It has already pretty much died, and I don't think it was by the hand of streaming. It was whatever process put a stop to new shows in the template of the really great shows we had in the past. At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge. Of course, there was always plenty of drudge.
It was the comedies that were particularly good and very British. Some were very unusual and bizarre, the late night shows. But they were also where writers and comedians got a break and then became mainstream. I would guess that kind of thing is now made for the internet, and its a shame to see everything go so niche.
An article I came across a couple of years ago (wish I could find it!) talked about how there was this period of time when British TV started to diversify the source of talent, around the 80s and 90s. You got shows like Red Dwarf where the cast were not all from the same small set of drama schools. But it has now reverted and that kind of low budget, take a chance show doesn't get shown on the main channels.
I think this is survivorship bias to a large degree.
Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.
Some shows seen as notable at the time are now mostly, though not always fairly, forgotten because they haven't aged well. Nobody's really watching, I don't know, The Onedin Line or Against the Wind today.
> Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.
I want to back up and support this point: just pull up a list of shows on Wikipedia from any TV channel you can remember, ideally one with a long history and just go through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s etc. You're going to find a lot more cream the further forward you go into the future, and maybe, depending on the channel and your own personal tastes, a drop off in the last 10 to 15 years. Most TV was just bad, but old TV especially. For every "All in the Family" or "Cosby Show" or "The Wire" or "Frasier"; or to make this more British: "Sherlock", "Doctor Who", "Monty Python's Flying Circus", there's just dozens upon dozens of terrible shows. They each had their audiences, the ones that weren't cancelled (and even some of the ones that were), but it's like, nobody remembers the dirt underneath the flower, but they remember the flowers that they liked.
90% of the BBC wasn’t crud. Even if you didn’t like it. Until the early 90s it was making programming commercial companies couldn’t justify or take a risk on. This programs were fantastic and impacted the entire world.
This was a corporation (the BBC) who made their own cameras and microphones.
Go and watch “Ways of seeing” on YouTube. It’s 50 years old and still as exciting and relevant as it was then.
It was most when conservatives decided that the truth felt a little too left wing and they became vocal about not wanting to fund things they didn’t find entertaining.
I would argue Monty python is in fact not an exception. Their best sketches are just outstanding, but their median sketches are very unfunny indeed.
The actual exception is e.g. the life of Brian where you have 90 minutes where almost every scene is funny or at least engaging. Compare with e.g. the holy grail where the best 90% is quite good but the rest is... Not...
I think this misses the broader point of how revolutionary they were. They were hugely original and experimental, breaking with a lot of comedy conventions and redefining them. They've been compared to The Beatles for good reason. They were never the same kind of worldwide phenomenon, but they were equally influential.
Sure. They may have had their misses, but the Pythons were exceptional. A classic TV show, two fantastic movies (plus a flawed one), a live stage show that's become a classic — they were among the best of their era, and we're still talking about them.
> At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge.
Same for all the big name movies these days, everyone is too scared to take a chance on something truly new. If you want a novel movie experience you basically have to look towards foreign films, often the more arty types (which I love
On the topic of TV though just consider this for a moment, we lived in a world where someone was daring enough to air "Paedogeddon!" (a Brass Eye special that imo is an excellent work of satire) on TV. Something so controversial couldn't be made and aired today and it was barely able to be even back then.
'Speaking in October 2017, Lucas stated that if he were to remake Little Britain he would avoid making jokes about transvestites and would not play the role of a black character, saying, "Basically, I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I'd do now... Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved".'
Basically the risk taking has gone in modern comedy.
Little Britain just hasn’t aged well. The sketches were always more about repetition than wit, relied on caricature a lot and mistook shock value for satire.
You couldn’t make Little Britain today mostly because it wasn’t very good, and the standards of the time were lower.
You could absolutely remake The Day Today, Brass Eye, Goodness Gracious Me or Peep Show today and they’d be just as good.
I agree, it’s often held up as a “risk taking” show but I don’t think it wasn’t really anything of the sort.
At the moment post 1997 when Britain was starting to change and become more diverse and sure of it itself it reinforced an identify of Britain as it used to think of itself: silly voices, binary identities and oddballs.
It has more in common with Love Thy Neighbour than anything that came after.
Yeah, that whole era of things like the Jimmy Carr gameshows were honestly a sort of mass nastiness as entertainment.
This business where we're all supposed to be surprised by what Russell Brand was up to despite him being incredibly open about it at the time is the same thing: society wants to blame the highly visible individuals of that era but in truth it was the audience that wanted this stuff that were the problem.
You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved, never mind today. And you absolutely wouldn't get away with Goodness Gracious Me.
> You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved,
I still hold that special up as one of the best pieces of satire to ever air on TV, but at the same time I'm shocked it was ever able to be produced and shown since it satirizes the one topic above all others you aren't "allowed" to joke about.
