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Utterly trivial observations about comedy

Started by Twed, April 07, 2019, 08:59:06 PM

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Glebe

Quote from: beanheadmcginty on May 30, 2019, 11:16:23 PM
It's only just occurred to me that Barry Cryer is the opposite of Barry Chuckle.

Brilliant!

Glebe

Gave meself a bit of a headtrip t'other night by watching a vintage clip of Emu's Broadcasting Company on YouTube... discovered that the cleaning woman in it, Barbara New, played charwoman Mabel in You Rang, M'Lord?

And on the subject of Rod Hull and Emu, it's old ground, but besides Emu attacking Snoopy Snoopy Dogg Dogg on The Word, I was probably even more amazed to discover that he'd appeared on the Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show alongside Richard Prior! Again, I know we've been here before, but it still amazes me. Oh, and only just discovered that he guested on Skippy too!

Icehaven

Quote from: beanheadmcginty on May 30, 2019, 11:16:23 PM
It's only just occurred to me that Barry Cryer is the opposite of Barry Chuckle.

Welllll, it'd have to either be Barry Cry or Barry Chuckler if we're being pedantic. In other Barry news I'd always assumed Barry was short for Bartholomew or maybe even Barold but it isn't, Barrys are just Barrys.

Twed

Barry isn't the opposite of Barry. That's Garry (two-Rs, Garys don't exist look it up)

metaltax

Quote from: icehaven on May 31, 2019, 12:13:17 PM
Welllll, it'd have to either be Barry Cry or Barry Chuckler if we're being pedantic. In other Barry news I'd always assumed Barry was short for Bartholomew or maybe even Barold but it isn't, Barrys are just Barrys.

It can be short for Barrington.

Glebe

Quote from: metaltax on May 31, 2019, 08:03:01 PM
It can be short for Barrington.

Barrington Arbuthnot Braithwaith Cryington IV.

Bennett Brauer

He's actually Charles "Barry" Cryer, the nickname deriving from bar-ry, because he was always propping up the bar at BBC Television Centre with Dennis Main Wilson.

Ambient Sheep

I just went to check whether that's true and discovered that he once had a Number 1 record in Finland!

Glebe

Quote from: Glebe on April 27, 2019, 12:59:03 AMNowhere Man just started a The Avengers (classic UK series, not Thanos-bashers) thread, I've been spotting a lot of comedy faces in glimpses of repeats of that on - wait for it! - ITV4! An episode the other morning, 'Murdersville', featured Sheila Fearn (The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, George and Mildred) and John Sharp, who I remember from Top Secret! (the maitre d' guy the hotel, although I believe he's been in loads of things)... caught another episode with Alan Cuthbertson (who I'd just seen in a repeat of Fawlty Towers' 'Gourmet Night'... the likes of John Cleese and Bernard Cribbins also popped in the series.

Just to clarify, I meant Cuthbertson, Cleese and Cribbins in The Avengers... Cleese appearing in Fawlty Towers, the very idea!

shh

A (possibly obvious) observation while I was thinking about This Country (which I adore). The mockumentary is essentially a fossilised genre, the style of documentary it's aping hasn't been around for decades, on british tv anyway. A typical contemporary BBC documentary is overbearingly narrated and swept along on an unbroken stream of cheaply manipulative muzak. The pastiche has outlived its target.

Sebastian Cobb

There's an episode of bottom where Eddie is holding a 'TV remote', its actually a big long Philips vcr remote with an lcd screen for programming the timer (predated cheap on screen displays). We had the same one.

This might be the most boring thing said about bottom on the Internet.

I dunno, we might be able to beat it. What was the model number? Often VCR remotes could also operate televisions, so long as they were made by the same manufacturer.

Sebastian Cobb

It had a slide-switch to be able to control Philips televisions.

This was useless because my parents had a Sony from 1976.

The prop television in the show was a woodgrain affair, it likely housed a Philips chassis as they were ubitiquos in non trinitron or Hitachi sets.

Glebe

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on June 01, 2019, 11:16:17 PMThere's an episode of bottom where Eddie is holding a 'TV remote', its actually a big long Philips vcr remote with an lcd screen for programming the timer (predated cheap on screen displays). We had the same one.

This might be the most boring thing said about bottom on the Internet.

