusoe, all voiceover and poor quality prints, that was aired about a zillion times in the sixties and maybe right through the seventies. I still get off seriously on that music. It’s the theme music to my childhood. I also liked some Wind In the Willows spinoff they did for kids in the sixties, forget the title, but again only for the music. Bill and Ben, the Woodentops, well they were just there. Given I have two younger sisters, I remember taking a mild interest in kids’ shows in the 70s and finding them all to be utter (as RAB says, worthy and sanctimonious) crap, with the exception of the Clangers, which was just surreal enough to get my vote. I grew up on Dr Who and The Avengers: Diana Rigg defines pre-pubescent lust for me.
What else… of course: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Never been equalled IMO: I would have turned down a date with that fit bird off Magpie rather than miss an episode of that. Fawlty Towers is good, Python mostly good and even occasionally funny (Palin went to my college in Oxf, rest were Cambridge IIRC). Not the 9 O’clock News (I happen to have been reminiscing over their Oswald Mosley lampoon song today). Benny Hill is worshipped in Spain, and I can see why (it’s quintessentially Spanish humour, if that doesn’t sound too weird), but a little goes a long way.
I remember there were a lot of US TV series on when I was growing up, but they all seemed to involve a “maverick cop with an average flask and boring unorthodox ways” (to quote HMHB). I obviously missed all the good ones.
Needless to say, non Anglo Saxon TV is utter tripe, with zero exceptions. Live abroad for a bit, and you’ll slaver pavlovianly at anything that comes with the Thames or LWT logo.
I wonder how did it happen that the American humor turned so different from the British one. Could it be the German influence? Anyone familiar with German humor? (This does not count…)
Do you mean Tales of the Riverbank, with Hammy the Hampster and voices by Johnny Morris, Endivio?
Benny Hill was branded sexist by the unfunny alternatives like Elton and Sayle, and the sanctimonious bastards ended his career, cos ITV cancelled his contract. But he was the complete opposite. The joke always was that Benny and the little bald fella never ever got the girls.
Alisa,
You may have a point in the German influence. A German teacher I know once said to me that some of the constructions of US English have a Germanic quality. RAB though has a point about class though. Endivio. I think you have a good point about things like “Are you being served?” I thought “‘Allo ‘Allo” was OK as a kid. I now think it sublime genius. And yes i do laugh at the antic of Mrs Slocombe’s pussy. I think the key point in all of this is Brit’s regard having a sense of humour as a cardinal virtue almost above any other.
I think that American humour has much more to do with jewish humour than German, Alisa. Let’s face it the Germans are not noted for being the most chucklesome folk on the planet are they?
But you look at the Jewish imput to American humour, and it is huge.
All the way back to the Marx Brothers, through Vaudville performers like Phil Silvers and George Burns and on to Woody Allan etc, a massive amount of the comics and writers have been Jewish.
Bilko, was the finest sitcom ever written, and the template for so many shows that came after.
One thing that always pisses me off about America though. They see a great Brit sitcom like Steptoe and Son and Till Death, and then they translate it into an American version, as if Americans couldn’t possibly understand it raw. And it very rarely works because they manage to completely miss the point.
Christ, the American version of Faulty Towers was a disaster. Apart from being set in an hotel, it was nothing like it!
Slightly off topic, but only slightly, I went to the Theatre Royal Bath last night, to see the updated version of Yes Prime Minister, and it was bloody brilliant! It hit all the right targets, The Euro, the spin doctors, dodgy oil deals with paedo Presidents from Cwmbranistan, and AGW. Please god they film it and put on tv like Jeffery Bernard is unwell. If it comes anywhere near you folks, it is a must see!
Sounds like a real treat RAB.
I think RAB is correct about American humor having a very strong Jewish influence. The same can be said about our entertainment industry generally.
It’s a good thing then:-)
Thank’s so much for sharing that derivative drivel with us Scott. As you say in the interview, you have to do it for yourself. Quite. Nobody is going to pay you for it are they? You self obsessed twat!
I think the old Music Biz phrase goes, Don’t ring us, we’ll ring you…
EndivioR, I vaguely remembered the Oswald Mosley song but at the time, it held no relevance to me. I took the opportunity of you bringing it up to check out his biography on Wikipedia. Very interesting…
If nothing else, Mosley’s bio is (or should be) deeply embarrassing for UK socialists, Fabians and people of similar persuasion. As wiki points out, Mosley was a cardcarrying socialist (Fabian, Labour, ILP, you name it) who wrote the 60s Labour manifesto thirty years ahead of time. He was also a bigoted antisemite and admirer of Hitler and Mussolini who wanted British people to don black shirts and goosestep through East London. Obviously he’s long since been airbrushed out of the photographs (metaphorically speaking).
EndivioR: Also some mention of the unions in there too.
Whenever you point out that the Nazis were National Socialists to left-wingers, you always get some hand-wavery about how the movement was hijacked or some other nonsense. Mosley’s biography really gives the lie to that and gives some real insight into how the movements are intertwined. While the statist-right is surely nothing to justify, I’m wondering just how the Nazis and fascism managed to get linked with the right. Some very clever maneuvering there.
I was always told that the reason for the difference between American and British humour, as shown on TV, was because the american shows, being driven by the soulless search for profits, tried to reach as large an audience as possible.
Also, British radio and tv was infected by ‘The Goon Show’, and the University revue style of humour. Can anyone confirm this?
No ‘Nuke’ we can’t. Especially if you can’t be arsed to read all the previous comments.
How does Round the Horne, The Navy Lark, The Clithero Kid and Morecombe and Wise fit in with what you wuz told?
The Morecombe and Wise xmas show used to pull in the biggest viewing figures in British television history (20 million or there abouts) and they are about as far from the Goons and ” University revue style humour” as it’s possible to get!
Oh and ‘Nuke’, there’s a lot you have to learn about humour, British especially….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAcbsKZlcE
Enjoy.
Here’s a bit more(Link) British humor (of a more recent vintage).
Hoist by your own Petomane methinks there Laird 😉
Now that is much more your “German” style of humour, being very scatalogical and single entendre as they tend to be.
My gramp used to tell me that when he was a conscript before the Ist World War, and training on Salisbury Plain, they used to have fart lighting contests too. Well there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in those days.
Thank you Laird.