When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?(dirtyfeed.org) |
When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?(dirtyfeed.org) |
I was properly introduced to Steve Coogan and also Rob Bryden through their movie The Trip.
Some B roll impressions from The Trip and maybe the follow-up movie(s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB3eSud1_Cs
Michael Caine impressions by them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIQIpC5_wY
Even more impressions from them and probably shows their breadth the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWJTcblS4KI
"Gentlemen! We ride at dawn! Or perhaps at about 8-ish"
I still use this line whenever I can, e.g. when staying with friends and planning the next morning.
(all in a French accent)
"We leave immediately!"
"What about dinner?"
"We leave... in five hours!"
That B roll cut is actually from the original TV series which is much longer than the movie. If you enjoyed the movie you'll love the series.
This is my Goodreads-review of Nomad:
This is one of the funniest books I have read. I just love the Alan Partridge character, with all his insecurities and petty attempts to show off. I read the first book, I Partridge, and this is even better. In Nomad, Alan tells the story of his walk to honour his father – he will walk from Norwich to the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. Not only is the book packed with hilarious episodes, the writing is also fabulously bad – full of examples like “the wind whistling through my hair like a wind whistle”. Highly recommended.
Alan Partridge is very underrated, and I'm surprised that so many here have heard of him - although hacker news has a large UK presence his shows are not those that have been exported widely to the best of my knowledge.
There's just something so British about that kind of character, where you're half laughing with him (1) and half laughing at how blissfully unaware and cringey he is. (Much like David Brent in the UK/original "The Office", although there's a long history of that style of character)
I actually paid for a Partridge-tribute to sing a happy-birthday song for my (Finnish) wife, on Cameo. We were both very impressed at how well his message was 100% in-character for the real AP.
1: Needless to say I had the last laugh.
The character has been steeping in his own mythology and metatext for decades, and these books use that to such a wonderful effect. I think they hold up as amazing comedy in their own right, but having the character describe events we’ve seen in previous formats but through a warped narrative is a wonderful and uncommon device, and the intentional bad writing is so joyous.
“Jet from Gladiators to host a millennium barn dance at Yeovil aerodrome. Properly policed. It must not, I repeat not, turn into an all-night rave.”
"you're a mentalist!"
We're talking about stuff that happened in the last few decades - and yet people's recollections are faulty, the documentation is inconsistent, and the contemporary commentary is already wrong.
Now extrapolate that back a hundred years. What conventionally accepted history is wrong? What cause and effects have been mixed up?
Popular culture isn't always well researched - and John shows just how difficult it is.
But IMO his finest work was Blue Jam - the radio comedy not the TV incarnation, hour-long episodes of low-key music and surreal sketches. Absolutely brilliant even today. Archive.org has a copy at https://archive.org/details/chrismorris_bluejam. Best enjoyed late at night.
Trigger warning: basically everything. The BBC would never get away with broadcasting it now.
Where does "December 1992" come from in this sentence? Is there a specific reason why it couldn't be October or November 1992?
(I mean, maybe it's just common sense that a programme wouldn't take that long to shoot, but I feel like the author is more confident than that given the rigorousness displayed throughout the rest of the article.)
If anyone is a Coogan fan, I highly recommend seeking out The Trip. And not the terrible movie version, but the actual full series. Season 1 is such a brilliant piece of television.
I'll check out the series, thanks for the heads up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg
Sad that his web site is now offline... www.trashbat.co.ck
I also quite enjoyed Time Trumpet. It’s a completely different show with different writers and comedians but follows a similar format.
IMO, probably the most under-rated show of all time.
"CRAZED WOLVES IN STORE A BAD MISTAKE ADMIT MOTHERCARE"
Famous Valid German Phrase
Actually he was probably one of the presenters on the East Anglia week of Why Don’t You (Just Switch off your TV and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead)
In my opinion the most of the Partridge stuff since I’m Alan Partridge has been pretty poor. The one exception being the movie Alpha Pappa. But hardcore Partridge fans might still enjoy Stratagem.
I'm now fairly convinced that This Time is the greatest version of Partridge. It's his equivalent of "Diamond are Forever" (and no, he's not showing off!)
Alan Partridge: First appearance on TV?
The most basic things are impossible.
It's why examples of semantic networks start with birth certificates, the most basic thing society measures that's taken 100's of years to get a system for.
Which of course are no longer considered sources of truth as the West has become even more abstract. And anyone who's lived in developing nations knows accurate DOBs were always for the rich.
I remember when it was originally aired, it would be on around 10pm. Then repeated around 4am, but with the visuals just bouncing around inside a small square (like a ‘Pong’ ball). Each episode they would mess with the visuals in a different way. Definitely will never see anything like that on Tv again.
Probably my favourite sketch (which is also on Blue Jam) [1], but there are so many [2][3][4][5]. Even the intros [6] were disturbing, and set you up for what was coming in the next 30 minutes.
[1] https://youtu.be/5SqHtWudI24 - 'Suicide with an escape clause'
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGex0kLgNok - 'Thick People as a Service'
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKxM4ToLLR8 - 'Symptomless Coma'
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhKla4MEstY - 'Living Outside'
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krsj2bcnRlM - 'Lizards'
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-i0XIux9vo - Intro compilation
American here. Reminds me heavily of Monty Python. I didn't realize there were other shows in such a similar vein. Will def checkout Jam / Blue Jam. Can you recommend any other shows I might not be aware of?
Ended up in some very strange headspaces at about 2am.
My own favourite Chris Morris production is probably his Radio 1 series with the painfully embarrassing improvised tasks he'd set his hapless roving man on the scene.
