Some More for The Worst Day of the Week

It dawns on me that Comedy is a trifle hard to find these days, especially if you don’t know where to look, especially if your search is confined to The Present Day.

Comedy has gone to ground. Comedy hides in the past.

It’s baffling that Monty Python is not to this day the Universally Experienced Standard that it’s always been for me, and it surprises me that even those who know Python are not aware of all its many offshoots. Why, for instance, do more people not know about RIPPING YARNS?

Created by Michael Palin and the late Terry Jones, it was a brief but wonderfully funny series of one-off comedies derived from Victorian-era British Boy’s Adventure Tales: stuff like Biggles and Tom Brown’s School Days. Two series were made; not every individual episode was a grand slam out of the ballpark, but enough of them were good enough so that it mystifies me that the series isn’t better remembered.

Nor was MONTY PYTHON the sole standard-bearer of oftentimes silly, usually biting sketch comedy. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie happily showed us A BIT OF FRY AND LAURIE; Rowan Atkinson (BLACK ADDER, MR. BEAN) was among the talented cast of NOT THE NINE O’CLOCK NEWS — as the title implies, a sketch show slightly a more rooted in topical, then-contemporary subjects than PYTHON; while THE GOODIES’ Tim-Brooke Taylor, Grahame Garden and Bill Oddie specialized in taking comedic flights of fantasy to ever-sillier extremes. In the states, the best we could do at this sot of thing was SC (Second City) TV, which served as the vastly superior Training Ground for performers who went on to a bigger paycheck on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. 

In other news, the situation comedies made by David Croft in collaboration (usually) with Jeremy Lloyd or Jimmy Perry were comedy standards of their day, even in the USA; today I find that entirely too many young people are unaware of their existence. Politically correct they were not — but neither did they really offend until more soft-headed executives took charge at the BBC. ARE YOU BEING SERVED? and DAD’S ARMY are probably the longest lived and most impactful of Croft & Co.’s oeuvre. The latter drew the displeasure of the Pythons when it bumped the FLYING CIRCUS out of a prime time scheduling slot. The former, about the staff of a failing London department store, was particularly beloved by those of us who were ourselves members the Retail Slave Class back when the show originally aired. As with ‘ALLO, ‘ALLO, another Croft/Lloyd collaboration, it was marked by a sense of humor that was oftentimes filthy — but infinitely subtle by today’s standards. Modern audiences can be so hypocritically fragile about so many issues, while simultaneously being blithely acceptant of overt (and utterly unfunny) vulgarity. To paraphrase Lance Corporal Jones of DAD’S ARMY, in those days we did not like it Right Up Us. We did not like it, sir!

The double entendre was a Croft staple back in the days when double entendres actually worked both ways. Implied but never overt filth could be said to be a standard of British Comedy. Frankie Howerd minced and giggled his way through UP POMPEII and other shows, while the working-class gents in ON THE BUSSES filled entire runs with a wink and a leer.

All the same, higher things, even Great Things, often came out of British situation comedy. THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN was based on a series of novels by David Nobbs, and the three series made during its original run (plus a fourth made years later after the death of Leonard Rossiter, the show’s anti-hero) all have a novelist’s sensibility behind them, and all tell affecting, relatable, and sometimes tragic stories each with a clear beginning, middle and end. (Martin Clunes participated in an extremely ill-advised remake years later: avoid this at all costs!)

In a similar vein, MULBERRY — from the writing team of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, who also gave us THE GOOD LIFE, EVER DECREASING CIRCLES and BRUSHSTROKES, dared to weave comedy around the tale of an old woman faced with a Personified Death who rather liked her and did everything in his power to put off the Event.  These shows are as good as “situation comedy” gets on television, and it’s a crime that seemingly no one under the age of fifty remembers them.

Thanks to American media being funded by sales of soap, laundry powder and underarm deodorant, and to the powerful driving force of Madison Avenue, American television was somewhat more polished and luxurious than its British counterpart; and so where Britcoms were often down, dirty and getting away with it on pure nerve, American comedy was a good deal more like gigantic, squeaky-clean, sturdily-built and maintained steamships cutting the waves. Still, the best was powered by Good Writing: the single commodity lacking from too great a majority of modern television.

