8 Comments on Rev 1 Curb 0

Martin Robinson on Fri, 9th Jul 2010 5:17 pm


And the star turn: Simon McBurney as the Arch Deacon.

G on Fri, 9th Jul 2010 7:49 pm


Don’t forget about the ‘Thick of It’, ‘Outnumbered’ is pretty good, ‘Star Stories’ was silly but funny, people loved ‘Gavin & Stacy’, ‘Peep Show’ is still good, ‘Brass Eye’ was amazing, Charlie Brooker serves up some good satire – there’s good comedy out there. I only caught a bit of ‘Rev’ but it looked good.

Where I do agree with Mr Fry is that we Brits haven’t come up with something with the scale and production value of ‘The Wire’, ‘Lost’ etc etc – it does even annoy me a bit that we can’t respond – surely of one our broadcasters could take a few chances and nurture something. (Though Dr Who is going strong)

And yes a lot of British telly is childish. However I’d suggest though our American friends come up with some great stuff they have plenty of unwatchable stuff on as well.

Glass half full for me really.

I even like watching ‘QI’.

Johnny Laird on Fri, 9th Jul 2010 11:12 pm


Rev is the first comedy I’ve EVER hunted down on iPlayer, and On Demand to watch.

For me, it’s completely outstanding…with a good deal of realism balancing the great comedy acting. Inner city Churchy types will recognize all kinds of familiar scenarios threaded through the script.

I particularity enjoyed Colin’s “review” of Dawkins’ “God Delusion”, and his bottle chucking game at the end of Episode 1 left me LOLing!

IAN CHRISTIE on Sat, 10th Jul 2010 10:50 am


Spot-on about REV. Note that characters just like this really exist in a lot of urban churches, so I recommend that anyone fancying a drink with people like that, as Matthew does, starts attending Anglican services. Social capital and mass wellbeing would rise immediately.

I can’t comment on CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM but endorse Matthew’s praise for MAD MEN. It’s a towering work of art and a brilliant evocation of the early 60s in the USA, when the postwar conformist society is fracturing, with mass affluence offering both real and illusory liberations. Serious ‘Maddicts’ should also see the excellent analysis of the series on Will Davies’s blog site Potlatch, by the way.

Livy on Sat, 10th Jul 2010 4:36 pm


I’d actually bet money MT’s not keen on The Thick of It.

With the risk of sounding like a typical reader, this is kinda pointing out the bleedin obvious. The U.S. has always produced the best shows; Ally McBeal and South Park stand head and shoulders above anything the UK has ever had to offer. But then again I’ve never really understood most English humour.

I mean… yeah… fair play, series 7 of Curb was a lot more slapsticky with many of the jokes following a more linear and formulaic pattern. I think they realised too late how hilariously valuable a character like Leon was and overdid it with him in the end. But the thing is, unless you were a fan of Seinfeld back in the day you wouldn’t have fully appreciated everything in the last season. Like all the George gags or the completely natural, uncontrived interplay between Larry and Jerry – it’s a kind of humour that doesn’t translate particularly well in the UK, but it is sheer comic genius on par with Woody Allen.

It’s not lazy, offensive or racist: when it comes to humour, nothing should be off limits. It’s about dealing with the absurdity of existence by ramming absurdity back down existence’s throat.

To be fair though, Americans are guilty of producing just as much dreck as us, only their industry is so much bigger with so much more money and talent involved that they’re bound to have a higher number of successful shows regardless of all the trash. Remember, they watch Jerry Springer-esque talk shows where child molesters confront their victims on stage, deny the whole thing, take a lie detector test, fail – and then the whole thing kicks off.

Comedy writers are actually in very short supply everywhere, which is why they’re highly sought after and surprisingly well paid. Humour writing is commanding more attention in higher education with about sixty universities in the US offering humour-writing courses and degree-granting programmes in humour studies. Funnily enough though, the largest group of current comedy writers for major films and TV shows comes from Harvard, which doesn’t do humour writing courses, and there’s never been a famous comedian who graduated from Yale or Princeton, unless you count a recent U.S. president.

Livy

Indy on Sat, 10th Jul 2010 11:02 pm


I haven’t seen the two series in question (not much time for TV at the moment) so I’ll start with the general observation that Livy’s words bring to my mind: humour will sooner or later always touch the edges of our cultural biases. Since so much of humour is based on the subversion of the unconscious taboos and touchstones that are part of ‘culture’ there will always be points at which it just doesn’t travel.

However, Matthew, I’m surprised you haven’t applied any structural lenses to this issue.

1) A lot of the historical reputation of British TV comes from the strength of the writing, and notably the strength of the dialogue writing. Over time, many of the innovations in visual, plotting and production have actually come from the US. You don’t get “The Wire” without first having “Hill Street Blues.” And the UK didn’t have anything to compare with HSB at the time – but in our jingoistic way we tend to forget this.

Of course, this is natural, because British TV is fed by the strength of British Theatre (and theatre training) where US TV is nourished by Hollywood.

