“How many American television executives does it take to change a light bulb?”

“Answer: ‘Does it have to be a light bulb?’.”

As comedy-lovin’ kind of website, we’d heard several times during our teenage years about how John Cleese made a fortune from his company Video Arts, a firm specialising in making corporate training videos. With us being huge fans of Monty Python, it gradually became one of our life goals to watch some of these videos. After all, Cleese had spent the time between Fawlty Towers , Meaning Of Life and Fish Called Wanda concentrating mainly on these things – how could they possibly not be brilliant? All we needed to do was wait until someone invented the Web, then for someone else to invent file sharing software, broadband and/or streaming video sites, and we’d be on them like moss on a tundra.

So, we waited. And waited. And… waited. And then, someone invented UK Nova. “Excellent!”, we’re assuming we probably thought around that time, “the Video Arts stuff is sure to crop on there soon”. Except, of course, none of it did. We assumed, due to Cleese keeping a specially trained team of radioactive lawyers guarding all the tapes, what with it being his nest egg and all.

Whip-pan to several years later, and us being at a Welsh Assembly-funded course for people seeking self-employment. Part of the course involved watching a Video Arts video on managing a budget! Starring John Cleese! And Dawn French! It was made in about 1988! How could it not be hilarious and brilliant?

Well, as you’ll have guessed, it wasn’t. Because, not wholly unsurprisingly, it wasn’t meant to be. It was a training video, and the stuff you were meant to remember afterwards was cashflow-related, not gag-related. Even the bits that were meant to be funny, weren’t very. Oh dear, eh? Still, explains why no-one bothered sneaking them onto the internet.

Well, at last someone has, and fortuitously it’s not bad at all. Not a standard Video Arts video (which is probably why it was allowed to sneak out), but rather a talk given by Cleese on Creativity. Some quite useful things in there, it’s fair to say, and happily he throws in a mixed bag of lightbulb jokes AND an anecdote about writing Flying Circus along the way.

A good chance you’ll have recently seen this, what with it having been featured on the likes of Boing Boing and Brainpicker recently, but as we’re clearly the equal of both those sites (ahem*) we’d better include it too. Don’t want to fall behind the other members of the digerati, after all.

(*The spoof DVD piracy poster we did years ago actually got featured on Boing Boing once, you know. Back in 2007 it was, when we were still any good. We didn’t get credited, despite the blog’s URL being visible on the jpeg. We’re not bitter.)

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Rings Around The World

Is this thing on? Hopefully, after the CATASTROPHIC failure of us scheduling posts properly the other day, our One Post Per Day Policy is now working properly and you’re reading this on Tuesday 10th July at, ooh, 7pm. If so: hello! We’re writing this four days ago. Did Andy Murray win the tennis? Did people keep wrongly claiming that no Briton has featured in a Wimbledon final since 1938, because seemingly all the British women who did just that don’t count?

Today’s delve into the digital depths of yesteryear is this, via maximumfun.org and The Monty Python Museum, a PBS pledge drive from 1975. It’s quite excellently titled “Eleven Great Nights On Channel 13”, and we must admit that the whole idea of PBS pledge drives has always fascinated us. So, on the one hand, it’s a bit like Children In Need but without the ‘helping children in need’ bit. On the other hand, it’s a bit like Children In Need, but without the mood-deflating clips of said needy children. Plus, with these all being local PBS stations, it was all on a small enough scale for there actually people in the studio answering phones and taking pledges, so need need for cutaways to whatever Dallas’ version of Mike ‘Smitty’ Smith Up The Telecom Tower would have been.

Anyway, if that’s all very boring for you (not wholly surprising), this DOES have the added bonus factor of the clip being an interview with the Monty Python team, there partly to plug the as-then-waiting-for-a-distributor Holy Grail. As that earlier link to The Monty Python Museum suggested.

Bon appetit.

Don’t you just wish regional TV in the UK needed events like this? I mean, the regional opt-outs in Telethon ‘88 were all well and good, but no-one got the chance to phone up and personally speak to Bob Greaves. So unfair.

