Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
Two of the BBC’s best comedies are showing currently on BBC Prime. The first is Yes, Prime Minister, the follow-up to Yes, Minister, the comedy series about British minister of administrative affairs Jim Hacker’s career. He is now prime minister, followed closely into office by the impeccably hypocritical Sir Humphrey Appleby, now cabinet secretary, and whimsical private secretary Bernard Woolley; all played in elegant style by the late Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds. The series is being shown nightly at 8.30pm except for Sundays. I seem to remember that like Yes, Minister, this series runs to 26 episodes. It’s worth instructing your VCR to record all of them, that’s if you prefer humour and satire aimed at your cerebrum.
The other series is called The Royle Family can you think of a catchier title? and is almost impossible to describe in any way that might do it justice. The Royles are the diametric opposite of the Buck House set, a decidedly working-class Manchester council-house family group who spend their lives arrayed on couches and armchairs in front of their television set.
Jim Royle is the father: overweight, with a blunt razor for a tongue; collapsed, like a giant bearded toad, in one of those huge recliner chairs. He’s the sole possessor and wielder of the television’s remote control. His brood of wife, cosmetically corniced daughter, soon-to-be son-in-law and a drip-nosed teenage son plus sundry drop-in visitors sprawl on the other furniture, all gazing steadfastly at the television while they trim and paint their toenails, massage each other’s feet, eat, belch, fart, scratch, smoke like chimneys, investigate their earholes, argue, talk on the phone, all more or less at the same time.
The humour is impossible to define, simply because it doesn’t try to be anything more than absurdly slice-of-life stuff, so achingly funny because of its utter ordinariness. It’s Pinter, Osborne, Wesker, Orton and a few others rolled into one, directed and performed like a television play. There’s no canned laughter, no pointing of funny lines; it’s a kind of television vrit.
If you’re sick and tired of the endless parade of almost identical American sitcoms served up nightly, give this one a try. You’ll need some careful listening to understand the Mancunian accents and idioms, but it’ll be well worth the effort. It’s on Wednesday evenings at 10pm on BBC Prime, with a repeat on Fridays at midnight.
Supposed palace rumblings in e.tv led last week to a short speculative article in Business Day. To call the reaction of e.tv news to this article hysterical would be to understate. According to e.tv news, the piece was grossly inaccurate so, by way of revenge, they proceeded to do a savage hatchet job on Business Day’s editor, Peter Bruce, claiming that “since he took over the reins” the newspaper has suffered an enormous loss in readership also grossly inaccurate.
On the other hand, San Reddy announced smugly, e.tv had in only the last month increased its viewership by a million and a half. Was he suggesting that Business Day’s alleged loss of readers had in some way increased e.tv’s audience? Or was it just a case of e.tv using the occasion to kiss its own arse publicly, an unsanitary habit to which it is fast becoming addicted?
I suspect it was the latter but whatever, it was the tantrum reaction of an enraged schoolgirl and hardly an appropriate way to go about correcting a few supposed factual errors. The net result was that we were left wondering why e.tv was reacting so strongly. Had the Business Day article been too close to the truth?
The most memorable image so far from the British general election circus was of Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott’s wonderful left jab. If only all politicians would follow Prescott’s admirable lead and give instant physical emphasis to their reactions especially to those who throw eggs and tomatoes. I hope the managers of Lennox Lewis took note. Their fallen champion could learn a lot from Prescott.
I didn’t have space last week to include the Quote of the Week before. It came from an aggravated Billy Nair, one of the African National Congress’s geostationary satellites in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. Clearly miffed at opposition questions, Billy let fly with a beauty: “We’ve heard all about truth and principles and freedom of speech … all that bullshit.”
A beacon of reckless honesty in our government’s ranks?