This weekend BBC America is saluting its Britcom divas with a schedule packed with the top female performers in British comedy, all but one of them are very familiar to American audiences, almost too familiar. Start with a double dose of both Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in the imaginatively titled French and Saunders and AbFab (Saunders paired with Joanna Lumley) and French's uneven Murder Most Horrid. Then it's one of the all time most popular britcoms, Keeping Up Appearances, and one of the most grating series ever produced by the beeb, Ruby Wax Meets... In fact only one of the six series being spotlighted is at all new to these shores, the marvelous Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies which I'm very much looking forward to seeing. However I'm a bit disappointed that BBC America is still relying so much on its "greatest hits". No matter how good a program is, when you've seen it five or six times, or fifteen or sixteen times, it's still just a repeat. Most of these shows, like many of BBC America's britcom offerings, have been rerun ad infinitum,on other networks and PBS, as well as on BBC America itself. For every Dinnerladies or League of Gentlemen we are treated to a half dozen Some Mothers Do 'ave 'em.
Now that I've got that out of my system I have to say I absolutely adore BBC America it's just that I know there is so much more great television available out there and they merely keep endlessly repeating things. Where's Comic Relief? Where's Goodness Gracious Me? Where are all the great cooking programs and children's telly the beeb produces. And now, with the holiday season upon us, come a myriad of new and classic holiday programs back in the UK, but I doubt we'll see many of them over here. The same will probably hold true for the phenomenal programming the BBC has planned for the Millennium New Years celebrations. Oh well, these are but small complaints compared to the great pleasure derived from watching the shows BBC America does air.
The 1999 UKTV Website of the Year Awards are coming up soon (in fact they're rather later this year then years past) and I have to say I'm both thrilled and frustrated as I attempt to compose the final list of nominees. There are so many great websites going right now, even in the face of some old standbys disappearing, that I'm driving myself mad trying to whittle the nominations down to a manageable number. In comedy alone I have a "short" list of 15 sites that I feel are more than deserving of the
Go To Page: 1 2
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Hunter Peters's British Television topic, please visit the Discussions page.