Brief Hiatus for the British Television Blog

Thank you for swinging by the 30 Years of British Television blog. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I haven’t posted anything here in a little while. I’ve been hard at work on a couple of other books and their respective blogs, which has made updating this one pretty difficult. I hope to resume updating this one once my next book is published at the end of November.

In the meantime, please feel free to stop by the blogs for my other books:

The New Horror Handbook

The Gilmore Girls Companion

or drop me a line if the mood strikes you: asberman813 (at) Gmail.com.

Thank you for your interest!

-Aaron

Thanks, Entertainment Weekly!

Cheers to Aubry D’Arminio for the kind mention of 30 Years of British Television in yesterday’s PopWatch blog on the EW.com Web site. It certainly was placed in some excellent company

Coltrane! And Now That We’ve Got Your Attention…

Horrah for the the people of New Zealand, still blessed with a keen sense of ingenuity unspoiled by the super-litigious spirit of the UK and North America.

To alert Christchurch residents to a teen bicycle thief working the area, the police circulated a “Wanted” flier boasting a photograph of Cracker star Robbie Coltrane. As a story on the BBC Web site explains, quoting the circular:

“Robbie Coltrane is not the burglar but imagine him aged 16 with lank greasy hair and you have the picture.

Could ‘Little Britain USA’ Be the Way?

A very unusual Transatlantic experiment will take place on Sept. 28. That’s when HBO is set to air Little Britain USA, essentially the fourth season of the BBC’s Little Britain.

Shot in Wilmington, NC, the six-part series also will air on the BBC in the UK and The Movie Network in Canada.

In addition to the usual gang of outrageous characters featured in previous series of Little Britain, this year’s entry also will include some new American ones:

• “Sweet American Teen Connor and his grandmother Mildred”
• “Misguided beauty pageant hopeful Ellie-Grace and her pushy mother” (pictured)
• Iron-pumpers Tom and Mark
• Bing Gordyn, the eighth astronaut on the moon

Up till now, Little Britain has been seen in the USA only on the BBC America cable channel. It remains to be seen what effect filming the series in the US for a combined UK/North American audience will have on the often-crude sketch show. Could this finally be a successful compromise between airing British programs in America and remaking them with American casts?

Visit ‘Comedy England’

Certainly it’s been a slow, maddening process, watching the BBC, and by extension all British television companies, come to realize what a commodity they have in their programs, and how admired those commodities are around the world.

Today, everything has changed. You can acquire most British TV shows on home video (though you may have to bung in a few extra quid for a Region Free DVD player), the BBC America cable channel isn’t afraid to experiment with its content, and last month, something even more amazing came about.

VisitBritain, the UK’s national tourism agency, launched a sweeping new campaign to lure more cash-engorged souls to its shores – all based on its rich history of television, cinematic and stand-up comedy.

The “Comedy England” campaign and Web site invite the curious and the obsessed to visit the birthplaces of legends such as Peter Sellers and Charlie Chaplin, and pay their respects at the graveside of Benny Hill.

Of even greater interest to British Telly fans, “Comedy England” also can helpfully guide you to dozens of other points of interest including:

• The setting of the Seventies sitcom To the Manor Born
• The place where Fawlty Towers‘ Basil Fawlty thrashed his car with a tree branch
• The home of Lou and Andy from Little Britain
• The fictional home of Bridget Jones’ Diary’s title character
• A Dad’s Army museum

What’s particularly gratifying about this campaign and its accompanying Web site is the thought that has clearly gone into it. This isn’t just the nonsense you’ll find in any old guidebook. Speaking of the Web site, its a slick, friendly little number that can easily lead to a relaxing evening’s Web surfing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to plan my trip to the French restaurant that Mr. Creosote threw up in in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. (I assume I shall have to bring my own bucket.)

Robbie Coltrane: ‘We’re All Going to Be Gypsies’

Robbie Coltrane, star of the yet-to-be-topped police drama Cracker, is exploring the weird and wonderful places off the beaten path in the UK in the new DVD Robbie Coltrane: Incredible Britain. Terrific, wonderful — I’m sure he’s brilliant in it as he is in darn near everything he’s ever put his hand to.

But check out this interview with Coltrane by Luaine Lee of the McClatchy-Tribune News Service for some of his insights into not only this new DVD, but the world at large. In particular he has an interesting riff on acting vs. “normal” jobs:

“The more dull the job the less likely you were ever to get fired. People made a deal with themselves that they were going with security and not necessarily much fulfillment. But that’s not true anymore. They’re laying off people who work in banks by the thousands. I think we’re all going to be gypsies and vagabonds one of these days.”

And don’t forget to check out an interview with Coltrane’s Cracker co-star Geraldine Somerville (Jane Penhaligon) in 30 Years of British Television, out now.

Book’s First Review!

Thanks to 30 Years of British Television publisher Ben Ohmart for calling our attention to the book’s first official review. On the whole, Phil Hall, writing for the Edge Boston, had some nice things to say:

For anyone who watches public television strictly to feed an Anglophile fix, this is quite the treasure.

Thanks, Phil! Feedback of any kind is always appreciated.

Is TV Drama the New Novel?