If I don’t write so much about thee traditions of situation comedy in the USA, it’s probably because Science of Mind is not my strong point. It’s hard for me to imagine entire generations of people who did not grow up in a world where THE HONEYMOONERS, M*A*S*H, ALL IN THE FAMILY and GILLIGAN’S ISLAND were Common Denominators. For me, these and others are part of Basic Cultural Literacy, but I don’t disdain someone not knowing or never having seen them: I just don’t understand how it can be possible.

THE HONEYMOOONERS and ALL IN THE FAMILY at least allow us to discuss how much the culture has changed. Although I have friends who see the handful of HONEYMOONERS episodes as a cultural high-water mark (and they are), it was never a personal favorite of mine entirely because I disliked Ralph Kramden so intensely. In this, I think that I’m more in line with Modern Thinking than in any other cultural area. I’ve softened to him just a little bit over the years, but only because Fred Flintstone allowed me to see past the bluster.

Conceived as a HONEYMOONERS parody THE FLINTSTONES is instead a full-on carbon copy, THE HONEYMOONERS in stone-age drag, and with a fanciful, imaginative sensibility that lightens the whole experience. It caused me to understand that we can love Fred/Ralph because Wilma/Alice loves him, and in loving him shows that there is more to him (not limited to faith and devotion) than what’s visible to the naked eye.

Archie Bunker is even more difficult than Ralph to come to terms with. But rather than ALL IN THE FAMILY being “too much” for Modern Audiences, I’d suggest that Modern Audiences are too thin-skinned and focussed on their Sensitivity Training to understand what it has to say to us. The point is not that Archie is sometimes in the wrong: he is always in the wrong, on every single issue and in every single situation — and not just a little bit in the wrong, but spectacularly so — and still Edith loves him. This is where comedy becomes great drama.

GET SMART (from Mel Brooks and Buck Henry) took a single joke and milked five seasons out of it, accomplishing in the process something that AUSTIN POWERS failed miserably at: parodying a genre that was already a parody of itself. WKRP IN CINCINNATI, BARNEY MILLER, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, BEWITCHED, GREEN ACRES, HOGAN’S HEROES, the BOB NEWHART and MARY TYLER MOORE shows, and a horde of others, too numerous to mention, were popular staples in the times that they aired, providing a social and cultural stage set upon which everyone could meet, if not agree.

It should be clear by now that you need almost nothing from the modern world when you program an evening of comedy. Because the best shows are universal in experience if not appeal, and you will find enough material that is New To You to last you for many years, even many decades, to come.

— Thorn

Just Another Manic Monday

The Story So Far: Media-loving boy deprived of the old sources and finding satellite, cable and streaming services a poor substitute becomes his own Programming Director and enjoys it immensely . . . though it is a lot of work. The more tricks he learns and the more content he amasses in-house, the less he misses the ever-growing shallowness of Contemporary “Culture,” of which the quality can best be described by another word beginning with the letter “C.”

And now we re-join our regularly scheduled program, already in progress:

 

When I first started going off the grid with my evening’s entertainment, I quickly realized that Monday Night was going to be critical to my mental well-being.

Monday. The worst day of the week needed to be met head-on with Things That Made Me Happy. Tip No. 1: Pile All of Your Favorite Shows onto Monday Nights!

For me, this meant Comedy, specifically situation comedy, specifically (but not limited to) the British variety. And in the USA, only the most popular of British comedies — your Monty Pythons, your Fawlty Towers and the like — ever got a home video release in any format. Some that did get issued (Are You Being Served, Dad’s Army and The Goodies among them) saw incomplete, inferior or staggered releases.  I was fortunate to have taped a lot of shows off the air during the days when PBS would run such things, but it became evident pretty quickly that if I ever wanted to see anything new-to-me, I would have to find a way to buy and play Region Two disks. The “buy” part was easy enough (because Suited Corporate Bastards will sell you anything), but playing Region 2 disks in the USA is impossible without specialized equipment.

Still, I resisted. It took a show called Last of the Summer Wine to get me to break down and buy a region-free DVD player. And I’m so glad I did.

At 295 episodes, it is the longest-running sitcom in the world. As things go, it’s about as UN-high a concept as you can get: three retired gents spend their days wandering around a cozy Yorkshire town, talking.

