Clatterford. Warmly recommended.
This show is the "anti-Seinfeld". (I'm a fan of both.) Seinfeld: big American city. Clatterford: an English town. Seinfeld: lots of good looking people. Clatterford: lots of middle aged folk. Seinfeld: lots of broad, loud, edgy comedy. Clatterford: lots of quiet, understated, edgy humor. It takes real talent to makes something this understated this funny.
In Seinfeld, if you'd had an episode where ladies had to make pies for a big picnic in a hurry, you could bet that something would go wrong and everybody would get violently sick from the pies. In Clatterford, not so. Nothing so predictable.
It's very funny. If you have a fondness for the best "britcom", you will like this. It's a French And Saunders production too, though it does not have all that much in common with Ab Fab. But actually, the woman who played Patty on Ab Fab (Joanna Lumley) plays an 80-year old woman on this one. Amazing, it took me two episodes to recognize her!
Update: it turns out this show was renamed for the US. It's originally called Jam And Jerusalem in the UK. Since I don't watch TV as such anymore, I did not know of it. If I'd known of this title discrepancy, I could just have bought it here in the UK rather than import it from the US! I imagine they renamed it because they were afraid to use the word "Jerusalem" in the title of a TV show in the US. Funny old world.
Even regarded as a drama, it's really quite marvelous. I'm very impressed by how Jennifer Saunders has matured as a writer.
21 comments:
We were just watching French and Sauders et al in Comic Strip Presents. We saw "Gino-Full Story and Pics" and "A Fist Full of Travellers Cheques". Strange to see them all looking so young there. Then stranger to think the show is 25 years old.
There are times when F&S get too much though. The "Having it off" sketch was just a bit too much. I found F&S offended me too often.
Joanna Lumley has had some wonderful lines. "An Air-hostess? Why Shirley whatever gave you that idea? I'm a hooker. A whore." in Shirley Valentine. Or in "Not the Nine O'Clock News" her cameo "I'm Joanna Lumley, and I'm suing". (That was the show that launched the TV careers of Smith and Jones, and Rowan Atkinson.
Lumley will always be, in my mind, the last Avengers girl. Prancing around in her TR7.
Hmm, why is the show called Clatterford, but IMDb has it as Jam and Jerusalem, a much more appropriate sounding title, otherwise one thinks "Acorn Antiques".
Anyway, Sue Johnston, a regular of Brooky (Brookside - a Liverpool Soap) and more recently "The Street" (not Corrie-Coronation Street). I am glad to see her getting more work.
Now we're talking! Britcom and Britdrama*, my favourite kinds of programmes.
But how on earth do you find time to watch all this shit -- it seems every other day you post a picture of a boxed set you've just finished watching through. I bet you've hired a virtual assistant in India to watch DVDs for you. :-) (While I don't see that service listed on the Elance web site I'm sure it's possible.)
*) Not the Spears kind.
I have time. I seem to have implemented over the years most of the things he talks about in the "The Four Hour Work Week", about using time effectively. A fellow webmaster tells me he uses ten hours a day running his sites. I use far less than that.
And in general since the nineties I have purposefully put effort into streamlining my life, getting rid of unnecessary obligations and distractions.
I am not a big fan of the old "French and Saunders Show", nor of The Comic Strip.
Absolutely Fabulous is really good though.
I think you must have been watching a different show if you think the humor of Seinfeld was broad. You are just not bright enough to understand anything the least subtle. Proof of your low intelligence is your love of this Clatterford, which is typical of many English movies and TV shows set in a small town of lovable eccentrics. How predictable! I could see the jokes coming a mile away.
You don't care for lovable eccentrics? That's actually my main beef, as mentioned earlier, with Seinfeld: the characters are as eccentric as anybody, but not lovable at all. Neurotic and cold. Even the show itself started making fun of that in the last couple of seasons.
Seinfeld was very good, and certainly had a lot of subtlety too. But you can't deny the humor was broad! It was excellent too, but rarely have you seen so many people falling on their ass.