Riffing on a remark made by Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction, at a recent Royal Television Society event, The Guardian’s Leigh Holmwood asked the very interesting question:

Should TV drama be taken as seriously as other forms of more ‘high art’? And has it really supplanted the novel as the “narrative of our times”?

Even more intriguing than the question were some of the answers Holmwood received such as this one:

I’m not convinced. Television is culturally extremely important but to say the TV drama has supplanted the novel as the “narrative of our times” is perhaps a step too far. The novel is still incredibly important – book sales are high and the novel has great influence over other art forms, in a way that television does not.

At first blush this sounds right, but even in the UK, book sales are not as high as all that. And as much as they would like to deny it, the type of books that are actually selling are of no greater intellectual weight than what passes over bookseller counters in the States: James Patterson potboilers, bodice-rippers and party-political screeds, mostly. A far more telling answer is one of the most recent on The Guardian page:

Last time I had a long flight, I didn’t take along a book. I took series one of The West Wing to watch on an iPod. Drama – as proven by The Sopranos, The Wire, and even pulp TV ‘airport’ fiction such as Lost and 24, can be every bit as engaging as a good book, and – thanks to ongoing narratives – can last a lifetime (or seven seasons…)

What say you?

British Telly’s Online Shangri-La

Our darling Beeb has taken a boot to the pants for years on both sides of the Atlantic. While often these trips to the woodshed have been deserved, the BBC has done a fair amount of good in the world that gets overlooked quite a bit.

In a move that should go a long way toward garnering that institution greater respect online,  the BBC has set out to create a Web-based repository for its more than 80 years of programming. As this piece from The Guardian’s Web site explains:

“…the project will create a web page for every episode of every single programme ever broadcast on the BBC, and be the basis of a future plan to introduce a searchable vault of archived shows.”

The possibilities here are endless. And on behalf of myself and my fellow non-British TV fans, I only hope that this “vault” is accessible by everyone.

In recent years the Beeb’s rival, ITV, has done an impressive job of unearthing classic shows for viewing online, only to lock out we foreign types. In May, for example, ITV’s Web site posted a lost episode of its classic soap opera Crossroads. You can read about that rare find here, but heaven help you if you actually want to watch it if you’re living outside the UK.

There are literally dozens of wonderful ITV programs waiting to be watched online here, safely locked away from all but British eyes. Rising Damp, Cold Feet, Chancer, Cracker…it’s pretty maddening, actually.

And while an argument can be made that these companies can hardly pop for unlimited bandwidth, would it be so difficult for ITV, and the BBC for that matter, to allow foreign users to pay a nominal sum to see these programs online? While Rising Damp and Cracker are readily available in American DVD editions, other series such as the Kevin Whately/Amanda Burton doctor drama Peak Practice are not.

Let us hope that, in the name of good will and celebration of this wonderful art form, the BBC will throw open the doors of this groundbreaking archive for the enjoyment of people the world over.

Countdown to Homogeny

The good news is that you can stock up on DVDs, read and reread your copy of 30 Years of British Television, and basically relive the best that British television has had to offer.

“Well that is a very good suggestion,” l hear you say, “but what ever are you getting at?”

Oh my brave little British TV fan, I read  this in the news today and oh boy. Let me just give you the first sentence:

ITV, the UK broadcaster, has signed a potentially ground-breaking deal to develop new programmes with Twentieth Century Fox TV using joint funding and combined teams of US and British writers and producers.

You see where this is going, don’t you? If not, let’s lend our attentions to Lee Bartlett, the new head of global content at ITV (and a former Fox executive):

“From this development fund, we could actually create scripted formats that could be produced in both countries at the same time,” he told the Financial Times.

“There could be differences – the cast for the British version could be more British than for the American version – but you could be making two series on top of each other, if I can put it like that. That could get you some pretty good production synergies.”

Now when we’re growing up, somewhere after learning our ABCs and how many capfulls of water can be swapped for Daddy’s vodka before the alarm is raised, we are taught that “synergies” are to quality what Hollywood is to originality.

You have only to picture a planning session for the creation of Are You Being Served some 30 odd years ago to see how this might work:

British Planner: Now let’s see. We have the middle-age woman who goes on about her “pussy” cat — hilarious! I can hear the laugh track already.

American Planner: Um, excuse me. I don’t want to be a wet blanket or anything, but there is really no way we could have that joke on American TV – we just don’t call kitties THAT here. At least we’ll keep that out of OUR version of the show.

Bean Counter: (Clears throat.) Sorry to butt in here but we can only afford a handful of writers and they have to knock out both sets of scripts in a small amount of time. Whatever they write, it’s gotta go in both shows.

British Planner: Awwww no. Lee Bartlett quite clearly implied we could sort of ‘British up’ the British version and ‘American up’ the American one.

Bean Counter: Yes, well I’m afraid he was over-egging the pudding a bit there. Not Lee’s fault, really. We were all so keen at the time, but that’s before we realized that Steve couldn’t write twice the number of scripts in just a few months time.

American Planner: (Pause.) Steve?

Bean Counter: Er, yes. When I mentioned our “handful” of writers, it was I who was over-egging the pudding that time.

Now if you all don’t mind, I really must be off. I don’t want to miss the first episode of “Lost in Brideshead Revisited.”