That’s it. As the cast filled out, opportunities for the ladies of the town to speak their piece were added; and, most of the time, the more enterprising one of the gents would come up with some hair-brained scheme to get the scruffiest one of the group to publicly embarrass himself. It ran for 37 years. 

I just finished watching series 18, which puts me a little more than halfway through the run. My first significant buy of Region 2 material has already lasted me for years, and without repeat viewings it will remain a centerpiece of my Monday Happy Place for years yet to come. Although I do not look forward to key cast members dying off and being replaced, it’s a strong reminder that life has its trials even in the best of times.

My region 2 player was not satisfied with just that significant dish, and still required regular feeding. One of the first additions was the Complete Collection of The Goodies, a comedy trio with cartoonish sensibilities that make Monty Python look staid and conservative by comparison. From Jimmy Perry and David Croft (creators of Dad’s Army) have come Hi-Di-Hi (hijinks in one of those uniquely English Institutions, the Holiday Camp), It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum (antics of a British “Concert Party” in WWII India; now considered by the BBC to be one the most offensive shows ever made — a thing that I regarded as a particular selling point) and others. 

From Bob Esmonde and John Larbey, creators of the classics Mulberry and The Good Life, comes Brush Strokes, the good-natured saga of a young man who likes the opposite sex rather too much. From Yorkshire Television, the company that gave us a state-of-the-art spy show in The Sandbaggers, comes In Loving Memory starring Dame Thora Hird and Christopher Beeny as a duo of undertakers muddling through in a 1929 mill town.

The versatility of comic star Ronnie Barker (known to Americans primarily as one half of The Two Ronnies) was spelled out to me via two series: Open All Hours (created by Summer Wine’s Roy Clarke) and Porridge (a prison comedy of all things, which turns up often on lists of Britain’s Best Sitcoms). 

And, in the fall season, from Richard Carpenter, creator and main writer for Robin of Sherwood comes The Ghosts of Motley Hall and Catweazle — not so much situation comedies as supernaturally-themed “kid’s shows” with a gentle sense of humor. These entries demonstrate why it’s important to support physical media while you can: they were released by a company called Network, which went belly-up late in 2023, taking an awful lot of British television with them when they died.

It hasn’t all been unmitigated joy: sometimes you come up with a clinker. Mann’s Best Friends was a one-shot-series from Summer Wine’s Roy Clarke with a good concept and a good cast that simply tried too hard. It wasn’t so much about the eccentric and wacky residents of a tiny rooming house as it was about residents who were trying to be eccentric and wacky and failing miserably. Misfires happen when you’re a programming executive, even on the smallest scale. Curry and Chips, another show that attracted my attention for being considered one of the most offensive shows that ever aired, wasn’t so much offensive as ineffective and half-baked.

But the winners have far outnumbered the losers, and one of the nice things about British TV is that the series are so short (typically not running more than 6 to 8 episodes in any given season) that none of them outstay their welcome.

Of course I liberally mix in American series, both new-to-me (for instance, My Favorite Martian, with Ray Walston and Bill Bixby) and Old Favorites. The latter includes a lot of shows that I haven’t seen since their original airdates (Cheers is coming soonish), but occasionally the time comes to revisit perennial classics like M*A*S*H or Gilligan’s Island. Whether new-to-me or not, I dole them out sparingly in six-to-eight week runs, just to pace them. Good as most MTM shows are, they’re better when taken in British measures. I’ve been viewing The Mary Tyler Moore Show in such limited bits that it’s taken me significantly more than a decade to view the first five seasons. No binge-watching for me: These shows were meant to be taken at a rate of no more than once a week. How can anyone appreciate anything when they guzzle it down in gulps as if it were a quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? One thing I’ve learned: when something makes you happy, you want it to last.

Among the re-discoveries? As a very young boy I remember watching re-runs of Car 54, Where Are You?  with Fred Gwynne, Joe E. Ross and Al Lewis. The main impression on me at that age was of course that Gwynne and Lewis were “the same guys in The Munsters.” In my sixties, I was glad to discover that it’s actually a very funny show in its own right about inner city cops, pre-dating Barney Miller by many years. I’ve made its two seasons last about as long as possible: it will be an unhappy day when I run out of episodes sometime this summer.

Next Time: WDUK Tuesday Night at the Movies.

— Thorn.

