Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 12:47:16 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Worst Acting In A Sitcom

Started by Satchmo Distel, April 28, 2019, 09:26:23 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

St_Eddie

Quote from: Virgo76 on May 09, 2019, 10:02:49 PM
THE ANSWER!
The Cleese website got back to me! (I complained about their first response):

"John says the role of Polly is an english character."

Settled!
I was wrong.

Huh.  Well that's that I suppose.  Kinda disillusioned to be honest.  I've spend decades thinking that she was American.

Ferris

Quote from: Virgo76 on May 09, 2019, 10:02:49 PM
THE ANSWER!
The Cleese website got back to me! (I complained about their first response):

"John says the role of Polly is an english character."

Settled!
I was wrong.

Vindicated.

I hope everyone who disagreed with me has learned their lesson, and will think twice about disagreeing with me in future.

magval

Class.

If I can get Iannucci or Baynham to confirm the correct intention for 'The Best of the Beatles', I will leave this forum and earth forever, my every wonder sated.

Jumblegraws

Quote from: Virgo76 on May 09, 2019, 10:02:49 PM
THE ANSWER!
The Cleese website got back to me! (I complained about their first response):

"John says the role of Polly is an english character."

Settled!
I was wrong.
Now that I'm 100% secure in my original assumption, I'd just like to take this moment to say that everyone who ever thought Polly was anything other than English is fucking BANANAS

St_Eddie


imitationleather

Fawlty Towers is #CANCELLED.

Bennett Brauer


neveragain

Quote from: Lisa Jesusandmarychain on May 09, 2019, 04:43:08 PM
Perfectly good actor, and quite a looker,  too.
What's your problem ?

He's got better but was very wooden to begin with.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

In all fairness, someone should write back to John Cleese with the enquiry " So why does Basil put a distinctly American accent when he's taking the piss out of Polly, the stupid cunt ? ".

( But yeah, I've always assumed Polly was English )

greencalx

I recently watched FT more-or-less back-to-back on Netflix and it occurred to me - independently of this discussion - that Polly might actually be American (having always previously assumed her to be English). Cleese's impersonation pushed me towards that conclusion but the Waldorf Salad episode doesn't make much sense if she is American. Also, given Basil's clear antipathy towards his transatlantic brethren, one would imagine it would come up elsewhere if she were an American character. So Cleese's answer makes sense to me.

Maybe he was aiming for a different accent and it came out American. I noticed the boom mike dangling into quite a few shots, which makes me think they didn't do many retakes when filming.

Utter Shit

Quote from: greencalx on May 10, 2019, 10:13:05 AM
the Waldorf Salad episode doesn't make much sense if she is American.

Can you explain this? Not disagreeing, just can't think off the top of my head how the episode changes if she is English rather than American.

She was a really bad actor if she was supposed to be English.

Quote from: greencalx on May 10, 2019, 10:13:05 AM
Maybe he was aiming for a different accent and it came out American. I noticed the boom mike dangling into quite a few shots, which makes me think they didn't do many retakes when filming.

Maybe he was afraid of it coming out a bit "Monty Python" and wanted to avoid the allusion.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

Quote from: Utter Shit on May 10, 2019, 10:17:50 AM
Can you explain this? Not disagreeing, just can't think off the top of my head how the episode changes if she is English rather than American.

She was a really bad actor if she was supposed to be English.

Polly's hardly in that episode, is she ? Maybe Basil had a line like " That American feller coming to a fucking hotel in Torquay is and asking for a fucking Waldorf Salad is a right cunt, just like our looking slightly too old to be a student and waitress Polly, who is also American .", but it would have got edited out ( because you couldn't say " fuck" and " cunt" on English telly in 1979 ).

Bennett Brauer

Quote from: Lisa Jesusandmarychain on May 10, 2019, 10:25:41 AM
Polly's hardly in that episode, is she ?

Correct. She appears a few minutes after Mr Hamilton arrives, then goes out for the evening. Doesn't interact with him at all.  HOT DOG!

greencalx

Ah right, ok - I misremembered the episode. I thought she was involved in the making of the Waldorf salad, but now I think of it it must have been Sybil.

