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have space to pursue these varieties here, though many examples taken from television comedy inform our subsequent chapters. Recommended reading Mark Lewisohn, Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy, London: BBC, 2003, 2nd edition. David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 2nd
6 Beur and banlieue television comedies: new perspectives on immigration Caroline Fache On July 17, 2013, Paris à tout prix (Kherici, 2013), a comedy about immigration, was released and received mixed reviews, despite decent numbers at the box office. Two days later in L’Express, journalist and movie critic Xavier Leherpeur assessed the production of French films about immigration in an article titled ‘L’immigration dans le cinéma français: un bilan mitigé’ (2013) (Immigration in French cinema: mixed reviews). In his review, Leherpeur also analyzes ‘la manière
The TV debut of Vic Reeves Big Night Out on Channel 4 in 1990 is often seen as marking a turning point for British TV Comedy, ushering in what is often characterised as the ‘post-alternative’ era. The 1990s would produce acclaimed series such as Father Ted, The League of Gentlemen and The Fast Show, while the new century would produce such notable shows as The Mighty Boosh, The Office and Psychoville. However, while these shows enjoy the status of ‘cult classics’, comparatively few of them have received scholarly attention. This book is the first sustained critical analysis of the ‘post-alternative’ era, from 1990 to the present day. It examines post-alternative comedy as a form of both ‘Cult’ and ‘Quality’ TV, programmes that mostly target niche audiences and possess a subcultural aura – in the early 90s, comedy was famously declared ‘the new rock’n’roll’. It places these developments within a variety of cultural and institutional contexts and examines a range of comic forms, from sitcom to sketch shows and ‘mock TV’ formats. It includes case studies of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer and the sitcom writer Graham LInehan. It examines developments in sketch shows and the emergence of ‘dark’ and ‘cringe’ comedy, and considers the politics of ‘offence’ during a period in which Brass Eye, ‘Sachsgate’ and Frankie Boyle provoked different kinds of media outrage. Cult British TV Comedy will be of interest to both students and fans of modern TV comedy.
by Pickering and Lockyer 2009b: 186). 6. ‘Light entertainment’ and variety rehabilitated and/or reimagined. This includes Reeves and Mortimer, Harry Hill, the catchphrase comedy of Harry Enfield, The Fast Show and Little Britain. 7. Changes in the ‘look’ (and sound) of television comedy. In his book on ‘televisuality’ – the emergence of programmes in the US with ‘identifiable style-markers and distinct looks’ competing for audiences in the post-network world – John Thornton Caldwell largely excludes TV comedy from these developments (1995: 5–6). In 1995, that was
In this chapter we focus on the ways film and television comedy have presented gender and sexuality. These subjects cross over in more ways than one. Gender is an issue of difference and difference has continually proved difficult for human cultures to negotiate. Patriarchal culture, that is, society which is structured in order to give the male sex many advantages over the
3885 Cult British TV Comedy:Layout 1 14/12/12 07:53 Page 147 6 The ‘Zooniverse’ and other (furnished) comic worlds Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: cult movies and intertextual collage’ (1987) looms large in what we might call ‘cult theory’, an essay whose resonance transcends its blind spots and inevitable datedness – Matt Hills rightly calls it ‘groundbreaking’, but also warns that it ‘has not aged well’ (2002: 132). It is perhaps best to see Eco’s essay as not dissimilar to the qualities he associates with cult texts – ‘ramshackle, rickety, unhinged’ – and to
about television comedy as it is television comedy, a rich, multi-layered, multi-registered treatise not just on the place and status of work in our contemporary lives but on the place, meaning and impact of both comedy and television too. Audience familiarity with the tropes and conventions of popular television suggests that comedy parodies will remain a feature of television for some time to come
publishers, juice-seller at the 24 Hours of Le Mans; see Parent 1989 : 176). He entered the competitive examinations for the Paris film school (IDHEC) in 1969, and was ranked twenty-first, although only the first seventeen were accepted. Beineix’s screen career began in 1969 as a trainee for a long-running television comedy series, Les Saintes Chéries , directed by Jean Becker. In the following ten years, he moved up to second
, plot-driven television comedy, and one of the oldest, originating from radio comedy (Edgerton 2007 : 130), and hence heavily verbal. Historically, the two stylistic identifiers of sitcoms have been the multi-camera set-up (the contemporary use of more than one camera to cover the action, which puts the sitcom closer to filmed theatre than to cinema) and the laugh track, the non-diegetic laughter that punctuates comic actions or jokes (Neale and Krutnik 1990 : 213–14). Shows with laugh tracks and multi-camera set-ups are unmistakably sitcoms – for example, classics
3885 Cult British TV Comedy:Layout 1 14/12/12 07:53 Page 232 Conclusion This book opened with a discussion of the post-alternative era as a ‘Golden Age’ – whether such a label was appropriate and, if so, when that Golden Age ended. While the first question is partly a matter of taste, an assumption inevitably underpins this book that this was a period of particular richness and significance for British TV comedy. On the other hand, the point of closure was not a question that I ever had any serious intention of answering – I had decided not to have the kind