I loved Yes Minister as a kid. But mostly because my brother laughed a lot (he was 7 years older). I was too young to get most of the jokes, and I’ve never seen the show as a teenager or an adult.
The other show my brother used to love back then that used to bore the tar out of me was “Paper Chase”. I recently saw the Paper Chase movie as an adult and loved it. It makes me wish I understood the TV show as a kid. It’s funny how things can seem so complicated when you’re young. Even though I enjoyed the James Bond movies as a kid, all that exposition went over my head, so I didn’t really understand why Roger Moore was suddenly going over here and then running over to this other country. Now I see it as an adult, and I wonder, what the heck was so complicated about this? It’s pretty simple exposition.
I was debating including Spaced in my list of ennui comedies. I don’t think it quite fits, though certainly there are moments of boredom and ennui within it.
I also highly recommend it. It’s possibly my all time favourite sitcom, but it helps that I was exactly the right age for it when it aired.
Any time you mention The Day Today I get excited because it was you who recommended it to me ages ago, and it turned out to be one of the funniest thing I’d ever seen.
Yeah I need to find more stuff Chris Morris has done because he’s great and I really only know him from The Day Today (which I haven’t really seen much of) and The IT Crowd.
Red Dwarf: So far, I’ve laughed the hardest at Season 5 episodes. I’ve watched 4 episodes now and they’ve got their comedy really tuned in by this point. Every episode has at least one really big laugh, and I love the science fiction concepts presented too. The season 5 episodes ring a slight bell, I think I’ve seen this before on PBS back in the early 90s, unlike Season 4, which didn’t ring any bells and was completely new to me.
Brass Eye is probably the main thing you need to see. It’s very similar in concept and execution to The Day Today, except rather than parodying general news shows it goes after single-issue factual shows. Then watch Jam and/or listen to its radio precursor Blue Jam, but be warned it’s pretty dark. You could also watch Nathan Barley, which he made with Charlie Brooker. I wasn’t a fan at the time, despite adoring the Brooker thing it came from, TVGoHome, but I suspect it actually holds up pretty well.
Season 5’s finale is called “Back to Reality”. When I saw it in the mid-90s, I had no clue what episodes were part of which season, and I honestly believed that this episode was how they were wrapping up the show in the last episode. That the gang had been playing a VR simulation this whole time. I thought it was an absolutely delightful and perfect way to end the show.
Of course, anyone watching now will know there’s still many more seasons to go, so no one will fall for it, which is a shame. It loses some of it’s punch when you know it’s not for real.
I’m in the middle of Season 6 now. They lost the Red Dwarf… how else, off-screen between Season 5 and 6. That really made me laugh out loud. All the big changes that happen on this show so far don’t get shown to the viewers, they always happen off-screen. I can see this now as a big running gag.
I have to admit, I like the change so far. Instead of being on a giant ship, the action feels much more immediate and threatening now. In the first three episodes (of Season 6), chasing Red Dwarf is a great premise, and they are having some great adventures off the ship so far.
This is definitely my favorite TV show, and I even like seasons 7-10
If you really want a good book that is a lot of fun, I would suggest picking up the Red Dwarf RPG books, including the GM guide (which basically game-ifies each episode of the show into a session of content). They are written in the style of the show, and are quite fun.
One early adventure had the crew transported back to the day before the accident that killed the crew (just like the episode) and it played out just like the episode, with our dead hologram person frantically trying to fix the failing heat-shield, by putting on a second heat shield “double up for safety” he said. Of course this caused catostrophic failure, killing everyone except for the rest of the crew who were locked up for smuggling a puppy on board.
Later, they found wax-world, and wax David Bowie was the leader of the Time-corps, where he and the other wax figures would travel back in time inserting their wax-selves in situations to fix history, as there was some evil force attempting to corrupt the past with his views (It was Curt Schilling… or Robo-Curt Schilling)
That was a lot of fun, one escapade had them smuggle Albert Einstein into a 1960’s era Vegas to count cards and bankrupt a mob-run casino. (It involved actual gambling, blackjack, craps) Einstein was a gambling savant, turns out.
Anyway, that was all inspired by those RPG books’ suggestions.
I miss that campaign, it was tons of fun, I would love to run another one. I am not in love with the RPG system it uses, but the campaign materials and setting were a lot of fun. We had a “Dog” instead of a cat, who was very friendly and smelly.
It’s only available in the US (and maybe Canada?) I don’t know if Amazon channel names are even searchable — the UI for Prime Video is horrific. If you google “Britbox Amazon channel” you should be able to find it though.
Almost done with Season 7, one more episode to go. I really enjoyed this Season as well. And I can see now why these later seasons were so much less conducive to random PBS-viewing. The show is much more serialized. If you watch these seasons or episodes out of order, it can be very confusing.
Now that I am watching in order, I can see that they lost Red Dwarf, then were chasing it for 3 episodes before they lost track of it completely. Then I can see what happened to Rimmer. And then I can see how Kochanski made it on the ship despite being dead 3 million years ago.
