Funniest Half-Hour Ever Alert!

Okay, rev up your funny bone – or however you get it ready – because if you tune into BBC America tonight at 9pm, you’ll see one of the funniest episodes of any show, ever. It’s “Gourmet Night” at Fawlty Towers, and you’re cordially…nay, vigorously…encouraged to attend.

Maybe you’ve seen it before, maybe you’ve seen it fifty times, it just doesn’t matter. This episode has everything: Kurt the chef who’s in love with Manuel the waiter, the hideous little boy who gets an elbow in the head, the Commander with the twitch, a plate of raw mullet, Andre and the duck, Basil’s vicious bastard of a car, and most importantly, no riff-raff.

All I can say is don’t miss "Gourmet Night" and definitely don’t come late, because, as Basil Fawlty says, “…on the other nights we’ll just have a big trough of baked beans and garnish it with a couple of dead dogs.” You’ve been warned!

One more thing: just don’t blame me if every other sitcom episode you ever watch looks a little bit lousy after this one.

Fawlty Towers "Gourmet Night" airs tonight, Wednesday 4/23 at 9pm, 12mid and 4am on BBC America. Check out their website for more schedule information.

There are some good Fawlty Tower fansites, too:
A nice basic site, with an adorable MIDI rendition of the FT theme song.
Fawlty Site, a great site with lots of good info and resources.
The Fawlty Towers Multimedia Page, including a quiz to test your FT knowledge.
A terrific page of Fawlty Towers analysis from Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Duck's Off!

 
Not So Trigger Happy Anymore

After watching some of the newest batch of Comedy Central’s Trigger Happy TV, I have to admit that the move to America hasn’t helped their aim one little bit. The original British episodes were weird existential romps into an unforeseen and astonishing world, a place where one could experience an almost Alice in Wonderland array of creatures and situations. Boy, I sure don’t feel the same way about these new ones, filmed in American cities like NYC and Seattle, and I have to lay a lot of the blame on the new American cast members.

Oh, they try really hard…and I mean REALLY hard. While THTV’s co-creator and main star Dom Joly can hardly be considered a shrinking violet, there isn’t a whiff of subtlety in any of the new cast members (two guys and a gal). In fact, there’s something more of an improv comedy troupe aura around the Yanks, and believe me, it’s not an improvement. The show bits don't feel clever and subversive anymore, just kind of rude and intrusive. Dom, we hardly know ye anymore!

When I wrote about THTV on 4/7, I mentioned the giant animals costumes that were such a prominent and welcome idiosyncratic element of the show. Somehow, the same six-foot tall Dalmatians and over-sized penguins that seemed so at home in Britain -- where such absurdity has a long and hallowed history -- end up looking like a cheesy advertising stunt. Americans don’t see things like that unless they’re standing on a street corner urging you to come inside for a store opening. We just don’t live in a country – or state of mind -- where a colossal walking eyeball could be anything else but a come-on for Visine, and more’s the pity.

I do like one thing in the new show: masked Mexican wrestlers who turn up and create havoc in the appropriate melodramatic style. It’s a great visual image and much more fun than the new annoying cheerleader character who pops in with her pompoms up to pester people as they go about their business. Not good. As a concept it has some appeal, but cheerleaders in anything but the abstract are simply so lame and trite that the bits just aren’t funny enough. Two-Four-Six-Eight…there’s nothing to appreciate.

I hate to come down so hard on THTV, but at least you can still see repeats from the original season, and maybe the new stuff will be more to your liking than to mine. Check my article here from 4/7 for the days and times, and check out Comedy Central’s website for more information

 
Holy Moses!

I'm not sure what it says about the current state of America -- I suspect it isn’t entirely to my liking, at least – but ABC’s quadrillionth run of C. B. DeMille’s 1956 biblical magnum opus The Ten Commandments won the Easter Sunday night TV ratings race, averaging over ten million viewers per hour from 7p to 11:45p. It’s kind of amazing that this 47-year-old movie still pulls ‘em in, and I think it’s safe to say that seldom in recent TV memory have so many live people watched so many dead people. Except for the stalwart Charlton Heston and a handful of the women in the movie – Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, Nina Foch and Martha Scott, to name most of them – TTC is a parade of Cinema’s Most Deceased, and it’s quite a roster. Yul Brynner, Vincent Price, Cedric Hardwicke, Edward G. Robinson and more -- it’s almost unbelievable that these guys can still hold an audience...unbelievable, sort of sweet and more than a little alarming, if you think too long about it.