But more generally it wouldn't make sense for Basil to be so rude to an American for simply being American, but tolerating Polly despite suffering from the same affliction.

Endicott

Basil is nothing if not idiosyncratic, I'm not sure it's fair to use such logic. But anyway, I'm very surprised about this.


riderhood

Polly sings a song with a strong American accent, "I'm just a gal who can't say no" or similar, right before or after Manuel does his Spanish guitar thing. I assumed the first time I saw that episode that she was a US student who'd ended up staying in the UK after her degree or a gap year or whatever. Basil's Minnie mouse take on her voice points in that direction, too. AMERICAN.

Ignatius_S

Quote from: riderhood on June 04, 2019, 06:59:29 PM
Polly sings a song with a strong American accent, "I'm just a gal who can't say no" or similar, right before or after Manuel does his Spanish guitar thing. I assumed the first time I saw that episode that she was a US student who'd ended up staying in the UK after her degree or a gap year or whatever. Basil's Minnie mouse take on her voice points in that direction, too. AMERICAN.

The song is from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma! - both would have been well known to British audiences - putting on a strong American accent would be entirely appropriate.

Personally, I've tended to the view of Polly being American, but very recently this story - https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/fawlty_towers/special/polly_english_or_american/ - claims that Cleese (or a representative, at any rate) says Polly is English.

*edit* Ah, I see the Cleese remark has been already mentioned.... many times, many many times.

Captain Z

Sorry but it's not enough for 'John' to say she's English, you need to reply again and clarify that we need a response in character as Basil.

Captain Z

Quotesome years ago I opined that Polly was not really English any more

Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation

neveragain

Haha!

Back to the thread, has anyone nominated the supporting cast of Green Green Grass?
If not, the above. Sheesh.
A perfect storm of shit writing and poor acting. Similar to the Count Arthur lot. Well, half of them.

hummingofevil

Quote from: magval on May 09, 2019, 11:24:40 PM
Class.

If I can get Iannucci or Baynham to confirm the correct intention for 'The Best of the Beatles', I will leave this forum and earth forever, my every wonder sated.

Was it not a reference to the fact that Red/Blue are indeed excellent The Beatles "albums" and the joke is actually on the audience?

Shaky

Cleese doesn't even know London is English so you can't expect him to get it right about Polly....

Panbaams

Quote from: neveragain on June 05, 2019, 01:06:05 AM
Back to the thread, has anyone nominated the supporting cast of Green Green Grass?
If not, the above. Sheesh.

Also: too many actors. Four country bumpkin idiots is at least twice as many as the show actually needs.

oy vey

Oh Connie Booth was fine. It's Michael Gwynn (Lord Melbury) who grates...

For a lesson in amateur theatre night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CH1IOJOys0

dr_christian_troy

"Skullcrusher Henderson" in Bottom. The freeze frame ending with him banging Richie and Eddie's heads together suggests that they only did one take for it because they were scared of the bloke, who stares blankly into space rather than perhaps make the most of playing a psychopath who had said seconds before "It's skull-crushing time!" in an OTT panto hammy kind of way.

St_Eddie

Quote from: dr_christian_troy on June 09, 2019, 08:06:10 AM
"Skullcrusher Henderson" in Bottom. The freeze frame ending with him banging Richie and Eddie's heads together suggests that they only did one take for it because they were scared of the bloke, who stares blankly into space rather than perhaps make the most of playing a psychopath who had said seconds before "It's skull-crushing time!" in an OTT panto hammy kind of way.

Ooooh, don't be talking smack about Brian Glover, you cad!  That man was a national treasure.

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: St_Eddie on June 09, 2019, 07:27:32 PM
Ooooh, don't be talking smack about Brian Glover, you cad!  That man was a national treasure.
That was Mr Rottweiler. Skullcrusher was the porno-money-forger whose patch Eddie was tying to muscle in on.

St_Eddie

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on June 09, 2019, 07:30:12 PM
That was Mr Rottweiler. Skullcrusher was the porno-money-forger whose patch Eddie was tying to muscle in on.

Oh, in that case, fair do's.