Things you just can't take seriously
Sandemaniac
Shipmate
Archaeologists in Somerset have discovered the medieval palace of the Bishop of Bath and Wells but, let's face it, who can take the Baby Eating Bishop seriously since Blackadder?
What should you take seriously, but just can't?
What should you take seriously, but just can't?
Comments
But the Blackadder reference is lost on me, so I guess I can still take the Bishop of Bath and Wells and his palace seriously.
You've missed out.
The Baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells features in one episode of Blackadder II. There were four series of Blackadder, starring Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder, and a host of very funny people (Tony Robinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, ...)
The writing on series one is a bit hit and miss, but series 2-4 are fantastic. (Blackadder II is set in the Elizabethan court, Blackadder III in the Regency, and Blackadder Goes Forth in World War I.)
Youtube has snippets, if you want to get an idea of whether it might match your sense of humour. I've found it on various US streaming services, and on DVD in my public library.
But Blackadder 2 & 4 were brilliant. The very ending of Blackadder goes forth is still moving.
He was also good (in parts) in Not The Nine O'clock News, with Pamela Stevenson, Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith. But I suspect that NTNON has dated badly, although the sketch with the punk in the lavatory still makes me giggle.
Indeed. I still vividly recall the first time that I saw that. There I was, feet up, having a g&t, and then the final sequence. My jaw dropped. My eyes widened. The only thought I had was, Well, I didn't see that coming.
The 1990 movie Slacker presents a verite-ish(but still scripted) assortment of aimless young people hanging around the streets and coffee shops of Austin Texas, engaging in pseudo-intellectual discussions in the general area of pop-culture and fringe politics eg. two scruffy guys in a dive bar talking about the philosophical implications of Scooby-Doo.
A few years after watching it, I read an academic book on New Religious Movements in the USA, some of which were fairly marginal. One group, some sort of Odin-worshipping outfit I believe, were described as holding their founding meeting at "a restaurant in Austin". You can guess what sort of impressions immediately popped into my mind.
And I'll admit that had it been any other city, I likely wouldn't have gotten the same impressions, or at least not quite as strongly.
John Lloyd produced Blackadder with other regulars Tony Robinson, Tim McInnery, Stephen Fry, Ben Elton & Richard Curtis wrote it, Hugh Laurie was in some series, as was Miranda Richardson. It's more like Upstart Crow, also written by Ben Elton.
"Every thought creates its own reality"
My mental image of Uxbridge included an apple orchard (one of Samantha's boyfriends wanted to be big in cider), a pretty High Street with all manner of shops, including the antique shop owned by Samantha's French Polisher boyfriend, etc etc. Discovering that Uxbridge is a real place but the sort of place where people think Boris is a good choice of M.P. - I can't take it seriously.
I can't remember the lovely Samantha ever dating her M.P. - clearly Samantha has standards!
Well, that's just bizarre, because I'm sure I found it through google, but there.
And I hate the way inserting links (doesn't) work on this software, with a vengeance. I think I'm just going to go back to pasting the link in, because if it does shit like that...
That may not be so in Peebles and Auchtermuchty but you are blessed in Scotland in ways which those of us who have the misfortune to live in England and might once have identified as English are not.
Uxbridge, though, is rather a nondescript London suburb.
Wiki article with pictures: http://www.pandora.com/station/play/143006064313591038
Sorry I have none from the X-Files episode.
And thanks, all—perhaps I’ll give Blackadder a try.
When we actually visited Bodiam Castle in Sussex, where that bit was filmed, I reckon we came this close to getting chucked out for doing just that!
No, I understand the point. She makes an ass of herself one way or another in every episode. I just don't understand why people tolerate her snobbishness. Richard, for example, would not be exhibiting bad manners were he to say, "Hyacinth, could you get the door for me, please? My hands are full." instead of struggling to open the door himself with his hands full, while she remains oblivious to his plight.
People are scared of her.
Sometimes, people do stand up to her, though. Richard did, once. They'd pulled over to use a pay phone. IIRC, there was a man in the booth; H harassed him; R shouted at her to leave him alone and get back in the car; and H was totally dumbfounded, and did it!
ROTFL.
"I will NOT have you approaching the communion rail without a hat!"
I think that show was a case of the writers wanting to do stuff that went beyond the settled parameters originally established for the show.
IIRC correctly, TXF started out as basically just a procedural focused on occult and alien cases, playing off the tension between the faith-driven Mulder and the skeptical Scully, who were otherwise portrayed as just average people.
By the last few seasons, they had spun a whole ongoing storyline where Mulder himself was a space alien, and was mixed up in some sort of plot to invade Earth that his father had also been part of. But if that's where the writers had wanted to go, they shoulda made a separate show, with different characters.
If it's any comfort, you're not alone
Yeah, in the later seasons I preferred the "monster of the week" episodes which were sometimes quite funny/quirky or shockingly dark. One of my favorites was "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" about a life insurance salesman who knew exactly when and perhaps how people would die including himself. He wouldn't tell Mulder about his death, but he told Scully that she wouldn't die. An episode a year or two later made this seem a possibility.
So Mr Bean - not particularly funny, although I possess Mr Bean's Diary which strangely is, because the humour is a bit darker, more obscure and less cartoony.
Blackadder is classic not because Rowan Atkinson is in it but because the writing is incredibly good. If you don't find Baldrick explaining that he's scratching his name onto a bullet because he's heard that there's a bullet somewhere with your name on it, and if he possessed that bullet he wouldn't get shot because he wasn't likely to shoot himself funny, along with Capt. Blackadder's response of "Shame", then there's no hope.
That and Prince Edmund's take down of Morris Dancing - "How it goes on in this day and age (1487) I shall never know..."
A particularly odd one. Any mention of an armadillo means a mental rerun of the 90s UK advert for the Dime/Daim chocolate bar. The animal is 'crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside' in comparison with the Dime which is the opposite. All in a West Country accent.
Anybody called Jeremiah ('is a bullfrog') or Shirley (the Leslie Neilsen quote from Airplane)
Anybody named Ralph (for readers of the Judy Blume book 'Forever')
As long as we steer away from threads involving the English language, everything should be fine.
Oh, and I'm another one who finds Rowan Atkinson hit-or-miss humour-wise, but who reliably cries at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth.
Oh gods, yes! I remember those ads!