The episode was also made at a time when it was fashionable to hold the view that the country was gripped by a kind of irrational hysteria about child sexual abuse. Monkey Dust's 'pedofinder general', from around the same time period, reflects a similar attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCywGhHQMEw
Decades later this all looks rather naive. The BBC, especially, could hardly make a program satirizing exaggerated concerns about child sexual abuse, given that the
Savile scandal proved that many such concerns had in fact been taken nowhere near seriously enough.
Their "Paedogeddon" special would have been highly controversial in any time and was also far beyond what they did before. Do you really think it could have been made in the 70s or 80s?
A lot of comedy back then was about laughing at the absurdities of a shared life.
The absurdities of yesterday have been changed - and there can be no actual normality today when there are no absurdities. Laughing at absurdities was not considered cruel.
With no common shared understanding of what's funny or not. Today we can laugh at cruel people only. The cruel and those who think others are weird are the strange ones.
Comedy used to be "look at us, hahaha" now it's "look at them, heh". Real comedy has truth and the truth is always about ourselves not some external other. But such vulnerability is very risky.
There's an interview with Bob Monkhouse about making TV in the 50s/60s; he wasn't allowed to say "condom" on TV, and would get fined if he said "bloody".
There's as always a "taboo" on some things. Lots of jokes about sex and religion today that would see you completely crucified in the past. Do you think The Thick of It could have been made in the 80s?
I never cared for Little Britain and haven't seen it, so I can't comment on their "jokes about transvestites", but this whining about "PC gone mad!" has been going on for 40+ years. A few decades ago it was about "you can't make fun of the pakis and nig-nogs any more!"
I suspect the same number of people were upset in 2006 as would be upset in 2017. But there wasn't a social media platform for those upset views to be expressed and easily measured.
This idea of "oh everyone is offended these days" is a bit weird to me; the 'these days' part I mean. There was a lot of comedy from the past that was... awkward to me as a kid, or just... felt unnecessarily cruel. But I was in a minority, or at least felt like it, with some of those. And... I don't think I changed, but I now can hear/read about others who share the same sensibilities on comedic topics.
The notion that it's somehow "more" people getting "offended" today just strikes me as odd. It may be that as more folks have a platform to share their views, that influences some folks, but I'm not sure that works on all topics. Certainly... on comedy, I've heard many of complaints about some comics/topics. Rarely has anyone's view of a comedy bit made me change my position. If I found it cringe/bad, I found it cringe/bad.
back in days you'd just be "allowed" to make fun out of minorities with them not being able to fight back. now you aren't, and thus the majorities are "oppressed" and everything is "politically correct".
i'm bi. sometimes I watch old Polish comedies or standups. The amount of "jokes" that are just good old bigotry is stupendous.
so when people say they're tired of "political correctness", I do wonder if they mean - I am no longer allowed to be bigot openly, why can't I kick those who I consider to be below me.
People made fun of others and themselves. Now it's only okay to "punch up" which makes things unfunny. It's great you can make fun of religion well only one religion but the rules constrain novel ideas that push outside of those rules to make actual humor. Tell me something I haven't heard before with some truth.
The repeated going back to the well makes everything unfunny. The first time a Polish joke was said was in Poland many Polish watching laughed because their was kernel of truth that made it funny but years later hearing it repeated like it's gospel makes it awful because people have changed but the joke doesn't so it doesn't land as true anymore. Once we start looking why the joke is untrue instead of why it's true the joke is dead.
Saturday night live always tries to go back to a joke that was never really that funny.
My son is a teenager but loves to watch old politically incorrect comedies like "Airplane". There's no way you could make that movie today... but there's certainly a market for it, cruel or not.
Now that I think about it, it's no more cruel than what most kids watch on YouTube today.
Airplane could be made today, the central premise would hold up well, some of the skits in it would have to be dropped or altered. Most things that were made in one period could not be made whole cloth in another period.
and to say what I said before, hardly any movie that was made in one generation can be made in another. There will always be things that have to be changed. This same thing applies to basically every other work of art - despite the valiant efforts of Pierre Menard.
The protagonist with Vietnam flashbacks would obviously have to be altered, you couldn't have skits about Ronald Reagan - nobody knows who he is, nor do they know who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is.
Having the autopilot smoking after being inflated doesn't make sense in a world where barely anyone smokes.
There is an airplane movie from this year! No idea if it can hold up to the old ones and I don't have time to watch movies these days: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
There are tons of dialects and accents and group slang that the joke could be done with. Doing basic generational slang would likely flop, but you could easily use something like a thick accent from Texas like Boomhower in King of the Hill, or a Louisiana Creole accent, or some deep Appalacian accent, or some Spanglish.
1 is why I said or an equivalent - you could do the same with pidgin or any creole or, I don't know if this is a PC way to say it, but any kind of 'hood' or 'ghetto' type slang. The joke is just person is 'fluent' in an unlikely dialect/way of speaking. If cockney rhyming slang were more prevalent you could do that, with you know a black American or Asian person or whatever being the unlikely fluent one.
2 is is not really the point, sure it could flop, my point was just that I couldn't imagine it going further than that, not that that would be funny.
