A compendium of 150 Monty Python Sketches. (via Quiddity)

In consideration of British comedy history, here are two video clips. The first clip is from “The End,” the first episode of Red Dwarf, written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor and produced in 1987:

The second clip is “The Exam,” written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, taken from the first episode of Mr. Bean and produced in 1989:

Both of these scenes are funny, but there are a number of striking similarities: the effort to blow into the paper, the cheater flipping over the paper and being surprised that there is information on both sides of the exam, and the cheater closing his eyes in disbelief only to open his eyes and see the exam in front of him.

The National Post reported that Mr. Bean was conceived as a test character in 1987. Sketches for Mr. Bean had apparently been performed on stage. But in this interview, Atkinson revealed, “And so we thought wouldn’t it be interesting to bring them to Montreal, which we did in 1989. We tried them out on basically a French-speaking audience. And then we did the English-speaking side.”

The big question here is what Mr. Bean sketch he’s talking about. Was “The Exam” one of the candidates? According to the Just for Laughs page:

The sketch, which was in the form of a lecture on dating techniques, was first tested out at one of the French galas. It was met with such an overwhelming positive response, that it was added to the HBO special, and was met with the same response. BBC brass watched the tape of his performance at Juste pour rire and the following year Atkinson’s “Mr. Bean” TV series aired for the first time and made Atkinson an international star.

This suggests that “The Exam” may have been written sometime in 1989 — shortly after the BBC commissioned the first thirty-minute installment of Mr. Bean. A version of this sketch was also included in a Rowan Atkinson one hour HBO special, which was performed and filmed on December 19th and 20th, 1991 in Boston’s Huntington Theater.

Still, I have to wonder whether Curtis and Atkinson were inspired, in part, by Red Dwarf. Obviously, hot off the success of Blackadder, they were very concerned about whether Mr. Bean was going to draw a major audience. But did they see Red Dwarf and abscond with a few of Grant Naylor’s ideas just after signing on with the BBC? And what do Grant and Naylor have to say about this?

Yes, the mercenaries clearly use Super Soakers as their weapons. Yes, Sharaz Jek is nothing more than a Phantom of the Opera ripoff. Yes, the “technology” hasn’t dated all that well. Yes, one of the bad guys speaks in Shakespearean soliloquies directed at the camera (and, really, why can’t we see more of this on television?). Yes, Peri’s “American” accent shifts into British at certain spots. Yes, the death of one of the supporting characters in Episode 3 could have easily been improved upon with Adobe After Effects. Yes, they had no budget. But, man, this is some pretty fun stuff — in large part, because the script and the acting are pretty fantastic under the circumstances.

Witness the Doctor Who episode, “The Caves of Androzani” on YouTube: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] Part 11] [Part 12]

Variety; “The canaries in TV’s creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Comedy Central’s latenight stalwarts ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.”

It’s 1988 all over again. And there’s a part of me quite curious about how long it will go on, how patient audiences will be for reruns, and whether the late-night television titans might at long last be revealed as mimetic melonheads desperately reliant they are upon their writers.

The difference this time is that this WGA strike is going down in the Internet age, with the largest possible depository of non-union talent showing off their wares at YouTube.

Sure, 95% of everything is crap. But what if the networks and the WGA can’t come to an agreement? Let’s say that the strike ends up going on for longer than six months, which would surely make the promised spate of sixteen uninterrupted episodes of Lost impossible and piss off the fans. That’s certainly sticking it to the man. But is it possible that a spate of enterprising nonunion talent, shut out by the WGA system, might drastically court the networks during this strike? And if they do not approach the networks or the networks do not approach them in scab-like manner, then perhaps television audiences, desperately searching for new material, might be drawn to either the Internet or reading books to find new stories.

In other word, this WGA strike couldn’t have happened at a better time. As the relationship between old media and new media remains transcendent and ever-evolving, I’m wondering if we won’t see some serious shock waves if the WGA strike isn’t resolved within two months. Unless, of course, the WGA strike proves the inevitable: that current television audiences are quite happy to get their reality TV fix. Which would be considerably ironic, given that this was precisely what the WGA has gone to the mat for.

Peter Davison will reprise his role as the Fifth Doctor. And yes an “Eeeeeeeeeeeek!” is in order for this.

The pilot for Babylon Fields, the zombie crime drama that was noted on these pages a few days ago, now lives in its full 42 minute glory on Google Video. Watch this while you can. One never knows the vagaries of lawyers who will want to take this down.

Dark Shadows reenacted by dolls.

