wed 04/12/2024

sitcom

Bluestone 42, BBC Three

Compile a list of the subjects you thought may be unsuitable for a sitcom, and it will almost certainly include a person with learning difficulties, assisted suicide and an army bomb disposal team.Well all three of those now exist – Derek and Way To...

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Best of 2012: Top 10 Comedy DVDs

There are oodles of comedy DVDs released for the Christmas market - here's a selection of the best.Dara Ó BríainCraic DealerIn more than a decade of watching him work, I've yet to see the hugely likeable Irish comic doing anything less than a very...

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Getting On, Series 3 Finale, BBC Four

Somebody has missed a trick in not promoting Getting On to BBC Two. Where The Thick of It earned its spurs on BBC Four before graduating to a larger audience, and Gavin and Stacey made the comparable journey from BBC Three to BBC One, the sitcom set...

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Girls, Sky Atlantic

While it’s not unusual for an imported television show to have been downloaded, discussed and dissected at length long in advance of of its UK transmission date, HBO’s Girls is even harder than most to approach with an open mind. Depending on which...

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Getting On, Series 3, BBC Four

Getting On exists somewhere on the spectrum between Carry On and Samuel Beckett. Set in a hospital ward where mostly geriatric patients are tended by middle-aged staff all with problems of their own, it looks unflinchingly at the great maladjusted...

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Me and Mrs Jones, BBC One

It's always either a very good or a very bad sign when my notebook remains untainted by my scrawl when I'm reviewing; either I am too busy enjoying myself to make notes or I'm so unengaged that I can barely be bothered to lift my pen.It was the...

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Mrs Brown Rides Again, Hammersmith Apollo

There's a great PhD to be written about why comics are so keen to dress as old biddies, from Arthur Lucan and Benny Hill to Dick Emery and Les Dawson, by way of any number of panto dames to the most noble of them all, Dame Edna Everage. To this...

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Derek goes to a full series, Rev takes a break

Channel 4 has announced it has commissioned a full series of Ricky Gervais's comedy-drama Derek, about an autograph-hunting care-home worker. Last month's pilot drew 3.2 million viewers and the first series will be broadcast in 2013. The pilot drew...

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2 Broke Girls, E4

Where would America be without its diners? Or for that matter, where would US culture be without them? Now here's another dramatic piece set in America's version of the greasy spoon, a sassily scripted sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick...

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Roger and Val Have Just Got In, BBC Two

It's a brave sitcom writer who dares to write a bleakly comic drama, without canned laughter, in which nothing very much happens and where a long-married couple natter away about the mundane details of their lives in the half-hour after they come...

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Felix and Murdo, Channel 4/ Ben Hur, Channel 5

I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben...

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Absolutely Fabulous, BBC One

Joy was unconfined in my house as the J-team reunited for Christmas to give us the greatest gift of the season. Not that baby and his royal visitors in Bethlehem but Jennifer Saunders, who gathered together her old mates Joanna Lumley, Jane Horrocks...

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