I think that was also the one that got him temporarily banned from the Beeb for implying - but not outright stating - that Michael Heseltine (very senior British politician at the time) had died from a heart attack.
Edit: Ah, here. Typically facetious interview with "close personal friend, colleague and bass player of the Jam, Bruce Foxton"
"hit the ground screaming",
"which of your bass lines would be a suitable sort of lament", etc, etc
https://archive.org/details/OnTheHour
The Chris Morris Music Show was another humorous radio show he did in 1994.
Similar shows today would include the Skewer, and to be honest I would rank that as more legally dangerous to run, it skirts libel laws much more closely.
And especially the relevant interviews: the movies are the artistic depictions, but the real world facts that made it important to produce them - the rationale and the exposition of salient research material that became the movie - are explained by Chris Morris in talks.
One of my favourites is the man who attends his own funeral: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HhBkC6B9I2U
Absolute favourite sketch is the ‘East End Thug’ with Alan Ford from Snatch.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=49nKWoTgouQ&pp=ygUdZWFzdCBlbmQ...
Oh, one of the best ever pieces of radio was
Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive
It's horrible that only 24 episodes have been produced. It should still be running today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QPJoRWz8Sc
Edit: Not you, obviously. Whoever was being wrong at that particular moment.
When 7/7 happened, we saw the CCTV footage; Yorkshiremen getting on a train at Luton. Three of the four bombers were from Leeds, they were born in the UK, what on earth possessed them to go to London and try blowing it up? Fanciful notions of being a mujahideen? Some disconnect of belonging to the UK when they were clearly brought up fully within it?
I'm pretty sure Morris said he made the film to answer that question.
Monkey Dust series 2 (broadcast 2003, two years prior to the attack) had a similar examination with its Abdul and Shafiq sketches. Their friend Omar preaching to them about jihad but their lives mainly revolving around what's on telly and their mum feeding them turkey twizzlers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhxQT1d1AvE
It returns to OP's missing that the movie may have «any particular political agenda»:
there is a political point, which is "outcasts in search of an identity conflictually with their environment may have a political agenda, which causes a political problem". Disregarding such problem implies potential tragedy.
Edit (wrote in a rush): hence, that if there is a risk, quite worth of assessment, you'd better see things flatly, for what they are.
The very fact that you write «a band of» suggests you are not seeing the universality of the depicted. It is not like the long dream in Mulholland Drive, that changes and deforms a reality: it is meant to be a description through a satirical lens. And it's not "wacky break": it's "Wackyland".
The right-winged that converts himself after studying the texts of the opponents with the original intent of deprecating them; the special radicalism of the converted "local"; the actual nature of the largely misunderstood special culture hosted in the alien lands; the tone based on constant references to actual events (those who hid weapons in a park and found them stolen; those who hid them in a playground and found the children playing with them; those who filled a boat with them and it sank...); the social and internal states, flow and dynamics of the involved... The causal relation leading to the "necessary conclusions". All of this is a portrait - an analysis.
And statements such as "I have hit them, so they must be the bad ones" are fed to the police - not the protagonists. «Clumsy» who? And the interrogator in the "extra-territorial" container, that seems to be imported directly from Joel and Ethan Cohen - «clumsy» who? No, not just "the protagonists".
Maybe, as suggested, you could check a few of the interviews that Chris Morris gave.
[0] Episode 1: Calcium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU
This is an example of the original 80s TV show it was doing the pastiche of [2]
Thants.
Edit: And for a much more brutal sense of humour, I don't think any political comedy has bettered The Thick Of It.
It was very funny, but also a spin-off to Absolutely!, which itself was a great series - 4 series! - with lots of funny characters:
* Calum Gilhooley, the most boring man in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebG3ZE4Ugqs
* McGlashan, the Scottish nationalist and anglophobe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND-SVKrvCxs
* Denzil and Gwenned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw7tQOyfwyk
* Stoneybridge Town Council: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njiH4i4Kkf0
* The Little Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGNc9VOipw0
They were Edinburgh's answer to Glasgow's Naked Video (Gregor Fisher, Elaine C. Smith, Andy Gray, Helen Lederer, etc.) although the welsh John Sparkes was in both, and had is own spin-off series, Barry Welsh is Coming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rEBtpWQ7x8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ofz1OnlNI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtllWIiOTuA
Edit: The League of Gentlemen
Unfortunately my favourite sketch, 'Cake Factory', isn't on Youtube any more. That was where I first realised how brilliant Simon Pegg was as a comedy actor.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcAqR-Hs9II - Join the Army
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxUm-2x-2dM - Do You Speak English?
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyj5cv5FPWA - Eagle Line Super Train
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxiOfepOxe8 - Evil Hypnotist
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIIAQME1Uhg - Jockeys in the Wild
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GmmAUbfhMU - Champion sprinter
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKRBYGhqI8Y - On Call Surgeon
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMh9CDNQhBg - Office Politics: Jesus vs Devil
(And the guard of the hospital in Darth Marenghi's Darkplace.)
Really, too many.
Other genius-level of strangeness? The Mighty Boosh, by Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding (radio, TV, theater). - Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OZN1zyS7gY&list=PLflSnz9gSh... ; also live shows are on YT. The core are the TV series though.
Logical genius to the extreme, madness revealing? People Like Us, by John Morton (arguably the best thing ever made for the radio). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZ4mBz5Qcc&list=PLJPeS4Ugqq...
For a sketch show I’d recommend Big Train - it went slightly under the radar, but has an absolutely incredible lineup of talent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You#Series_two