I actually find that quite exciting.


Uncle TechTip

Quote from: shh on June 01, 2019, 08:32:46 PM
A (possibly obvious) observation while I was thinking about This Country (which I adore). The mockumentary is essentially a fossilised genre, the style of documentary it's aping hasn't been around for decades, on british tv anyway. A typical contemporary BBC documentary is overbearingly narrated and swept along on an unbroken stream of cheaply manipulative muzak. The pastiche has outlived its target.

I reckon it was The Armstrongs that did it for the genre, that was presented pretty straight with very little (if any?) narration, and we were never sure if it was real or not.

Glebe

Just posting about June dressing up as a punk in Terry and June episode 'Age Before Beauty' in the TaJ thread... Mrs. Slocombe and Mr. Humphries also did that in this episode of Are You Being Served?... then there's that The Goodies episode, 'Punky Business' (thanks, Google)... any other old sitcoms with stuffy old characters going punk rock?

On a side note, there was an episode of AYBS? - 'Friends and Neighbours' (thanks again, Google) - where the staff end up sharing an apartment and Mr. Spooner starts blasting some punk song... oddly enough, that bit appears to have been edited out of this Dailymotion upload, and the couple of shit-quality uploads currently on YouTube, so I imagine they're sourced from DVDs that had to edit the song out (whatever it was) due to a copyright claim.

magval

#106
I know this is one that the Internet has made a fuss of, but I was very amused when I first realised that Bill Murray had taken over for Lorenzo Music as Garfield following Music having taken over for him as Peter in the Ghostbusters cartoon years earlier.

Nowadays, something similar (like Billy Dee Williams appearing as Two-Face in the Lego Movie) can only happen with smug irony, because everything like that happens with full transparency and a requisite amount of winking to and nudging an invariably well-read audience of hardcore nerds who hoover this sort of trivial information up from echo chamber sources of second hand information.

Well.

You know what I like about this thread, and this forum in general? We're the cunts that notice these things, and not the cunts that read them and share them on Facebook, not trivializing but diminishing the observed by anonymizing the observers.

We're a type of person, in that regard, and I am glad to have found this place and its excellent cohort of posters. Thanks, Cookdandbombd wans.

Glebe

The Bergerac thread has jogged my memory about something... I've had to do a bit of Wiki/IMDb searching to find his name (and the titles of some of the TV episodes he was in), but the actor John Bennett, who appears as a nazi hunter in the episode 'The Sin of Forgiveness' (which I just caught again on the Drama channel or summit recently), plays the doctor in that classic Porridge scene with the urine sample gag from 'New Faces, Old Hands' ("Can you fill that up for me?" "What, from here?") that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais reused when they did some script work on Never Say Never Again, apparently.  I also recall him from Blake's 7 episode 'Weapon', in which his character wears a big, silly Ming the Merciless-like collar. And according to Wiki, he later appeared in Spielberg's Minority Report!

Twed

Quote from: magval on June 02, 2019, 03:58:08 PM
We're a type of person, in that regard, and I am glad to have found this place and its excellent cohort of posters. Thanks, Cookdandbombd wans.
What I'm reading from this is that this was the best thread idea ever and the creator of the thread is ahead of their time.

BritishHobo

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on June 01, 2019, 11:16:17 PM
There's an episode of bottom where Eddie is holding a 'TV remote', its actually a big long Philips vcr remote with an lcd screen for programming the timer (predated cheap on screen displays). We had the same one.

This might be the most boring thing said about bottom on the Internet.

In an episode of CITV sitcom My Parents Are Aliens, one of the parent aliens used a alien torture device to keep Josh, the naughtiest kid well-behaved, in a weird 1984 parody. She used this futuristic gadget to give him electric shocks when he misbehaved. It was an unexpected and kinda unpleasant story for a kid's comedy show, the creepiness of which was undermined quite a lot by the fact that the evil torture device was actually the exact same trackball computer mouse that my dad had bought a few weeks earlier and which me and my brothers had written off as shit and useless.

Icehaven

#110
In the third episode of the first series of Peep Show, when they're at the bowling alley, at one point 'Flagpole Sitta' by Harvey Danger is playing in the background, which ended up being the theme tune for the show from the 2nd series on.