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Sound On (Sound On!) Vision On (Vision On!)

[Speaking of The Mike Sammes Singers – which we will in a few sentences – you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of excellent TMSS collection Music For Biscuits. And reading publisher Trunk Records’ lovely piece on the great man’s work. “Fine Fare”, we’re sure you’ll agree. A-ha-ha.]

Yesterday’s talk of ITV past somehow somehow let several hundred words fall from our fingers without mention of the most memorable event for our first five years on this planet.

(Reader’s voice: “What’s that? The death of Elvis? The Silver Jubilee? Panini launching a sticker album all about motorbikes, even though you hated and still hate motorbikes, but were fascinated by all the motorcycle manufacturer logos for some reason, you strange, troubled little child, you?”)

Well, very close with that last one, but no. It was of course: this, probably The Mike Sammes Singers’ finest hour.

“I’m winning, Mildred!” “What ARE you doing?” “I’m playing with myself.”

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Not Only Peter Cook, But Also Douglas Adams

Amazing to think that there are children growing up who are so young, they never even got to see Have I Got News For You when it was on BBC Two. All that they know is it being on BBC One, clips that were on YouTube months ago and jokes about Eric Pickles being fat*. Because that’s the first thing you’d leap to on a satirical news quiz and you’re tasked with lambasting Britain’s questionable alliance between two political parties who failed to win a General Election, isn’t it? ISN’T IT Oh, and probably Micky Flanagan guest hosting or something equally horrible.

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time there were enough comedic legends doing the rounds so that you’d occasionally get an absolutely killer pairing of guests jostling for position between Ian Hislop at his most scathing and Paul Merton at his very funniest (and of course the best host the programme has ever had, despite all The Unpleasantness).

Case in point: 11 December 1992. The guests: Peter Cook and Douglas Adams. PETER COOK and DOUGLAS ADAMS.

Okay, we’ll admit to wearing slightly rose-tinted ironic hipster glasses a bit, and are willing to recognise that your standard early 1990s HIGNFY episode would have someone like Tony Slattery or Jerry Mayes MP on it, AND you do get guests like Armando Iannucci cropping up on modern-era HIGNFY. But still. Peter Cook and Douglas Adams!

Shall we watch? Let’s watch.

At least until the YouTube link above these very words features the dread words “copyright claim” due to legal bastardry. It’s like The Man doesn’t want us to remember how good it could still be.

(*See, during THAT episode, it was Cyril Smith who was being made fun of for being fat. Ah, a different age.)

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Friend Of The Animal World

After we, erm, appropriated (okay, shamelessly nicked.) a cartoon of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebilng from the website of top comedy mag Mustard yesterday, we got to reading their interview with Commander John Lloyd. In that interview, mention was made of the episode he co-wrote (along with Douglas Adams) of surreal Anglo-Dutch kids cartoon Dr Snuggles.

That very cartoon series is possibly one of our earliest telly-related memories, right up there with being scared when Kenny Everett burst through the Thames endcap, our parents being impressed that we could read Pages From Ceefax at such a young age (28 years old, we were, a-ha-ha-ha-ha), and not quite grasping why our BBC regional news was Midlands Today even though we lived in north Wales.

Now back to modern-day us, and we were already aware that Adams and Lloyd had scripted an episode of Yoop Visch’s animated opus, but never expected we’d ever get to see more than a grainy tenth-gen VHS clip of it on a clip show. It couldn’t be on YouTube, surely? At least not in full.

Oh, how wrong we were. Only in a good way for once, and not at all like the time we thought lemon-flavour Original Source shower gel might taste like the filling of lemon meringue pie.

In the episode, Snuggles MD (voiced by Peter Ustinov, no less) goes looking for a river. SPOILER: the river is hiding in a cave, having undergone an existential crisis. Nope, we’re not joking.

