Jonsmad

[Jonsmad]

Phil Wrote: “John Cleese ? I can?t imagine anything other than his sex scene in The Meaning of Life. I?m not even kidding when I say that scene probably isn?t very far from reality.”

Are you saying Phil that the sight of a six foot man dancing around with his underpants on his head and talking russian doesnt do it for you?

And your deffinately a real limp wristed caricature, because you didnt list Carol Cleveland. I’d give her Marriage Guidance Counselling any day.

[Jonsmad]

Before Series one was repeated or released on video
I used to think Rimmers line in Better Than Life…

“So I said to Holister…” was some kind of bad misspronounced “Hol Lister” combo. Because I didnt realise that was the captains surname, and I thought he was trying to start a boast about something heroic he imagined, that had happened on ship during his time since being dead, as opposed to when he was alive with the original crew. Even though it’s lister that calls Holly as Hol. Which makes me twice as dumb.

[Jonsmad]

I rate cruise of the gods. And Jack Jones is singing at my local theatre soon, I was thinking of going along to see if he’d sign the dvd. And yeah Walliams is good in it and his character liked John Pertwee a lot too, didnt he.

[Jonsmad]

Warning contains spoilers for anyone who doesnt want to hear more about
this DVD before buying it.

…..

Well there is good and bad with this DVD release. Picked up my copy this morning.

First the bad. Advertising “commentaries” on the back of your dvd and not saying how many or who is bit a of marketing angle rip off in my mind. People may assume 12 commentarys and them being full cast. Neither of which is true.

2ndly the non appearance of Rik, Ade, Chris Ryan, and Ben Elton on this dvd in the documentaries and commentary is a huge gaping hole in this attempt at being some kind of 25th year celebration. Alexi and Nigel are interesting, but cant carry the whole documentary from everyone view point and the complete non mention of Chris Ryan is an insult, yeah so we didnt expect a huge focus on him, but no mention at all in the documentary, though this is made up for in the commentary.

3rdly although, lengthy and interesting the main documentary lacks structure, it’s got a good begining and a good end with people saying which bit they liked most. The middle wanders all over different aspects of the show without much focus. Sure they do split the memories up by series a little, but the end of the young ones and the bus comes up 3 times I think in different bits.

…

And now the good bits, Sebs comment that more of Lise Meyer is a good thing, is spot on she’s great and a real indepth insight, as is tons of Ed bye and Paul Jackson. In fact the Ed Bye stuff that is “prop related” is fantastic and fits in like an early chapter on him before Red Dwarf (which he mentions once) documentaries cover his later work.

Any kind of dream we might have had of a huge cast for these doccos from the excellent Red Dwarf documentarys (which this disc is copying the style of) are sadly limited to Andy De la Tour, Mark Arden, Geoff Posner, but it’s nice to see them and get their input. The talking is wider than some previous young ones doccumentary stuff thats come before so we do get some new insights.

The talking about special effects and animation is great stuff, and early glimpses of neil pre young ones I’d never seen, though I’d seen the rik poet ones. The way they cover the flash frames topic is very well done.

Well better than no commentarys at all, are 2 commentarys over “Demolition” and “summer holiday” by Paul Jackson and Geoff Posner. Both a delight to listen too over the first (pilot) and last show. Paul Jackson despite getting the odd fact wrong, pretty much never lets a gap appear in the commentary and is interesting through out the 70ish minutes these two shows cover. Just like a
good commentary should do this sheds new light onto the show, pointing out,
people, effects and recording techniques that I hadnt thought of before in relation to the show. They cover other episodes too sometimes with in the plot,
and find out the inside exclusive on what happend to spg! and which main stream comedy double act influenced vyvian trousers.

I’ve checked if the Jools Holland song is edited out or not, and excellently it’s there! Ace. so better than my USA dvds. So I dont know if this means these are all uncut episodes. What else was trimmed before on US or UK release?

The guests stars and band get there own short featurette which isnt much but it’s nice it’s been included to highlight this aspect of the show, no one new is interviewed in this section either though.

Menu’s are reminisent of the young ones computer game style box, with messyness
and an overhead veiw of a bubbling lentil pot, and let them play to the end for a small surprise. The slip case packaging is nice. I like the rat on the spine.

This could have been a whole lot more, but the little more that it is over previous uk sets, is greater than just leaving this show extra less. I enjoyed the documentaries and glad they made some kind of effort to beef up a uk box set release. I’m still keeping my region one set to go along with it. I would have wished for deleted scenes, out takes or more cast involvement, but without that in the budget they could have at least included comedy connections, the usa box set extras or more boom boom footage to flesh this out to something truly all the more encompassing.

