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+---- Thread: Brit Box (/showthread.php?tid=6110)
Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-11-2021
We're trying out AP's Brit Box channel because Stacy wanted to watch Zen. There's quite a bit here, more than the PBS Masterpiece channel, which we've nearly exhausted so we might switch over. We're on the 7-day free trial.
Zen - 3 hour-and-a-half eps. A 70s period police procedural based in Rome. Quite good. It went a lot of places that I didn't expect and it's got a cool style. I did not see the feral cave girl twist coming. We'll watch the next two.
Ripping Yarns - Michael Palin & Terry Jones pre-Python series about school days. A lot of the same BTS crew and the pacing is the same with the laugh track and style of humor, only it's not sketch. It's episodic. I've seen clips of this before but not entire episodes. e1 & e2 star Palin (but both Palin and Jones play multiple roles). e1 is about a bullied kid in boarding school. e2 is about a 'boring tit' who's family runs away from him. It's very NPC today. VERY NPC.
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-11-2021
Doctor Who - I've watched a few odd episodes over the years, including most of one season with Baker, but I never really followed it. Tara got into it recently to check off that box in her nerd-dom but only the recent seasons. Brit Box has the 1st 27 seasons. I just watched the 1st 2 eps from 1964. Fascinating. B&W. Might cherry pick a few more. Open to suggestions.
Do Not Adjust Your Set - more python precursors. This is a B&W show featuring Idle, Jones & Palin. Sketch comedy. It was supposed to be a children's show but it comes off more like primordial python. There was a game show sketch which they redid in python. Just watched 1 ep so far. They're short.
RE: Brit Box - thatguy - 02-12-2021
Re Dr Who: baker was the best. Davison (all creatures guy) was good. For the reboot, eccleson and rose were very good. Tenet too, tho I didn’t like his post-rose companion. Mike Smith was also very good (fezzes are cool! Bow ties are cool!) tho I started to lose interest around here and stopped watching about the time Capaldi came in.
Go back and watch Troughton and Pertwee episodes if you can find them. The pertwee’s are funny as he didn’t have the tardis and drove around in a yellow antique motorcar.
—tg
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-12-2021
Good tip, tg, thanks. I might look into it. I've been thinking I'll just watch all the season premieres and finales...maybe.
We finished Zen. It was great. It got a little complex at the end where we were getting confused about what exactly was going on, but everything resolved satisfactorily. Good shots of Rome, great characters and decent mysteries. And super sexy Italian peeps who all want to have affairs. It's a shame it only went one season.
RE: Brit Box - Dr. Ivor Yeti - 02-12-2021
Re: Dr. Whom. The reboot is the way to go. Start with the Eccleston version. If it doesn’t pull you in in a few eps, just shine the whole franchise. I thought the writing was quite good and Ecc played a weary, battle-scarred Dr quite well. I stayed with them through Tennant and much of Matt Smith, but bailed before Capaldi came on board.
RE: Brit Box - Greg - 02-13-2021
Didn't see much of Capaldi. On board for the Jodie Whitaker incarnation. It is hit or miss for me.
The one thing I saw on Brit Boxx that I might watch is the Rob Lowe series with him as a local cop.
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-13-2021
Well alright then. I can see Who is the best Doctor Who? might be worthy of its own indie thread. I watched a few of the Hartnell eps but couldn't quite get through the because they were slow and dated. I was amused that the first companion was his granddaughter Susan but I didn't hang with it long enough to get into that. Hartnell was okay I guess. He seemed bound in his time period which is ironic for a timelord.
And then for S3, it rolled over to some pretty slick animation, clearly not from the 60s. On doing some research this morning, it seems many of the early episodes were lost, so these are reconstructions. The animation was B&W and in that flash-driven style, which came off as appropriately surreal. It somewhat explains the transition to Troughton.
Ripping Yarns e3 - This one felt vaguely familiar. Palin is a Brit soldier trying to escape from a WWI prison camp. It wasn't as NPC as the previous eps. The writing and comic timing is just so Python. Jones is hardly present. It's all about Palin.
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-13-2021
The Moonstone (2016) Yep, the Wilkie Collins story. 5 eps. We're 2 deep. It's not as good as that The Woman in White production we watched on Masterpiece. Stacy has seen this before but we only knew because our AP account showed it as viewed. She began remembering it as we were watching.