It's been a few years since I watched Airplane, and while I absolutely love it, I recall it being rather tame even by modern standards. I can think of a few gags that might not land as well today, but I don't think it was mean-spirited.
"Oh, stewardess! I speak jive" would absolutely get you cancelled today. I don't think it's mean-spirited either but that's not enough to save you these days.
In Blindspotting (2018), a white protagonist is shown as being able to fluently speak an incomprehensibly dense version of AAVE, and it’s revealed later he has no idea what he’s saying (despite communicating effectively). I’ve never seen anyone criticize that joke.
The joke is how incongruous it is that she speaks their language despite being very white. It only works because you expect black people to speak like black people and white people to speak like white people.
Airplane is mostly physical humor and dumb wordplay. 90% of the jokes would be fine as-is. There are a few you'd have to update, but that's hardly surprising for a movie released 35 years ago. You could have said the same in 1980 about most comedies made in 1945.
Little Britain was always crap and completely mainstream and non-edgy. It's a series of one joke sketches based on familiar stereotypes. I don't want to 'cancel' it, and the occasional sketch gets a titter out of me. But to hold it up as an example of edgy, groundbreaking comedy is quite absurd. You can find oodles of much edgier and funnier shows on British TV today.
But yes, the low budget is part of the formula for success. Without a ton of money, they had to rely on wit and creativity. Most shows now have comparatively gargantuan budgets, and it goes on big sets, big effects and big names, but the things that actually make a show good (compelling story, enjoyable writing) are unbottleable magic that you can’t just buy.
Red Dwarf used practical effects in the era when VideoToasters were a thing. For some reason the BBC replaced the lovely miniature shots of space ships with crap CG in a mid-2000s remaster.
It isn’t just comedies - there used to be a plethora of interesting documentaries produced by the beeb, to the extent that for a while they had a channel (BBC 4) pretty much dedicated to them. I used to be able to find something interesting on there any day of the week, and likewise, iPlayer held a great catalogue of content. BBC 4 was slated to be axed a few years ago, first thing on the chopping block. They seem to be stuck in decision paralysis, which is absolutely emblematic of what faces them.
While the BBC still produce documentaries, the quality has declined over the last decade or so, and when Attenborough dies they will be fresh out of ideas, as right now it’s just… Attenborough, and licensed human interest pieces.
I just can’t see it being a thing in 10, 20 years, as they surmise - I would wager they will whittle away until all that remains is BBC News, which will run on a shoestring, even more than it does now.
I've noticed this a lot with anti-BBC folks. They have some ideological issue with it but that isn't a popular position so they go for more niche arguments like "The entire historical catalogue isn't fully available to watch on demand" or "They axed BBC <insert number> from broadcast". Arguments they don't actually care about. It's just a way to snipe at the BBC.
As you've pointed out, if someone loves being able to watch BBC Four on broadcast TV, they're not going to be complaining about it's non existent axing.
The problem is that BBC Four now only shows archive material (with occasional exceptions as "overflow capacity" from sports events etc.) whereas they used to commission their own documentaries.
Comparing all programming in the 80s and 90s to current programming is going to throw up more “hits” for the multi-decade time range than the contemporary.
There are a few other comments listing them all. The uk has lots of high quality novel shows coming out every year. Our tv export market is strong, both for programming and for formats.
It's not just the time range that's the issue with that comparison. Older shows had less competition and had a longer time to develop a cult following.
I find it interesting that you mention red dwarf. As I started reading your comment I thought I'd comment something "i think that's just nostalgia, for example red dwarf is awful but people love it". And then you mention red dwarf.
Eye of the beholder. I personally think Red Dwarf series 1 to 6 was great. It even charts a course of British TV decline. Series 1 and 2, low budget sitcom, class warfare and the loneliness of space. Series 3, more budget, more sci-fi, but similar writing. Series 4 and 5, more budget, more sci-fi, becomes monster of the week, but the character building from the prior series keeps it funny. Series 6, even more budget, they start to explore some more interesting sci-fi themes. This turns out to be popular, so it gets more budget again and moves to BBC 1, more cast etc. Series 7, 8 just urgh, trying to appeal to "mainstream" was stupid because it was already popular enough, it loses the serious side. Everything they've done since then feels like they're trying to force the humour that came naturally before. The actors have aged but the writing didn't mature with them.
I watched some interviews with the cast and they would joke around in the canteen between filming and find their jokes had been overheard and incorporated into the script. It had this realistic dialogue.
It was the comedies that were particularly good and very British. Some were very unusual and bizarre, the late night shows. But they were also where writers and comedians got a break and then became mainstream. I would guess that kind of thing is now made for the internet, and its a shame to see everything go so niche.
An article I came across a couple of years ago (wish I could find it!) talked about how there was this period of time when British TV started to diversify the source of talent, around the 80s and 90s. You got shows like Red Dwarf where the cast were not all from the same small set of drama schools. But it has now reverted and that kind of low budget, take a chance show doesn't get shown on the main channels.