[Jonsmad]

Yeah, It’s an idea that came to my mind too, while in bookshops and seeing the
huge range of who, torchwood etc stuff that comes out now as talking books and having hugely enjoyed the recent Dirk Maggs, hitchhikers audio series and current Dirk Gently Shows, a lot can be done with sound.

The 3rd hitch hiker series had a dvd release show casing a dolby surround mix, along with video making off.

[Jonsmad]

Pulling that BBFC trick,
Here are the documentary extras for the box set.

Run Time 75m 10s
The cast for this work includes: Mark Arden, Andy Le Tour, Lisa Mayer.

Widescreen, DVD additional material – THE YOUNG ONES DVD EXTRAS,

13:23:15 ALTERNATIVE REBELLION – THE COMEDY BEHIND THE YOUNG ONES
50:27:02 SILVER JUBILEE 25 YEARS – THE MAKING OF THE YOUNG ONES
11:19:05 THE GUEST STARS – THE OTHER YOUNG ONES

Wonder if Chris or Norman are in the third featurette.

[Jonsmad]

A love letter to TV
Peter Serafinowicz on his new sketch show

The vacillations of the American TV industry always come in for a lot of flack. But if it wasn?t for the delays and rethinks of indecisive networks, Peter Serafinowicz wouldn?t have his own BBC Two show tonight.
It was while he was bored in Los Angeles, hanging around between auditions and a role in a sitcom that never aired, that the actor shot a comedy sketch for his own amusement. Then he banged it on YouTube where it so impressed Beeb bosses that they decided to put his name in lights. And with a name as long as Serafinowicz, that?s quite a lot of bulbs.

The fairytale passage to primetime was surely help by his previous form. He?s appeared in everything from Shaun Of The Dead to Black Books, not to mention the cult success of spoof science show Look Around You, and the voice of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace.

But, over a coffee in a family deli near his West London home, he insists it was the YouTube clip which swung it ? cutting through months of meetings and pilots to get the commission.

?It?s probably the biggest reaction I?ve had to anything. It had something like 100,000 hits in three days,? he said. ?And where it would take months and months to turn your ideas into something people could watch, now you can put something together instantly.’

The clip was a spoof Hollywood entertainment show, O! News, reporting on a bold new look for the Oscars statuette. It was inspired in part by the wall-to-wall TV coverage leading up to the awards in LA ? and partly down to sheer boredom.

?My girlfriend, Sarah Alexander, was out there doing a pilot called Teachers, that was very loosely based on the British version, and I went with her.

?I also heard they were casting for Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, for the role of a cast member/writer for this show that was supposed to be like Saturday Night Live. I?m a huge fan of Saturday Night Live and a huge fan of Studio 60 creator Aaron Sorkin, who also did The West Wing, so it was a part I really wanted

?I had to make up a sketch for the show. So I did an impression of Alan Alda, doing the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars, that whole hologram speech. They?d done things like that that on SNL before, stars? audition tapes for Star Wars, so I sort of nicked that idea but I didn?t think anyone?s going to do Alan Alda.?

The Alda impression, which pops up in the BBC Two show, did the trick and he got down to the final two. ?We had to audition for Sorkin, which was terrifying to meet a hero. But I didn?t get the part, and I was really fucked off,? he admits

But Serafinowicz did win another role, in a Friends-style show called Our 30s. ?Everyone was trying to do a version Friends, but set a bit later on ? when the characters are all in their thirties,? he says. ?But it just didn?t happen. The one I did, there were nine main characters ? far too many.?

But he was still obliged to hang around in Los Angeles waiting for work to start on that aborted sitcom. ?I couldn?t do anything because I was committed to this show,? he said. ?So I had this idea of doing a showreel.

?Also, My brother James was bored back in England, and we?re like best friends as well, so I said, ?Why don?t you come out here and we?ll make something.?

?On the TV in LA, from about January everything on TV is Oscars, Oscars, Oscars ? they can?t help it that?s all they do there. So we decided on that. He had a video camera, a semi-professional one, about ?1,000 and I?m a bit of a whiz on my Mac, so we put it together very cheaply.

?It?s amazing what you can do these days. What used to be a ?1million studio in a Soho post-production house you can now do on a ?1,000 laptop and a few hundred quid for an editing programme.

?YouTube has totally democratised the whole process, too. The revolutionary thing about it was that you could email a link to someone and five minutes later they?d be watching it. You didn?t have to email a 5MB WMV file that would probably look shit, even if you could play it, and you didn?t need to make sure you had the right codec for it to work.?

Codecs? WMV files? Serafinowicz is talking more like an IT geek than a cutting-edge comedian. But not only is the 35-year-old a self-confessed technofreak, his anoraky tendencies extend to comedy, too. His conversation drops the names of Saturday Night Live cast members, an obscure cult US series called Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! which he cites as a favourite, and even the NBC executive who championed Seinfeld, who he calls ?a bit of a comedy icon?. The man certainly knows his comedy stuff.

