Briers – together with Felicity Kendall, Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington – were a perfectly cast foursome, and their infectious chemistry made The Good Life one of the greats.Īmazingly few comedy writers have chosen to plumb the rich depths of Wales’ vast comedy potential. Their pigs, chickens, cockerel and goat provided slapstick humour, while more sophisticated jokes came via tensions between the Goods and their snobby neighbours Margo and Jerry Ledbetter. And The Good Life was his crowning glory, following the efforts of Tom and Barbara Good to escape the rat-race by becoming fully self-sufficient in their Surbiton home. From The Marriage Lines to Ever Decreasing Circles to Monarch of the Glen, his brand of gentle, easygoing humour delighted audiences of all ages for decades. Richard Briers may be the most beloved actor in British sitcom history. Mixing slapstick silliness with scathing fashion satire, Absolutely Fabulous still lives up to its name over two decades from the day its first episode drunkenly stumbled onto the BBC. The running gag follows a terrible Mother being parented by her long-suffering child, and a tipsy socialite who lives in constant fear of passing her sell-by-date as she stumbles into middle age. But like that one “difficult” chum whose borderline sociopathic behavior you must constantly defend to the rest of your mates, so should you embrace the antics of kookily callow publicist Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and her boozy BFF Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) with the same spirit of steadfast forgiveness. ![]() Critics, meanwhile, condemned the series as too spiteful and crude to raise so much as a grin. The show’s fans watched its 39 episodes while crying enough tears of laughter to irrigate the Sahara with their cheeks. You might end up sticking out of a wall, but you’d have had fun getting there.Ībsolutely Fabulous is divisive. No one ever wins and yet, somehow, you end every episode wishing you were wasting your life alongside them. His suffering friends Manny (Bill Bailey) and Fran (Tamsin Grieg) are a life-long optimist/loser and perennially out-of-touch lonely heart respectively. Bernard Black’s heart is tar-black and claret-stained he’s a misanthropic, addicted, greedy bastard of a man. It’s everything that makes the show special, unafraid to jump straight to the surreal to get a joke across, while rejecting the shiny-shiny trappings of more aspirational US sitcoms, where even the worst character has a heart of gold buried somewhere. There’s a moment in Black Books’ final series where, to demonstrate the sheer depths of misery and filth that book shop owner Bernard (Dylan Moran) has fallen into without his friends, he’s shown sticking horizontally out of a wall. It was far-fetched, farcical fun in a galaxy far, far away. Imagine The Martian, but with less potato growing, and Matt Damon a dreadlocked Scouser whose every second word is “smeg.” Kicking of in 1988, Red Dwarf chronicled Lister’s struggles to stay alive with only Cat, a hologram of his sarcastic former crewmate Rimmer, and a robot called Kryten for company. Unfortunately it’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere, all his crewmates have died of radiation poisoning, and his cat has evolved into a fanged, fish-loving humanoid. Fortunately Dave wakes up to discover he’s in perfect health. ![]() ![]() Well, not Earth, but a simple mining spaceship called Red Dwarf that has been floating through space for 3m years while he slumbered in stasis. But ultimately it came down to the question of whether or not the show really made us laugh, and the following 25 sitcoms very much did.ĭave Lister is the last man on Earth. In the process the team pitted all-time classics against modern alternatives, family fare against shows that were shocking and revolutionary, and sophisticated comedies against the childish and deeply silly.
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