I don’t know what’s funnier: the mad genius who teamed up Amy Sedaris with Martha Stewart in the kitchen or the fact that Stewart doesn’t know what bongwater is. (via Quiddity)

Violet Blue: “As I told the producer (who I saw quite quickly), I will not lie about my appearance or who I am, for anyone or anything. It does my readers, my listeners, my viewers, my friends and the sex-positive, non-judgmental message I bring and represent a disservice to lie. And, I told her, I have to look at myself in the mirror when I wake up the next day and look at myself. Would she have me change my appearance to look ‘less Asian’ to seem more of an expert?”

…apparently, you can watch every episode online. (via Quiddity)

I’ve noticed a troubling trend in television dialogue for two characters to begin their conversation like this:

CHARACTER A: Hey.
CHARACTER B: Hey.

Now “Hey” is a perfectly reasonable word. I use it myself. But what bothers me so much about this recurrent exchange is that the actors always deliver their “Hey” like some languorous hipster, generally when in the middle of working on a farm or meditating on a porch or doing some kind of “thinking” in relation to an emotional exercise. Never mind the age or the character relationship. The double “Hey” is used among couples who have been together for multiple years, siblings, between shopkeepers and customers — in short, it now serves in lieu of a name. It is also used when one character has returned from some pressing errand and has just finished talking with the other character only an hour before! Instead of even a rudimentary exchange like:

CHARACTER A: Everything okay?
CHARACTER B: (silence, as CHARACTER B ponders death of a loved one)
CHARACTER A: Is there anything I can do?
CHARACTER B: Leave me alone.

we get

CHARACTER A: Hey.
CHARACTER B: Hey.

No sense of empathy. No sense of giving someone space. At the end of the day, there’s the lazy television writer’s trusted “Hey,” which signals to the audience that the show will go on and we will be right back for a message from our sponsors. And the characters don’t even bother to refer to each other by their first names!

Well, I’m sorry, but this is lazy writing. “Hey” has become the detached crutch that has now replaced beats and silent emotional reaction. Apparently, television space must be filled up with dialogue or an action scene at every moment, even if it’s a monosyllabic word. And instead of conveying excitement, the “Hey” is drawn out, as if Southern Californian vernacular could be found in every scenario.

Perhaps the solution to all this is for fans of television to count the number of “Heys” in any given episode and to publicly shame these writers into writing more convincing dialogue.

I have seen the last episode of the third season of Doctor Who and I am close to vomiting. I didn’t know how much I cared about the series until now and I sincerely hope that the rumors are true — that Davies has decided to leave Doctor Who and will never return again. I’ve had enough. For all that any long-time Who fan complained about John Nathan-Turner, the cheesy crap under Nathan-Turner was fucking Masterpiece Theatre compared to this flamboyant tripe. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see this clip, in which Doctor Who has been cheapened beyond any rudimentary level of dramatic redemption. It’s a pity, because John Simm is a promising Master. Russell T. Davies appears to have sabotaged a science fiction staple. This is, in many ways, worse than the Six Feet Under episode, “That’s My Dog,” in which another great series was hijacked. To dwell on the subject further is to unleash a mad torrent of violence upon an inanimate object that I will only call “Russell,” only to injure my hand and pay an expensive hospital bill.

Russell T. Davies, you fucking wanker. How could you do this? How could you destroy a sizable chunk of the human population in the present day? How could you write scenes in which characters effortlessly infiltrate major executive scenarios? How could you write something so adverse to the show’s quirkiness, wit, intelligence, and charm?

Christ, it’s only a television show, I know. I have only late-night Dirty Harry impulses to go on. But this two-part finale is the work of a talentless megalomaniac and I wish that justice of some sort could be effected. But it can’t.

Guess it’s time to read James Joyce instead.

Listen for the scream near the end when she gets the network wrong.

Once again, John Freeman offers a preposterous essay. In bemoaning the ostensible popularity of The Sopranos, Freeman writes, “[C]ritics were calling Chase the Dickens of our times.” And from there, Freeman’s article can be summarized as followed (and it’s best if you read the next four sentences in a high-pitched voice to get the hysterical timbe right): Oh noes! The novel is dead! The sky is falling! The literary landscape is in trouble because of uncited empirical evidence!

Again, Freeman refuses or is simply incapable of citing specific examples to prove his thesis. Maybe it’s because calling out Michael M. Thomas or Alessandra Stanley — writers who both offered this not so unreasonable comparison — involves taking a stand against fellow New York journalists, something that runs counter to Freeman’s notorious streak of passive-aggression.