Comedy seems to run in his family, too. His brother James, who co-wrote the new show, worked on the Brass Eye paedophilia special, Big Train and The Mark Steel Lectures (and they previously collaborated on Blankety Blank sketch for Comic Relief starring the cream of British comedy), while his brother-in-law is Father Ted and IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan. In fact, it was Linehan who introduced him to YouTube.

?He sent me this link to Chronicles of Narnia, these two white guys doing gangsta rap ? Andy Samburg and Chris Parnell from Saturday Night Live. It was brilliant ? one of the most perfect things: so silly, sweet and stupid.?

Serafinowicz is genuinely enthused by the possibilities Web 2.0 creates. But isn?t there a fear that the cult of the amateur, and the fact that internet content needs to fit in to short chunks, means that the days of quality, long-form TV like his beloved West Wing could be numbered.

?Maybe,? he concedes. ?This show is like a love letter to television, before it all disappears. How will these old programmes survive when everyone will be able to download anything they want.?

?There?s not mystique about being on TV anymore. You see these people go on Jeremy Kyle and carry on their miserable lives as if the cameras weren?t there, there?s no prestige about it. That?s why we came up with Michael-6, a robot talk-show host (right). The people in our sketch just ignore him.?

The Peter Serafinowicz Show was initially intended to be an impression-based show, but they soon broadened out the idea to encompass all sort of TV spoofs, from pared-down gameshows like Heads Or Tales, to adverts that make Cillit Bang?s Barry Scott look demure.

?There?s a definite naffness to doing impressions,? Serafinowicz says. ?Funny impressions can be funny in their own right, but often for about ten seconds, that?s it. That?s the sort of thing that put me off. It was a block for me.?

His range of impressions was also limited by his size. He?s 6ft 4in and used to be quite heavy-set, although his stint in LA got him in physical shape too, as he embraced the Californian fitness culture.

?I thought I if I?m doing impressions, I need to be as malleable as possible,? he said. ?I?ve got distinctive facial features: big bulgy droopy eyes, big nose? There?s a limit to what I can do. I don?t want to impersonate people I don?t even look like, so I try to do people who have at least got similar features to me, like Paul McCartney or Al Pacino.

?So I?m limited anyway, and I didn?t want another obstacle, so I lost a lot of weight.

?Also, I thought if I?m going to be in America, you?ve got to be on top of your game. Not only is everyone there really funny and talented, everyone?s really fit, too.

?A friend of mine Amy Poehler, from Saturday Night Live, describes going to LA from New York as like coming out of a nightclub. You think you?re pretty cool, but then the lights come on a 3am and you realise your make-up?s all over the place, your clothes are a mess and you?re looking really haggard. That what it?s like getting off the plane in LA.

?You go for audition there and you sit in a room with six Brad Pits, three Keanu Reeveses and a Justin Timberlake ? and they?re all clever and witty and ultra-talented and that?s the world. You?re competing against these people, so you have to be your best.

?The image is that LA a nasty, soulless place ? and that is the truth ? but what is also true is that it draws immensely talented people from around the world.?

Serafinowicz was especially pleased to meet South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker while in Hollywood ? and they asked him to voice the character of Darth Chef after Isaac Hayes sulked off the show, upset at their mocking of Scientology. ?They were real heroes of mine, and I got to meet them,? he says proudly.

From the look of the new show, he has tried to capture some of the outrageous silliness of South Park ? without too much of its crudeness. That said, the most noticeable change to the redesigned Oscar statuette featured way back in that original O! News report was that it had a proud phallus.

?We wanted to make the statue different, and were racking our brains thinking what it could be. Then I said the phrase I think a lot of comedy writers have when they?re trying to think of something. They?ll say, ?Not this, but?? so I suggested ?Not this but? the Oscar has a cock.

?I think you say that if an idea feels a bit Route One, ?The Oscar has got a cock ha-de-ha?. But we didn?t come with anything better than that, and sometimes the simple idea is the best.?

You can see how Peter Serafinowicz?s simple ideas worked out on Thursdays at 9.30pm on BBC Two.

Interview by: Steve Bennett

[Jonsmad]

I thought it was watchable. Not as great as I’d hoped. Liked the O news bit,
and the masterclass. Found the 1st sketch a bit too naked video, and I think
it’s hard to do anything new with advert spoofs these days, but there’s
no doubt he’s got a lot of talent, and the sureal nature of his look
around you shows continued I felt with some of these sketches. Great to
see benedict wong again.

[Jonsmad]

13 years of age in 1988, big fan of the Young Ones and Fawlty Towers and Python by this point. Read the blurb in the paper about a new comedy show set in space. I thought, That sounds shit. Didnt bother watching it, probably read an Eagle or Oink Comic instead and went to bed.