What didn’t work too well last night was Susan Sarandon’s Ice Bound for CBS, where she played the South Pole female doctor who battles breast cancer under particularly harrowing conditions. One could throw some socio-political philosophy-tinged analysis onto the triumph of Heston/Moses/the Bible over Sarandon/Female Strength/War Criticism, but if it turned out to be true that America’s regressing into some kind of sentimental and fundamental muddle…well…let’s just say C. B. DeMille made some damn fine movie, can we?

Hey, if it’s spectacle and ersatz history that you’re looking for, take a gander at USA’s Helen of Troy miniseries, which concludes with Part 2 tonight (Part 1 repeats from 6p – 8p, too) and with more encores to come this week. Nobody parts the Red Sea, but you get to see the very interesting, very talented and slightly wall-eyed (or is that a lazy eye?) Rufus Sewell. If you saw him in Dark City or some of his other films, you know he’s a terrific actor and it’s a treat to see him on TV.


Check out USA’s website for more information on Helen of Troy, and this direct link for a list of all the scheduled plays of the miniseries. Better catch it this week, because it doesn’t seem to be replaying anytime soon.

And here’s a nice fan website all about Rufus Sewell.

 
Whew! 100 Years of Hope and Humor Was Okay, After All!

I'm extremely happy to be able to report that NBC's special last night about Bob Hope was better than expected, I thought. The worst parts were the casts of various NBC shows wishing him Happy Birthday; understandable, of course, but fairly insincere and didn't add anything to the main point, which was Bob Hope. Best Parts: a nice selection of movie segments, good coverage of his early career, and enough footage from all sources to show that Hope really was funny.

It was particularly pertinent to see comedy aficionados like Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Conan O' Brien, Phyllis Diller, Woody Allen and Alan King accurately describe and appreciate Hope's unique comedy style. Though I love Primetime Glick on cable's Comedy Central, using Martin Short's character Jiminy Glick -- in his trademark misinformed mode -- to comment on Hope seemed a bit of a misfire, and I would imagine left much of the audience wondering who in heck that Glick guy was. His was one of the few contributions where the well-wishers did their own schtick, and though I'm sure Martin Short would have been a great addition as himself, Glick isn't a household name by anybody's standards and seemed off-kilter in the midst of the other material.

So here's the problem -- this show should be repeated, but where? Let's hope that NBC can find someplace -- even on MSNBC, maybe -- to rerun this sentimental yet snappy tribute to Hope. Thanks for the memories, indeed!

 
NBC Says “Happy Birthday!” To Bob Hope – A Month Early


Either NBC knows something we don’t -- as in bye, bye, Bob -- or they didn’t want this special anywhere really close to May Sweeps (which start 4/24 and end 5/21); in any case, they’ve decided to run their 100 Years of Hope and Humor special tonight. It’s a two-hour look back at Hope’s career, including, I hope, more than just his TV specials, or else nobody under the age of 60 will be able to understand why he’s considered a great comedian. Bob Hope’s actual birthday isn’t until May 29, but it’s never too early to say something nice to somebody who’s been out there entertaining the world for such a very long time.

More-or-less off TV (except for his old movies) for the past eight years or so, Hope was at one point a comfortable compass point of comedy, the true North of American humor, right at the center between the distant past and its sometimes scurrilous present. One of the best things I’ve ever read about Bob Hope was an article from the late, great webzine Suck; it gives him the credit that he truly deserves and is a must-read for anybody who wants to know where the bodies are buried and which comedy gods to worship when the spirit moves them.

Although it may have been fashionable -- even callously understandable -- a few years ago to say that Bob Hope wasn’t funny anymore, it’s definitely time now to look back at a man who has lasted into his second century and is no doubt the quintessential American comedy icon. I’m not sure that this NBC special will be the vehicle to do it, but this might be a good time to scour the TV listings for his old movies or rent a few. It’s not easy to catch his features from the late ‘30s-early ‘40s, but his comic persona was beginning to bloom during those years, and it didn’t fade onscreen until the ‘60s. By then a lot of comedians were having movie troubles – Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis – and all of them, to various degrees of success, made TV their primary venue.

I guess it’s better early than never to say Happy Birthday to Bob Hope, so even if the thought of a bloated celeb-filled tribute makes you wince (and it does me, a little bit), tune into tonight’s NBC special and let’s see how good a job they do. Then watch a Road movie or two – Utopia and Morocco are particular favorites – and see what all the Hope-la’s really about.


100 Years of Hope and Humor airs tonight from 7p to 9pm on NBC.

Check out the official Bob Hope website for more information on his life and career.