Don't misunderstand me, I don't equate "broad" with "poor". I love seeing Kramer take a spill.
I agree with you, Eolake. Seinfeld had a good mix of the two kinds of comedy. They did a joke about broad humour when they were doing the show-within-a-show called Jerry...which was not picked up.
I don't like people appropriating the names of famous hockey players like Terry Sawchuck and putting those kinds of words into them, though. I guess I'm probably the only one here who knows who Terry Sawchuck, Vincent Lecavalier, Mario Lemieux, etc., are. I can't remember any of the rest. Come to think of it I don't know if Lecavalier was one of them. Anyway, the NHL is not a big draw in Europe and the Middle East where the rest of you are from.
You don't care for lovable eccentrics?
I forgot, I was going to comment on this. One of the things about British movies - at least the ones that find an audience outside the UK - is that they often take place in small towns and have those same sorts of characters. Even Notting Hill had that same feel. Not that I haven't loved movies like that. Billy Elliot was just on TV a week or so ago. But the townsfolk could be taken from The Englishmen Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down a Mountain or Hot Fuzz.
Anything to add to that, Mr. Sawchuck?
I really liked Hot Fuzz (search this blog for my review), so I will try The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill.
Small town people are a huge percentage of the world's population, but are much underrepresented by Hollywood, so I guess somebody has to compensate. :)
There's no action in TEWWUAHBCDAM, though. It just has those same small town, eccentric weirdos that are in every British movie... The same characters really as Waking Ned Divine or Saving Grace too and I'm sure there are others.
Small town people are a huge percentage of the world's population, but are much underrepresented by Hollywood, so I guess somebody has to compensate. :)
The only ones I've met in real life were just hicks, though. :) You know, there's not a lot to do in northern Ontario but drink, fight, and fuck. And considering the bush pigs that pass for women up there, they mainly just do the first two! ;-)
Ah, what a pity.
I grew up in a small town in Denmark, which surely is a different thing. No lack of beautiful women there.
And of course DK is so small and civilized that there's really no place to go "off the map".
In Britain you tend to live in communities, be it part of a Metropolis or a hamlet. Consequently Billy Elliot did not seem to be set in one of the largest industrial cities. Notting Hill is an suburb of London. Again, it functions like a town unto itself. Sameway as SOMA and Greenwich Village sub-exist.
Indeed US shows like Seinfeld and The PJ's, King of the Hill have much of the small town feel, or community feel, and are a la sit com chock full o eccentrics.
Maybe it's just recognizing country versus city. A lot of town like scenes are in "Garden Cities", a product of the 30's and 40's. They are established, lush and green. Suburban hubs are often focussed around villages which got swallowed up into towns.
There are a lot of American shows I thought were set in the sticks, and they are right in town. It is hard to see immediately know what you are looking at.
It depends on where you're from - what I think of as a small town is different. When you're out in the wilderness, many many miles from a major city, and you've got a town of maybe a hundred people stuck in the middle of a wilderness... I mean, you're out in the bush, you could walk right by a town and not know it's there... And fuck the winter is cold up there. This is a bit different from towns or hamlets or whatever in Britain, where you're never really that far from a major city - I mean, hell, you're never that far from London itself.
When you've got these people out in the middle of nowhere, where the TV reception is almost non-existent and there's nothing really to do... It's almost like Deliverance country. And everybody looks the same.
Of course, the majority of the population in Canada is in cities along the border, so the number of people in the north in these little Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel towns is pretty small.
Right.
I have no experience with communities like that.
I once saw on TV somebody traveling through a small town called Denmark. He spoke to an old guy who had never been away from the town in his life!
I don't have much. I am not much of an outdoorsy type, so that kind of life would not be for me. Only been up there a couple of times. Fishing and moose hunting is not for me. I'm not really much of a drinker, either, or much of a sports fan.