Then later at school, everyone raving about the show and calling everyone else a smeg head, and me feeling left out for having missed it. So first episode was Future Echoes, and the recaps at the start of the show really helped back then. Started recording the show off the tv by series 3 premier. And Waiting so so long for a series 1 video release and a chance to see how it all began, by which time all I could really remember was bits of Me2 and the catchphrase of saying “Fish”
multiple times, which me and friends used to do all the time.

[Jonsmad]

Additional…

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/casablanca.html

[Jonsmad]

From a Scottish newspaper interveiw with Gordon Kennedy,

“We’re hoping to bring a DVD out for the first time next year,” he said.
“It occurred to me after some of the extras on River City told me how
much they loved it.”

“There’s a guy called Absolutely Andy who’s run a petition to get the
show released on DVD. So I’m determined to get us all back together to
do a commentary for the DVD.”

But the bad news is, there’s no chance of any new material. Gordon said:
“I’m still really proud of it. We wrote it performed it and it was
successful. But it makes me very cautious for ever wanting to do it
again. We got away with it the first time…”

[Jonsmad]

Everything in all versions of red dwarf is cannon.
Because alternate dimensions and changes to timelines
happens a lot. So that would make it a cannon with several barrels.
And a lot of balls.

[Jonsmad]

Madness and motorhead are on the dvd region 1 i have, I think all the other
songs are there.

It’s only the bob dylan song they had trouble clearing I think.
Most of the bands that appear in the show singing their own songs
get a few of some kind for appearing I guess so are happy to clear
the song rights. But Dylan isnt singing that one, it’s jools holland,
rowland rivron and some bloke out of the police, so maybe dylan gets
lets money or perhaps he doesnt like the version who knows.

[Jonsmad]

The only major ommission from the shows I could see missing on the original release in Region 1 dvd, was the Jool’s holland super band Bob Dylan number was cut completely from “cash”. Dont know about the UK dvd’s though.

[Jonsmad]

“Why would Rimmer, a lowly 2nd technician be at the helm of a job that would
put the entire crew at risk?”

Because like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere.

Back in Red Part 2.

RIMMER

“I’m concerned over some of the safety procedures on board, sir. There’s a
potentially lethal scenario concerning drive plates, sir.”
Obviously, anyone who mis-repaired one of these plates would have to have a
brain the size of a leprechaun’s testicle.”

I think both senarios are true in that Rimmers direct testicle brained
incompetence caused the accident. But if tried through health and safety law
style investigation it’s likely higher ranking personel in JMC would
be implicated and sustain higher penalty. Based on current uk law only,
It would depend on what risk assesment paperwork had been filled in
before about the accident area.

[Jonsmad]

Interesting announcement about Tate. I feel sorry for the people who cant Fucking stand her. I can see what you dont like and that must be deeply annoying you all right now to the point of voodoo.

Im not about to defend her appointment, I’m probably in agreement with the
“Back for a whole series? Pfffft.” statement.

But playing satan’s pit advocate for a moment, If series one and two had a theme of rose and whichever dr’s mutual feelings for each other and the tate christmas special was about loss, and series three had a theme about marthas unrequited feelings, then where does series four go with a companion theme?

Maybe It’s a season about being stuck with someone you hate, the dr hating donna as much as you all hate tate, but he cant get rid of her, he keeps dropping her off on the worst planets and back in the worse time periods, and she keeps getting tortured and stuff, but then keeps popping back up in the tardis like she did before by magic and it ends with him asking the daleks nicely to exterminate her, and you could tune back in just for that maybe?

Maybe after two growing into have a go hero sidekicks (three if you count mickey) It will be nice to have a crap horror film twisted ankle cliche style character around who never gets better at dealing with monsters, she could be the new teegan.

Do you think dr who is going to go more comedy now with a comedian/actress cast? Maybe she will play a different comedy character each week.

[Jonsmad]

Looks like Doctor Dwarf got a bit overshadowed in favour of
ripping off big film trilogys instead this week.

As the Masters funeral pire became very
return of the Jedi/meets LOTR sauron’s ring.

[Jonsmad]

Ganymede and Titan, will carry on the flame of red dwarf whatever happens
alone in an otherwise RDfansiteless universe, and out of shake and vac.

[Jonsmad]

Is it cruel of me to have placed all of the garden fountain statues
faces up against the conservatory windows, just before my father sits
down to watch the recording of last nights Dr who “blink” later today ??

(evil laugh) :-)

[Jonsmad]

Time to bring in an academic to further this swearing debate…

[Jonsmad]

I cant stand George MacIntyre, In “The End”, mainly the acting
and delivery is rubbish.

I like how they cut his part down in the remastered version.

[Author]

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