The Power of Playlists

 

For a long, LONG time, I was content with planning my evening’s entertainment around the DVDs that I had on hand; which, yes, meant removing and inserting disks and waiting for them to load at about half-hour intervals (I don’t “binge-watch” anything, and neither should you). As a child of the broadcast TV era, and an adult of the VHS era, I was accustomed to this. It teaches patience.

It took me an unconscionably long time to figure out how Wifi and digital media could make an evening’s entertainment seamless, and it took even longer for me to realize that iTunes’s Playlist feature could be used just as well for video content as it is for music. This was more than a “lightbulb over the head” moment: it was a door opening.

Away back in the days when I was the night guy/de facto children’s librarian at the library of a small local college, I started hosting a regular “Free Movie Night” for the students, and from the start it was never just a movie. I’ve always been interested in re-creating the kind of full program that movie theaters used to offer their patrons, and so I presented an array of short subjects before the feature: usually a cartoon, a two-reel comedy (Laurel & Hardy or Buster Keaton), and a chapter from an old cliffhanger serial, because that’s what I had on hand.

In those days, it was next to impossible to run a seamless program, without interruptions. In addition to the projector, it required two VHS players, or a VHS and a DVD player, the latter of which was a New Thing then. I would have to cue up the tapes the night before so that they would start at the desired point when I switched them out. With DVDs it was actually harder, even though the quality was better. Because of menus and un-skippable commercials.

In later years, when I had friends over for a movie night, it was still the same challenge, with the same unsatisfactory result: impossible to create a really smooth program. In fact it was a little bit worse, because I’d have to occupy one of the best seats in the house just so that I could reach the players easily.

It wasn’t until about three years or so ago that I discovered the freedom of using playlists in iTunes to arrange the evening’s show. I know, I’m slow on the uptake. But with a small amount of prep, I could pre-load an array of trailers, movie-theater bumpers, short subjects and the feature; at showtime, all I had to do was press “PLAY,” sit back and watch it unfold seamlessly. 

This was a Joy.

From there, the next logical step was to arrange my normal personal evening TV series viewing the same way. Before I moved to town from the country fifteen years ago, I’d never known anything but free broadcast TV. After that, DirecTV was the best option, but I quickly grew tired of paying every month for a bunch of channels that didn’t interest me. The rise of streaming services passed me by; I’d already pulled the plug by then. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that nobody knows what I want to watch better than me.

I have an older iMac that I’ve converted into my server: and an AppleTV connected to my television, which easily allows me to connect my TV to the computer, and run iTunes directly through my TV. It isn’t the fanciest or slickest set-up, and there are plenty of other ways to do it (and plenty of sources to tell you how), but it’s simple, it works, and I was able to figure it out for myself.

Nowadays, whatever I’m watching, I usually plan the full week’s viewing in advance. I have an array of “station ID” bumpers that I’ve created, and am amassing a growing collection of vintage TV commercials, so that when dinner is over and I sit down for the evening’s entertainment, all I have to do is launch the playlist; what unfolds isn’t particularly authentic, but it is a fair approximation of the style of what prime-time television used to be like when I was growing up. And I’m finding a lot of pleasure in the planning, in being the “Programming Director” of my own virtual station. 

I still buy physical media. In fact, I ONLY buy physical media: digital content can go “poof” too easily, and in too many ways. But every disk that comes into the house is immediately ripped (via MakeMKV and Handbrake) to digital MP4, because it’s that much more convenient. As Monty Python once said, “It’s fun, and only slightly illegal.” 

Over the next few posts, I’ll be walking through my current schedule, the thinking behind it, and the hows of finding and arranging it all. It’s a way of writing about media that goes beyond just what the present day is shoveling down your throat. Hopefully this will be of interest to somebody; perhaps it’ll give you some ideas, and open some doors for others. I’ll be starting with most critial night of the week: the dreaded Monday.

See you there.

—Thorn.

Embracing Your Inner Librarian

 

My father kept a small library in an alcove beside the den, and I used to love standing in there just looking at all the titles, trying to decide what to read, what I could read, and what I would read in the future. Titles that I specifically remember discovering on those shelves were Lost Horizon,  The Flight of The Phoenix, The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, the Poppy Ott adventure series by Leo Edwards (Edward Edison Lee), and Dickens’s Bleak House in the original parts — thank goodness I still have that one on my shelves today!

