In this week’s blog post, I’m going to be focusing on something newer than my last post – namely one single series sitcom created in the 2010s. The show in question is a sitcom that heavily spoofs health and safety guidelines through the lens of a man named Gerald Wright, a show imaginatively titled “The Wright Way”. The show in question was very poorly regarded, but is it as bad as people say? Let’s find out.
Continue reading “The Obscure Sitcom Files – The Wright Way”
Ah, sports – one of the greatest pastimes of the human world. I personally never really got into sports – I was one of those nerdy kids who would much rather prefer to linger in the toilets all class rather than do P.E. (well, I didn’t really – I was one of those who cared deeply about my grades but I would have if I could have). Still, it is a pastime so timeless that there have been numerous attempts to adapt it into comedy, some more successful than others. Modern comedic takes on it include Ted Lasso and The First Team, whilst earlier attempts include Renford Rejects and Fantasy Football League. Did you know however that there was an attempt at a mainstream sitcom starring Chris Barrie in the 1990s? Well, you might do, but let’s read on anyway, shall we?
Continue reading “The Obscure Sitcom Files – A Prince Among Men”After my previous blog post on the history of Red Dwarf video games a while back, I thought – have the fans looked into this topic themselves? After all, they’re a creative bunch – the amount of good fics on AO3 and Fanfiction.net is proof to that – so some games must have been at least created and in the demo stage. As it turns out, they do exist, although there aren’t many out there.
Continue reading “The Wonderful World of Red Dwarf Fangames”Red Dwarf is a long-running sitcom that concerns the misadventures of a group of misfits, including the presumed last human alive, onboard a mining ship 3 million years into the future. Despite the depressing subject matter, it is nonetheless very good at mining such a situation for laughs and has proven to be quite successful. How successful you may ask? Successful enough that it has a wide amount of tie-ins, including a superb book series, a magazine, and a tabletop game. With this in mind, you might be thinking, were there any video games? The answer is actually yes, and this blog post aims to give a brief overview (as well as my opinions) of each game.
Continue reading “Red Dwarf and Video Games: A Brief History”
“The Brittas Empire” was a British sitcom running from 1991 to 1997 which featured Chris Barrie as Gordon Brittas, a manager with a Dream but not enough social skills and too much confidence to lead it without everything descending into chaos, as well as a similarly oddball staff to compliment him. This blog post in particular though is specifically focused on a later part in the series’ history, namely Series 6 and 7. By this point, Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen (the original creators of the series) had left, with Series 5 presumably being intended to be the end of the Series, a theory backed up by the fact that their final episode had everyone being given their happy ending. However, after said special, the BBC decided to continue the series for two series, getting on new writers to fill the void left by the original two’s absence. Despite the attempts of the new writers, however, these new episodes were not well-liked by the viewers for a variety of reasons, and this post attempts to look into why this may be the case.
Continue reading “A Look At What Went Wrong With Series 6 and 7 of “The Brittas Empire””Welcome to my very own blog: British Sitcoms and Me, a blog which I have just set up to discuss British Sitcoms, whether that be my opinions on them or just some interesting facts that I have recently found out about them.
Good question, random observer! First, it’s Summer where I’m currently living (although you wouldn’t be able to tell from the weather) and I’ve recently finished University for the year so it would be nice to have something to do to pass the time without devolving into madness (although I do hope to continue working on this when I get back to University in the Autumn). Secondly, I have been exploring my future career options and have found that maintaining a blog works well in getting into future career pathways, especially if I want to get into the study of media, so I figured: Why not start now!
Also a good question there. Well, I first discovered them around about 2018-2019 through shows like Derry Girls and The IT Crowd. However, it wasn’t until the 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown that I realized that I really liked them, thanks to me gaining special interests in shows like Red Dwarf and my favorite underrated sitcom of all: The Brittas Empire. And, whilst there is some good coverage about them online, I feel like it is a field that isn’t particularly crowded, especially concerning those sitcoms which were once popular, but are never talked about nowadays.
Of course, it doesn’t help that compared to dramas, sitcoms are somewhat ignored in media coverage. This is a fact that is especially true with studio sitcoms, which are nowadays treated as laughing stocks (I still shudder at a Guardian article suggesting that audience laughter is unsophisticated). So, with this in mind, I figured I might try to give more coverage to those sitcoms that need some love.
Well, I could in theory talk about anything in this field. However, I have a preference for those sitcoms from the 1990s. And I’m not just talking about more popular shows like Absolutely Fabulous and One Foot in the Grave. I’m talking about stuff like Sitting Pretty, Is It Legal? and On The Up. But, as I say, if it piques my interest in the field of British Sitcoms, I will try to make a blog post about it.
…Bloggist out.