Ripping Yarns - Okay, I now realize I've seen this before. Of eps 4-6, I remembered ep 5 or at least the end of it. And ep 6 I remember fairly clearly. I know I've seen those last two. Maybe I saw the others and just forgot. But it feels fresh so that's what counts, right? It's a lot of Palin, and while he's in my top 6 pythons, well, it's a lot of him.
RE: Brit Box - thatguy - 02-13-2021
Have you watched any "At Last the 1948 Show"? I found it on Amazon and watched a few episodes. It was very weird to see a sketch that I always thought of as quintessential Python done with some different comedians, pre-Python.
--tg
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-14-2021
(02-13-2021, 10:57 PM)thatguy Wrote: Have you watched any "At Last the 1948 Show"? I found it on Amazon and watched a few episodes. It was very weird to see a sketch that I always thought of as quintessential Python done with some different comedians, pre-Python.
--tg
Cool! I just added this to my APBB queue. Thanks!
It's surprising how much of MP was recycled.
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-14-2021
At Last the 1948 Show - 2 eps in. Fascinating watch. Cleese, Chapman plus Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor, who I've always enjoyed since The Goonies. There's already been a cameo of Idle too. It's very raw, B&W, but to see them all so young and their comic timing rough and quick is a delight. Cleese does a riff on the secret service interview with Tim and his antics are more outrageous then ever. Chapman does his one-man wrestling schtick and his physicality is impressive - he even pulls off a kip-up. Ep 1 was complete. Ep2 was in fragments. For missing scenes, they had the audio and just showed the script. That didn't quite work but at least it preserves it. APBB has 6 25 min eps. There were like 13 and there's been an extensive recovery attempt.
Do Not Adjust Your Set - e2. I still can't conceive of this as a kid's show. Each ep has a musical interlude from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a goofy psychedelic band. There are two co-stars, David Jason and Denise Coffey, both of whom are quite funny in their own right.
Both shows are by Rediffusion and Python is their bastard child.
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-15-2021
Finished The Moonstone. Well, you guys were raving about the book but as a tv series, it was slow and unrewarding. Both Stacy & I dozed off (at different points so we could catch each other up) and the ultimate reveal felt silly. I didn’t buy into the laudanum memory recovery schtick because I can’t imagine laudanum works that way (it was just another opioid). Although I like Wilkie’s fascination with psych of the times.
This was the recent version and there’s an older one from the 70s but I doubt we’ll bother. It must be a
RE: Brit Box - thatguy - 02-16-2021
(02-15-2021, 10:55 PM)Drunk Monk Wrote: This was the recent version and there’s an older one from the 70s but I doubt we’ll bother. It must be a
MAYNARD: He must have died while carving it.
LANCELOT: Oh, come on!
MAYNARD: Well, that's what it says.
--tg
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-16-2021
![[Image: GenerousSpicyCockroach-small.gif]](https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GenerousSpicyCockroach-small.gif)
RE: Brit Box - Drunk Monk - 02-17-2021
At Last the 1948 Show - Each ep begins with the foursome being introduced in absurd roles.
e3 had a bookseller skit with Cleese trying to sell a book to Feldman. Made me think of all you ACWLPfB peeps - my wife, the Yeti and KB. Reminded me of the Cheese Shop and Parrot sketches. There's also a skit with Chapman doing his shepherd character from Harold the Flying Sheep.
Luving Taylor and Feldman - they are comic geniuses. It also had Idle and Oddie. Chapman and Cleese are ridiculously tall, towering over the others, and their humor is much more physical in their youth.
The skits are broken up with scantily clad showgirl hawties - it reminds me of Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. In one of the earlier episodes, one of them said 'And now for something completely different...' They've been adding a new gal with each ep. The first, Aimi Mcdonald, has great comic chops and at the end of each ep, she promises to dance but is undermined by some humorous schtick. I kinda want to see her dance. She's the hawtest of the lot, of as she’s say ‘the loveliest., she steals the show sometimes and along with Cleese, is still alive.
E5 has a horribly racist parody of Asian martial arts with Chapman v Cleese and Taylor judging. Full on slant eye and language mockery. E6 has a Chinese restaurant skit that is also racist.
The Mallorca Files - a BBC1 detective series that uses the Castle/Mentalist formula. A hawt German Max, unconventional and brash, and full of himself and a hawt driven ocd Brit Miranda are teamed up as investigators. Max even looks a little like Mentalist. The twist is it's in beautiful Mallorca. The chemistry is good and it's light. We were too entranced by the location to solve the crimes. 2 eps in - 10 total in S1 (S2 not available).