It is good that those wide-open spaces exist, though. I mean, one thing about Europe is that it's a little too civilized - even the "country" doesn't really seem like country - it's way too near cities. And there's no such thing as wilderness. Even in the U.S., with such a large population, it's sort of the same.
But the US has plenty of places where you can get lost and die of exposure.
... I didn't mean to make it sound like such a bad thing. :) I just meant it has wilderness.
It's a different degree of wilderness, that's for sure. In Canada, starting a few hundred kilometers north of any of the large cities, you can walk straight north for many months without seeing anyone. Mind you, you probably will freeze solid before you do encounter others.
Hey, I too know who Mario Lemieux is. He's that world-famous blue-eyed plumber-speleologist coin collector, with a skinny brother named Luigi, right? One of those guys so famous, they were paid to endorse a videogame with their name on it. Like Jonah Lomu, Ayrton Senna, Colin McRae, Rocky Balboa, Bugs Bunny...
And to think my father still fails to see any educational value in videogames! :-)
And what about "Eat your bright-red white-spotted mushrooms, they'll make you grow faster than Tony Parker amd improve your vision of shapes and colors"?
I also learned that a first-aid kit is quite enough to fully restore your health in a split-second when you've been machine-gunned within a thread from death. Now I feel those 10 years I spent studying Medicine were a big waste of time!
Eolake testified...
"I grew up in a small town in Denmark, which surely is a different thing. No lack of beautiful women there."
Well, not to brag, but I grew up in a small Lebanon mountain village, and I was practically next-door neighbors with the young girl who later became Miss Lebanon 2006. And she has a mind to match the body, as it turns out. Went straight back to her college studies when she was done, because "being a Miss isn't a career".
(P.S.: She knows I'm still single. Maybe I'll have more to tell you some day in the future... :-)
"an old guy who had never been away from the town in his life!"
Hmm... Some people aren't very different in mentality where I used to live, but Lebanon's such a small country that today you can get into one of them private taxi buses from anywhere and reach the capital in less than three hours. Stories of old yokels discovering the big city for the first time are part of our folklore now.
Speaking of "a small town called Denmark", did you know that Lebanon was the heart of the USA? That is, Lebanon, Kansas. :-)
Joe Dick relaxed...
"Fishing and moose hunting is not for me. I'm not really much of a drinker, either, or much of a sports fan."
So you're stuck with fucking then? Poor bored man, you have my sympathies.
Hold on one goldurn minute, what am I saying?!?!? I wanna live just like you do!!!
"one thing about Europe is that it's a little too civilized"
Well, I read in a recent article that France these days has a little TOO MUCH forests, which in turn causes wildife diversity problems because there are less of the other environments.
And I believe the USA have a population that's still insignificant compared to the country's size, meaning they only really have problems when major cities get too crowded for the neighboring resources (especially fresh water).
It's rather fortunate, too. I mean, imagine if the world's #1 oil-consuming country got markedly more populated, THEN we'd really be deep in the tar pit.
"Mind you, you probably will freeze solid before you do encounter others."
Well, if you stand still, chances will markedly increase that somebody eventually finds you... An archeologist from the future, for instance, like with that Otzi feller in the Alps. ;-)
So you're stuck with fucking then? Poor bored man, you have my sympathies.
Hold on one goldurn minute, what am I saying?!?!? I wanna live just like you do!!!
But I don't live up there. Besides, I think I said that the crop of females up there are not all Miss Lebanons! (I could make a joke about that - the unibrow, female shot-put champion build, hairy pits...)
:)
Trust me, the crop of females in my former village were not all Miss Lebanons either!
:-)
"And amidst the mud there lied a diamond."
Don't ask me who the above phrase is from, I just made it up.
Incidentally, and to be fair, I once saw a North Canadian female singer, very enthusiastic and merry, who had a body like her day job was as a lumberjack... but still perfectly feminine, with a pretty face and a lovely smile. An american Valkyrie, if you wish.
So I guess they don't all breed among brothers and sisters. And bears.
:-)
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