But no matter. If we examine the Dickens comparison to David Chase closely, it’s not as unsound as it seems. After all, Dickens’s work arrived in installments, much like television episodes, with Dickens often corralling mammoth plot threads as he wrote (ergo, his much cited tendency for coincidental run-ins) and tailoring his novels in accordance with reader reaction. Consider the case of The Old Curiosity Shop, surely the most reviled of Dickens’s works. (As Oscar Wilde once famously noted, “One would have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) While Dickens’s close friend John Forster kept his editorial contributions fairly low-key in his Life of Dickens, it was Forster who read all of Dickens’s proofs and who gave Dickens considerable advice. Observing the close audience reaction to Little Nell, he pointed out to Dickens that he would have to kill her off.

With Forster’s hand in the Dickens editing process, what makes him any different from a script editor or a more benign version of an HBO studio executive? And with the great controversy over whether the Sopranos finale was any good, what makes the Sopranos finale any less different from the way people reacted to Little Nell’s death?

Further, if an acclaimed television series can’t be compared with a Victorian serial, then what the Dickens is David Simon doing recruiting crime novelists like George Pelacanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane to write episodes for The Wire? Surely, there is some convergence afoot. People like Simon wish to inject television with a more ambitious quality: the contained serial with deaths and developments that television has sometimes failed to live up to.

Unable to discover an explicit connection between the apparent fall of books and the rise of television, Freeman quotes the oft-cited NEA “Reading at Risk” study — an examination which collected its data in 2002. But what business does Freeman have drawing upon data from five years ago to contextualize a series of unsubstantiated delusions he views as a present-day problem? After all, it’s the “white-wine sipping yuppies” who are “talking.” Pretty soon, it will be the rabbits in Freeman’s walls confessing their unanimous preference for Edie Falco over Edward Falco.

And there is this preposterous leap: “To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people’s outlook on the world, and so far only George Saunders and David Foster Wallace have adequately described the way this framework is murdering our language.” What of Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, with its hip-hop neologisms and affluent fat man protagonist? What of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which used a bitter divorce to comment upon said language? What of Mathew Sharpe’s Jamestown, in which an apocalyptic scenario is predicated entirely upon trade and communication? I could be here all day rattling off titles. Is Freeman simply not paying attention to the current literary environment?

There is no need to plunge further. Freeman’s piece is uninformed and hysterical poppycock of the first order — the kind of nonsense I’d expect to be published in a college newspaper, not The Guardian.

So let me get this straight. Max Headroom, a major cyberpunk cultural item that aired for two seasons on ABC in the mid-1980s, is unavailable on DVD. Yet a handful of episodes are available for free on AOL? I don’t understand the logic behind this, but I know what I’ll be downloading very soon. There is also the V television series (as opposed to the more interesting miniseries), a smattering of Wonder Woman episodes, and even Freddy’s Nightmares, which I’m confident is an unintentional laugh riot. (via Fimoculous)

[UPDATE: Actually, it’s too good to be true: “Your PC is not running a supported Windows OS (Windows XP Professional x64 and Vista x64 are not currently supported). You can not buy and download videos.” To hell with AOL.]

The Onion: “In a cease-and-desist letter sent to Google’s attorneys last week, media conglomerate Viacom demanded that YouTube immediately pull 400,000 ex-TV viewers from its industry-leading video-sharing site.”

13 Places to Watch TV for Free Online.

I encountered this list of the ten best television intros and I was a bit underwhelmed. So here’s an additional list of intros to add to the pile:

1. The Prisoner: When was the last time that you experienced a television series intro that was this cinematic? Everything from the great match editing of McGoohan walking down the corridor, with the shadow passing over his face cutting to the shadow passing over his tapping heels, to the retro typewriter Xing out McGoohan’s photo throws you into the intricate allegory that The Prisoner dared to bring to its viewers.

2. The Muppet Show: If you examine The Muppet Show‘s premise (a bunch of puppets running a variety show) from a hard rationalist’s perspective, the show is pretty damn absurd. So what better way to set the mood then unleashing a mad torrent of Muppets singing and dancing?

3. Six Feet Under: Whatever one’s feelings on Thomas Newman’s theme, one must admire the deft stop-motion animation, the unusual angles that the coffin is pulled out of the hearse, and the great match cutting (such as the gurney wheel turning on cue).

4. The Drew Carey Show: My feelings on The Drew Carey Show are mixed, but I did greatly enjoy the show’s intro, in large part because I’m a sucker for anachronistic urban dancing.

5. The Six Million Dollar Man: It was a pretty lame show, but there’s a reason why this intro remains indelible. Starting off with a straight-faced summation of Steve Austin’s accident, we are then given all manner of superimposed graphics, followed by that indelible narration. It’s too bad the writing on the show wasn’t this effectively melodramatic.