EDIT: Or is it? I've been rewatching the first few series on Netflix and have just remembered the mentions of other shows on there where music has been replaced due to rights issues etc., and given it's been at least 10 years since I last saw that ep I obviously can't recall if it was in the original or not, so if not I stand corrected and Netflix meddling strikes again. 

Twed

I noticed the same thing, and I think it was when I rented the DVDs, before Netflix did streaming. So yep, that's canonical.

Icehaven

The subtitles on Netflix at the start of series 2 say Flagpole Sitta is by Green Day. Doesn't even sound like them ffs.

Glebe

Caught a bit of National Lampoon's European Vacation the other night, I've never actually watched it the whole way through... while I knew Eric Idle, Mel Smith and Ballard Berkeley were in it, I didn't know Maureen Lipman and Robbie Coltrane also appeared! Also, according to the trivia on IMDb, Smith's Not the Nine O' Clock News cohort Rowan Atkinson was apparently considered for the role of the hotel manager. Also;

QuoteRik Mayall was first considered for the role of the bike rider as both Chevy Chase and director Amy Heckerling were both fans of The Young Ones (1982). But Warner Bros executives wouldn't allow him to be cast as he wasn't very well known in the US. John Cleese was also considered for the role.

And;

QuoteEric Idle and Chevy Chase became friends after filming wrapped. Shortly after the release of this movie, Idle and Chase began work on a screenplay for a follow-up called "National Lampoon's Australian Vacation". Aside from a few shark-related gags, neither could come up with much, and the project was shelved.

I'd heard that before, but I actually thought it was Mel Smith rather than Idle, which doesn't seem as likely tbh.

Meanwhile, rewatching  Terry and June on Dailymotion, Leslie Dwyer who played Mr. Partridge in Hi-De-Hi! appears in series one episode 'Flying Carpets', while Barry Howard who played Barry in HDH! appears in the episode 'Writing on the Wall' (also from series one).

Icehaven

In The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon and Amy's wedding is being organised, Barry Krupke agrees to move his birthday party so they can have the venue they want as long as he's allowed to sing 'Volare' at the wedding ceremony, but then when it's the actual ceremony he sings 'At Last'.

popcorn

Quote from: magval on June 02, 2019, 03:58:08 PM
I know this is one that the Internet has made a fuss of, but I was very amused when I first realised that Bill Murray had taken over for Lorenzo Music as Garfield following Music having taken over for him as Peter in the Ghostbusters cartoon years earlier.

I was in sixth form when the Garfield film was announced. "Guess who's playing Garfield?" my friend asked me excitedly. I guessed Bill Murray for exactly the reason you describe - I'd noticed as a kid that, in the Garfield cartoon, Garfield had the same voice as the Murray character in the Ghostbusters cartoon.

My friend said "So you already knew then". He refused to believe otherwise and I never received credit for my brilliant guesswork. It is an outrage.

Gurke and Hare

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 07, 2019, 10:53:29 PM
The Ferguson CD Midi System (probably also featured in bullseye or family fortunes at some point) in Men Behaving Badly was the same one that my primary school used, for playing Vivaldi and that into assembly.

Not comedy, but my family had the same portable telly as the one that Renton locks himself in the room with when he's going cold turkey in Trainspotting.


Also, this morning's The Sweeney on ITV4 had Morecambe and Wise in it, playing themselves and taking a significant part in the plot.

gilbertharding

...as observed by me in the 'cycling thread' in picture box.

Apparently it was a return favour for Waterman and Thaw appearing in a (quite bad) sketch on that year's M&W Xmas show.

According to wikipedia, it was also one of the final nails in The Sweeney's coffin for its two stars.

Jockice

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 07, 2019, 10:53:29 PM
The Ferguson CD Midi System (probably also featured in bullseye or family fortunes at some point) in Men Behaving Badly was the same one that my primary school used, for playing Vivaldi and that into assembly.

Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques in the early 70s sitcom named after the former had the same portable radio as I got for my fourth birthday. A Bush TR130 with brown casing. I loved that radio.

coinneach

unseen characters always seem to be women

Maris out of Frasier
'Er in doors in Minder
The mum who shouts from the other room in Big Bang Theory
Columbo's wife