And it’s worth being proud of the fact that strong writing/acting typically meant that in the past, the average UK TV show was a stronger product than the average US TV show. Also, one might note that stronger writing/acting might naturally lend itself to comedy…

2) The three shows you cite come from strong niche channels – HBO (Wire, Curb) and AMC (Mad Men). This era is a new high for the multi-channel world, the planets have aligned to give them the budget and commercial imperative to invest in quality television. (Throw in the Sopranos from HBO too, although it may not be as good as the others cited, the scope of the undertaking was similar.) And the writer of Mad Men cut his teeth on the Sopranos – in a lot of ways we’re looking at a pool of talent created by HBO – see Grant McCracken’s book for a sense of how much this comes out of the vision/gut of Chris Albrecht.

In the UK, ITV is a hollow wreck of a channel, Four and Five are on tight margins too. (It’s easy to forget that any golden age of British TV wasn’t just about the BBC.) And the BBC? Waves of reorganisations and tinkering with the remit seem to have left it directionless – unwilling to invest in new series in particular – but also without the courage to make something like The Wire – both for fear of the backlash about the political statements a series like The Wire makes and for the opprobrium about the budget involved… and the question of “family viewing…” Economically, something like The Wire only makes sense if you can screen it when most people are watching… but it would take a non-mainstream channel to be able to put something so adult on at “prime time.” Even Mad Men (it seems to me) might get the BBC in trouble if it were screened right after EastEnders.

But to return to Albrecht, when he moves on, whither HBO? And who knows when the British Albrecht may arrive?

3) So what about niche channels in the UK? (After all, NBC seems to be hollowing out in much the way ITV has, so it’s not all sweetness and light in the US TV business.)

a) UK niche channels naturally have a lower budget – HBO can reach peaks of 18 million viewers, which is on a level with the highest Eastenders episode on the mainstream BBC. It’s just a very different scale of operations.

b) The place where UK niche channels should have been fermenting over the last 10 years, on satellite, has been locked down by the cross-ownership of major programme channel and distribution by Sky. It’s only recently that Sky’s business model included bigger budget drama. Of course, we have Freeview now, but it will take time for something to grow there, just as it took a long time for HBO to grow beyond it’s original programming (which wasn’t so good.)

4) Speculatively – has UK TV become more childish by itself, or in response to changes in viewing habits? UK TV has seen a general decline in viewing – perhaps children and “young people” are the largest audience left? If UK adults are on the internet (and many of them are) that cuts into their TV time as their work time hasn’t gone down (although George Osborne is perhaps trying to fix that!)

Livy on Sun, 11th Jul 2010 6:54 pm


Just picking up on a point Indy made.

We’re might eventually get there, but very very very slowly. We may not have a TV show like Hill Street Blues for a springboard but films like Kidulthood and Adulthood are surely paving the way. However…in the long run we may not be ready for it, and for more worrying reasons. In the UK, many white middle class fans of The Wire ironically tend to be the same sort of people who turn their noses up at hip hop music and frown at sports like boxing or MMA; despite a complete ignorance of the details and contexts, they will dismiss one as using offensively degrading language and the other as heinously barbaric or primitive, even though they both save legions of young people from poverty, jail, gangs and drugs, providing the disadvantaged with empowerment and opportunity on par with their more privileged critics.

These art forms – like The Wire – are accurate, cultural reflections of individual lives and societies we will never be capable of fully comprehending. In Thailand, boxing is bigger than the Premier League in England, and you’ll find kids on every street corner practicing their equivalent of keepy-uppies by trading punches with each other in a safe and controlled way. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the Philippines with people regularly training complex systems of knife-fighting with blunted blades (Arnis/Kali): as sheltered white westerners with more comfortable living standards most of us (often protesting how ‘open minded’ we are) find this kind of thing deeply unnerving simply because we are not a martial society and consider ourselves superior and more highly evolved because of it.

Zippo lighters issued by the U.S. Army during WWII were inscribed with “For those who fight for it, freedom has a taste the protected will never know”. That’s what gang members, governments, boxers, MMA guys and hip hop artists are all about. Rappers don’t advocate changing the world for the hell of it – which is a rock ‘n’ roll attitude – but changing it because it’s wrong, which is a hip hop attitude.

A British TV show like The Wire….facing up to the reality that there are more kids than we think in our society compelled to carry weapons for reasons of personal protection? I don’t know.

Jenny on Mon, 12th Jul 2010 9:25 am


I was loving Rev – and will no doubt watch tonight – until the end of last week’s episode where suddenly the fact that poor old Colin hadn’t had sex for years and ws lonely (‘cos men are entitled to sex, am I right guys? It’s a tragedy if their alcoholism, vagrancy, or unwashedness means bitchy women won’t sleep with them) exculpated him from pinching some poor women’s bottom and calling her a ‘prick tease’.

You can make a joke out of evangelicals (I loved the stand off between the Rev and hios charismatic rival) without falling back on lazy cliches about slutty yet frigid women who are totally asking for it.

So annoying!

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