The Story of Light Entertainment

[benthalo]

Outrageous Overstatement Of The Week: Sunday Night Clive "the first" to reappropriate news footage, apparently. Even Sean Hardie claiming the same for NTNOCN would be a stretch.

[The Mumbler]

Yes, absolutely.  Such a mad claim I'd forgotten that had been said.  By two people!  (Beatrice Ballard as well as James.)  That series started (as Saturday Night Clive) in January 1989, almost ten years after the Not The Nine pilot.

Glaring absence of Last Resort clips, one couldn't help noticing.

[Lfbarfe]

Well, quite. Everything has to be a first or a greatest nowadays. Nobody's happy doing a job well. They have to innovate or be seen to innovate, even if they're doing something as old as the hills. As for Ruby Wax being the first to go round the houses of the rich and famous, what about Alan Whicker? Even though he seemed to be getting his nose extremely brown, he was letting the camera a lot of the story and allowing the viewers to form their own conclusions.

Courtesy of someone on the Parkinson production team at the time, the LE book I'm currently writing will have a much, much better Orson Welles story than they used. In fact, when I heard about the series, I, rather selfishly, thought "Oh dear. I bet some of the revelations I've unearthed will be old news by the time I get into print". However, throughout, I've watched this series and thought 'Nice clips, but why didn't they ask about x or y?'. When talking about Dee Time, they showed a tiny fragment of the surviving Sammy Davis Jr clip, but said nothing about the circumstances surrounding his appearance. And that's, quite frankly, a fucking amazing story...

Baffled at the inclusion of This Morning, Trisha, Vanessa, Oprah & Jerry Springer in a show about LE. They're current affairs or features programmes. The Rediffusion/LWT Frost shows were an uneasy mix of current affairs and red-nosed variety, so they pass, but the Nixon interviews were current affairs, pure and simple, so why were they in? And the absence of any Jonathan Ross clips has to be significant. Clearance trouble? I have the first 15 mins of a Last Resort retrieved from Betamax, but that's it.

[Lfbarfe]

Outrageous Overstatement Of The Week: Sunday Night Clive "the first" to reappropriate news footage, apparently. Even Sean Hardie claiming the same for NTNOCN would be a stretch.

I suspect that TW3 was the first to get away with it, in British television terms, anyway, but even then it was something people had been itching to do for years.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

The trouble with all these docs is the 'story' aspect. Because stuff like this doesn't really have a story - yes, there are trends and mentalities and influences and causes and effects...but there's no actual narrative, because life's far too messy.

And I just wish they'd celebrate that messiness, really. But they can't, because they have this slightly sinister agenda - an insistence that television is the same as it's ever been, that Brand X Celebrity from the present is the 'natural successor' to Brand X Celebrity from the past. They can't actually admit that TV has changed beyond all reconition and isn't the thing it once was.

It also means there's no room for any 'People often think x, but in actual fact y is the case' stuff - that just causes trouble and complicates things. Even though it's far moe interesting than sloping down the well-trodden path.

It reminds me of the bit in Alan Bennett's Kafka's Dick about how everyone loves to hear stories they've heard millions of times before, and that's why biographies are so popular - no matter how tragic the final page is, the subject still experiences a happy ending (ie, because people are interested enough to read about them). This BBC series is just comfort food for people who want to believe that nothing changes.

[Lfbarfe]

The trouble with all these docs is the 'story' aspect. Because stuff like this doesn't really have a story - yes, there are trends and mentalities and influences and causes and effects...but there's no actual narrative, because life's far too messy.

Well, I think there is a story, but this series isn't really telling it.

This BBC series is just comfort food for people who want to believe that nothing changes.

Deluded fools. Even Parkinson's different now to the way he was in 1972.

[ApexJazz]

The reported animosity between Alexie Sayle and Ben Elton is interesting....the worked together on The Young Ones, of course.

It was the accusation of plagarism that intrigued me. The usual shoddy research meant that we didn't know when this happened - it certainly can't have been 1981 to 1984 during the Young Ones period or else they wouldn't have worked together, so I'm guessing after this, when Elton's popularity and fame was rising.

The accusation intrigues me too. What all was said in the docu?
More than once I have been around british comedians or writers who eyes-to-heaven lament "why don't we have a British Bill Hicks?" I usually give them a peculiar look and respond "but you had Alexei Sayle". I have never seen Elton plagiarizing Sayle's material, but for my money there's no comparison between the two.
Regardless of my respect for him as a craftsman, I always thought Ben Elton was a phony (this without taking into consideration partnership with Andrew Lloyd Weber, mockney accent, royalty kiss-ups, and sitcom banality).

[alan strang]

It was the accusation of plagarism that intrigued me. The usual shoddy research meant that we didn't know when this happened - it certainly can't have been 1981 to 1984 during the Young Ones period or else they wouldn't have worked together, so I'm guessing after this, when Elton's popularity and fame was rising.

In the sleevenotes of the re-release of the original Comic Strip LP it's suggested that Sayle actually used his influence to make sure that no material by Ben Elton appeared on the album.

[Lfbarfe]

Regardless of my respect for him as a craftsman, I always thought Ben Elton was a phony (this without taking into consideration partnership with Andrew Lloyd Weber, mockney accent, royalty kiss-ups, and sitcom banality).

I can forgive Ben Elton all of his transgressions and almost any future ones that care to imagine for the simple reason that he wrote Filthy, Rich and Catflap. Remember him this way...