I was learning to love storytelling and fiction in all its forms at a very young age, and also learning that if you made a place for it in your home, no one could take it away from you.

That was the problem with TV and movies. Not only could they take it away from you, they could prevent you from seeing it in the first place.

At the age of seven, my favorite TV show was a Hanna-Barbera half-hour adventure that combined live action with animation called THE NEW ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Look it up; all I’m going to tell you about it that Ted Cassidy, the actor who played Lurch on THE ADDAMS FAMILY and who appeared on STAR TREK and many other series of the day, was the regular villain; and that I was desperately in love with Lu Ann Haslam, the Older Woman who played Becky Thatcher on the series.

I was in my sixties before I ever was able to watch the entire series. Did it live up to my memories? That’s beside the point.

The point here is that the show aired early on Sunday nights: one of those Time Slots of Death where the network put shows that they were Trying to Kill. The Elephant’s Graveyard for TV shows in the ‘60s. Programming was a game that networks played with millions of dollars at stake, and Sunday nights were the slots of planned Loss Leaders. Because Sunday afternoons were when the football games aired, and if the football game ran over time, “your regularly scheduled program” would be “joined in progress.”

That is, if it aired at all. 

The football game always ran over time. I missed so many episodes of my favorite show, or was forced to join them halfway through, because of those fucking football games.

And so some other things that I learned at a very young age were to hate football with a deep and abiding passion (still with me to this day), and to learn that if you missed your favorite show, you missed it. Shows aired once in those days, maybe twice if you were lucky. Grown-ups would say to you (as they forbade your favorite show because it was past your bedtime or for some other equally dumb-ass and self-serving reason), “You can watch it another time.”

I knew that this was bullshit even before I knew the word “Bullshit.”

In those dark days, every kid knew the rules of television: that TV series had a cumulative effect greater than the sum of their parts, that to everything there is a season, that when it was gone, it was Gone Forever, and as for binge watching, what the hell was that? Even the word didn’t exist yet.

Nowadays of course we live in a world where it’s all Out There, all available, all the time.

Except when it isn’t.

Because the Suited Corporate Bastards who control everything (and who share about equal status with football in my estimation) are always trying to find ways of taking things away from us in the interest of monetization — and preventing us from having anything that they think can’t be monetized.

This is why I’m now quite worried about the preservation and restoration of our silent movie heritage, or for that matter any art or fiction created in or before 1929. It’s all in the Public Domain now; the upshot of which is that the Suited Corporate Bastards will find it harder to bleed money out of any of it.

In the great Ray Bradbury’s still-alarming novel FAHRENHEIT 451, small personal libraries were humanity’s only record of the past, and people became Living Books to preserve literary works from destruction at the hands of the government. That day could still come. That day is closer now than ever. Just sayin’.

Personal libraries are more important today than ever before, and will likely become vital in the near future, unless you are one of those people who will contentedly eat whatever shit you are fed, and smile and say “Give me more of that shit!” 

The whole culture is dying, because everyone who knew how to create it is either dead or disenfranchised. When all the chefs die off or are let go, the food becomes inedible. The same principle applies to culture. Oh, the food will continue to be prepared, but it will be less and less nourishing, less and less flavorful, until we’re all eating Spam.

And yes, there’ll always be that one guy who shouts out, “I’ll eat your Spam! I love it! I’m having Spam eggs bacon Spam Spam Spam and Spam!” If I have to explain that reference to you, all I can say is that you’ve got your cultural work cut out for you.

But riddle me this, Batman. Name one single person working in the industry today who is capable of writing anything even halfway as good as THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. Maybe you’ll have to take time out to track down and watch a copy of THE PHILADELPHIA STORY before you can answer that. That’s okay, I can wait.

You can’t do it. Because they don’t exist.

Thankfully, in 2025, it is easier and more practical than ever before to live in the past. But you’ll need to become your own personal teacher, librarian, programming director and technician to do it. You’ll need to be hunter/gatherer, archeologist, archivist, detective, technician and intrepid cultural explorer. You’ll have to learn to not to be distracted by the obstacles that get thrown in your path, and to not have any age-ist prejudices about the past, how to recognize and follow a lead. 

It’s a lot of work, but there are pleasures to be had, including the pleasure of re-connecting with lost dreams, and the joy of making New Discoveries.

—Thorn.