The kindly Brits over at the BBC have decided to make an American version of their longtime news quiz satire show The News Quiz, called The News Quiz USA With Lewis Black. The pilot episode, which will be taped one week from today in New York, will feature comedians Andy Borowitz, Kathleen Madigan and Ted Alexandro chattin' about the news. Keep your fingers crossed for the pilot to succeed so that the show can be sold to US radio markets! Unless you hate good things. Then you can do whatever you want with your goddamned fingers. I don't care.
A preview of the Absolutely Fabulous holiday special has been released, and it features Jennifer Saunders blogging and flogging and Twittering her favorite cheese. All while sporting a denim explosion! The three upcoming specials will lead up to the London Olympics, and surely will include many more pills being taken and outfit-related wisecracks being cracked. Those are, of course, the two pillars of the holiday season.
The BBC is making a movie called Holy Flying Circus about the controversy surrounding the release of Monty Python's classic Life of Brian. It was called an attack on the church when it was released in 1979, but it went on to be a huge hit despite that fact. This new movie will be written by Tony Roche, who also wrote for In the Loop and The Thick of It. As for who will be playing the Pythons, here's the cast breakdown: "Darren Boyd will play John Cleese and Charles Edwards has been cast in the role of Michael Palin. Comedian Steve Punt will star as Eric Idle, [...]
In this weekly column, I’ll introduce you to the world of British comedy in the chronology of how I, an American anglophile, discovered it in my life. This week: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is great. Really great. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly great it is.
It’s been so incredibly popular, for so many years, across so many mediums it’s become sort of an alternative comedy Star Wars and Star Trek all rolled up into one…but better.
A science-fiction and comedy masterpiece, its many incarnations have included; novels (a 6 part, “trilogy”), comic books, radio series, [...]
How many times did David Schneider pee his pants with laughter when making 90s BBC spoof news show The Day Today? Read the interview and let the answer flow into your mind like warm, hysterical urine.
Cult classic Absolutely Fabulous is coming back, if but briefly, for three new specials that will lead up to the London Olympics. They'll take place in the present day, with Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley and all the original castmembers reprising their roles. Here's what to expect from the three specials: In the first epsiode, audiences will rejoin the ensemble in the middle of a "life-changing experience for one – which affects them all".
In the second show, Edina sets her sights on changing the career of someone described by the BBC as "a very big fish indeed".
In the concluding episode, Eddy and Patsy play their own [...]
Whatever happened to predictability, the milkman, the paperboy, evening TV…and the cast of one of the greatest comedies of all-time, The Office.
The original version of The Office, which ran on the BBC for 12 episodes over two series from 2001-2002, is one of the most influential comedies ever, spawning a number of remakes around the world and making series creator Ricky Gervais a very rich man. But what of the rest of that original cast? What have they been up to since leaving Wernham Hogg? Have they been able to match the success they had with that show? Let's catch up with the original office drones and [...]
Here's a great clip from BBC Two's The Trip, a series in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play heightened versions of themselves traveling around England and reviewing restaurants. In it, they fight over who has the better Michael Caine impression. They are both quite good!
Steve Coogan's production company is recutting a series of web shorts featuring character Alan Partridge into a real-deal TV show.
The shorts, which were originally made for Fosters Beer, are 11 minutes long, making it relatively easy for them to stick two of them together to reach broadcast length. The 12-part series starts airing online on November 5th, with each episode "shot as if it’s been filmed through a webcam in Partridge’s Radio Norwich studio." So they'll presumably be able to turn the show into a standard 6-episode British series. Just how much it all has to do with Fosters is unclear.
Could Steve Carell be set to re-make a second popular British sitcom for American audiences? ABC is working on a US version of the BBC show Only Fools and Horses, to be written by Scrubs writers Steven Cragg and Brian Bradley. Steve Carell and Jason Biggs are rumored to be playing the lead roles, but you know what they say about rumors. (That they're always true and we're going to have another Office!)
Hulu has picked up a 10-episode mockumentary comedy series called Paul the Male Matchmaker from Sex and the City's Liz Tucillo and Mad Men's Paul Bartholomew, with guest stars including Janeane Garofalo and Tony [...]
The original BBC Office premiered 10 years ago tomorrow. 10 years! In that time, it's become one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, spinning off a number of localized versions around the world, including the super-popular American version on NBC. In honor of this anniversary, Ricky Gervais penned an essay on the show and how he developed the characters for Entertainment Weekly. Here's a taste: David Brent doesn’t represent evil, or nastiness or even ignorance. He’s just a little out of place. Out of time. His worst crime is that he confused respect with popularity. He wanted both but concentrated on the wrong one. He didn’t [...]
We want to talk about life before Bridesmaids. You might be fatigued from all the talk about women in comedy, from sentences like “women aren’t funny” and “WOMEN AREN’T FUNNY?” or even “this movie won’t make you grow breasts,” (the strangest commendation for an Apatow film yet). We get that, and so we want to take off your glasses, rub your temples, and escort you to other moments in comedy that expose the famous dearth of 3-dimensional ladies, and what happens when they show up anyway (usually in Britain). We’ve been tracking the fucked-up funny women who have managed to flex their dimensions and do what everybody is all excited about [...]
The BBC just released a new list of rules for shows that it airs, including a couple focused on comedies. They are very British! One rule states that "unduly derogatory remarks aimed at real people (as opposed to fictional characters or historic figures) must not be celebrated for the purposes of entertainment." Another states that "we may feature a portrayal or stereotype that has been exaggerated for comic effect, but we must be aware that audiences may find casual or purposeless stereotypes to be offensive." They seem relatively reasonable, but it'll all depend on how strictly they're enforced. [via]