Part of what we think was ITV’s first ever children’s TV strand – the unnecessarily threateningly-titled “Watch It!” – this jostled for position amongst the likes of Vicky The Viking, On Safari and The Book Tower, yet it’s Snuggles which really seems to have stuck in our memory. Seeing the part of this episode where cube-shaped chunks of the ocean have been stolen, we realised we still recall several parts of this episode with slightly unsettling accuracy, despite being about four or five years old at the time. That might not seem much to you, but speaking as a television blog who can barely remember how to wear shoes without iPadding up a video tutorial app each morning, that’s quite remarkable.

Is it any good? Well, don’t go expecting anything to rival the majesty of Dangermouse, but it’s certainly a cut above the landfill Hanna-Barbara fare being spewed out of America around that time. So, worth watching? We’ll say so. But hey, judge for yourself:

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Wonderful YouTube clip of the day: Monkhouse/Streeb-Greebling

[Image shamefully borrowed from Mustard magazine’s website. Go buy an issue now. NOW. We’ll wait.]

HISTORY LESSON FOR YOUNGER VIEWERS: You know comedy ‘podcasts’, yeah? Where the likes of Richard Herring, Marc Maron, Aisha Tyler, Ken Plume or The Nerdist guys interview a comedian for so very long it takes about four days commute to even listen to one podcast? Well, we had those in the 1980s too, except them they were called ‘chat shows’, and were just the same except you couldn’t listen to them on the bus unless you’d sneaked a telly onto it.

A prime example of which is this, from the quite criminally never repeated (COME ON, BBC FOUR) Bob Monkhouse Show in 1985. Bob’s guest is Peter Cook, who in a move that seems near-incomprehensible to our 21st Century minds, hasn’t really got anything to plug, but is mainly there to run through a classic Cook & Moore sketch with Lord Bob playing Dud’s interviewer role. Lovely stuff.

We were about to type “why can’t we have a TV show about comedy like this nowadays”, but then we remembered it’d probably involve Mark Dolan asking Mickey Flanagan about how wacky it is living in the East End, and died a little inside.

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Baby (We Have Just) Got Back

Yeah, long time no post. Probably time to rectify that, though admittedly our limited amounts of free time and talent mean our in-depth coverage of important affairs might not appear too often just yet. But, we’re going to try and do at least one update PER DAY for as long as possible. Just so we don’t fall off the internet.

Today’s update: just EIGHT days to go before the first part of the first half of the final season of the greatest television drama of all-time. And we don’t mean New Tricks. Evidently.

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So, Derek.

“Hello and welcome to Robert’s Web, the Channel Four programme with a surprising approach to the disabled. COMPASSION.” – Robert’s Web, Channel Four, 2011.

So, Ricky Gervais’ new ‘comedy drama’ Derek just aired. We know it was a comedy drama because there was thoughtful piano music playing beneath most of the scenes.

Much of the pre-publicity was about whether Gervais was playing the lead character as disabled or not. Ricky Gervais himself swore that he wasn’t because that would be wrong, and he would never do that kind of thing.

Well, not since the internet told him off for doing it, at around the same time as a spectacularly misjudged promo for showings of The Office US on Comedy Central UK:

But this was to be different. It was going to be sensitive, and the main character was just a bit socially clumsy with a heart of gold.

So, was it good? For our money, nowhere near as terrible as Life’s Too Short, but any high points of the programme were instantly outdone by Gervais portrayal of the title character. It’s all very well putting the seeds of a sensitive heartwarming comedy in place, but to have most of the action centred around a character played as a live-action cartoon – lower jaw jutted out, shuffling around with an arched back in the manner of someone unconvincingly pretending to do just that – undid any good there might have been. If Derek had been played by a more convincing actor, our reaction could easily have been along the lines of “a watchable pilot, once the kinks are ironed out and the script given an extra draft it could become a lovely little gem of a show”.

As it was, well, meh. But hey, as his work for Channel Four goes, it was slightly better than Being Ricky Gervais.

ANYWAY, that’s not why we’re here. How have his Twitter army of fans taken to this sensitive comedy drama that definitely isn’t about mocking those with disabilities? Well…

Hmm.

Wonder why he only retweeted the sensitive mentions for the show, not the ones we’ve found?

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It's Only Every Single Itchy And Scratchy Cartoon Edited Together Into A Single 43-Minute Epic

...All [Edit: Mostly] In Chronological Order, Right From The Tracey Ullman Show Years Onwards. On YouTube.



(And there are a few missing, but shush. PROTIP: if you need to go to the toilet during it, wait until the "rubbish movie parody years".)

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The Top Non-Bakers Dozen Simpsons Episodes Of All Time

Remember us? Okay, sorry for falling offline halfway through our rundown of Simpsons episodes. Going back to this briefly, if only because we’re about to upgrade the BrokenTV computer to one that (hopefully) doesn’t slump into an electronic coma each time we ask it to do more than three things at once (yep: grr), here’s the rest of the rundown.

Admittedly, we’d hoped to write full details for each episode stating why they’re so great and why you’re wrong if you don’t agree with us, but there’s no time. So, here’s the rest of that list.

12. 22 Short Films About Springfield

Season 7 episode 21

original airdate 14 April 1996

"Aurora Borealis?  At this time of year?  A this time of day? In this part of the country?  Localised entirely within your kitchen?"

11. Bart on the Road

Season 7 episode 20

original airdate 31 March 1996

“"Well, you sure don't look 25, but your unlaminated, out-of-state driver's license is proof enough for me."”

10. Homie the Clown

Season 6 episode 15

original airdate 12 February 1995

"There's your giraffe, little girl." "I'm a boy!" "That's the spirit.  Never give up."

9. Homer Bad Man

Season 6 episode 9

original airdate 27 November 1994

"Now, here are some results from our phone-in poll: 95% of the people believe Homer Simpson is guilty. Of course, this is just a television poll which is not legally binding, unless proposition 304 passes.  And we all pray it will."

8. Bart Gets an Elephant

Season 5 episode 17

original airdate 31 March 1994

"Those clowns in congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns."

"How does it keep up with the news like that?"

7. The Front

Season 4 episode 19

original airdate 15 April 1993

"Dear Mr. President.  There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three.  I am not a crackpot!"

6. Homer's Triple Bypass

Season 4 episode 11

original airdate 17 December 1992

“1-600-DOCTORB”

5. Lisa on Ice

Season 6 episode 8

original airdate 13 November 1994

"Oh my God, Marge.  A penalty shot with only four seconds left.  It's your child versus mine!  The winner will be showered with praise; the loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!"

4. Marge vs. the Monorail

Season 4 episode 12

original airdate 14 January 1993

"Oh, Andy Capp.  You wife-beating drunk."

3. Mr. Plow

Season 4 episode 9

original airdate 19 November 1992

"There's a $10,000 bill in it for you." "Oh yeah?  Which president's on it?" "Uh... All of them.  They're having a party.  Jimmy Carter's passed out on the couch."

2. You Only Move Twice

Season 8 episode 2

original airdate 03 November 1996

"Oh, my God, the 59th Street bridge!" "Maybe it just collapsed on its own." "We can't take that chance." "You always say that. I want to take a chance."

1. Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment

Season 8 episode 18

original airdate '16 March 1997

Yes, a season eight episode is the best of the lot. Why? Technically, it shouldn’t quite work – Homer acts out of character for much of the episode by suddenly being clever enough to evade capture, for one thing – but when it’s as brilliantly plotted, utterly packed with killer jokes, and sees Homer revert to dumb at all the right moments (“oh, nothing Marge, it must have been that bean I had for lunch”), it’s our favourite Simpsons episode ever.

Oh, and it ends with possibly the best closing line to any episode of anything ever.

"To alcohol! The cause of and solution to all of life's problems."

--

Okay, there’s the vastly-delayed list. Disagree with any of it? Of COURSE you do – feel free to leave a comment detailing exactly why we’re wrong, and (PC upgrade permitting) we’ll explain our reasoning on why Last Exit To Springfield is so vastly overrated.

Yes it is.

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