Are you 'avin a laugh? Is he 'avin a laugh?!

[spatch]

Hooray, BBC America's about to start showing the second series of Spaced next week! I'd stopped watching after they started programming nothin' but DIY shows and Footballers Wives back to back, but god damn I'd take time out of my busy schedule for one of my most favorite situation comedies ever ("Tim, I'm not going to buy you porn. You can get it from railway sidings like everybody else." "I can't, I'm an adult. I'm supposed to leave it there.")

Apparently Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's next series will be "La Triviata," about pub quiz teams. This kind of thing, however niche, could easily be adapted to a US bar trivia crowd, I'm sure, but we'll have to wait and see. The next movie from the Shaun of the Dead team is Hot Fuzz, I think I've already mentioned it looks great (the trailer is a spot-on parody of cop action movies, just a little too spot-on) and we're looking at an April release date in the US.

All this ought to make up for the admittedly well-done but ultimately disappointing second (and final) series of Ricky Gervais' Extras. Don't get me wrong, the "When The Whistle Blows" show-within-a-show was a terrific parody of every dumb, crass and puerile sitcom you've ever had to endure, but the show really strayed too far from its Season One roots -- a show about two hopeless professional film extras in search of their big break. When Ricky's character gets his big break, hooray, it's a nice payoff, but the second season deals with that break and it just wasn't the same. However, the irreverent celebrity cameos were still funny so there's that going for it.

Comments

[giantfightbot.livejournal.com]

I tried watching the first series of Spaced and I just couldn't get into it. I dunno, maybe I wasn't in the right mood for it.

Currently listening the heck out of the Ricky Gervais Show on both podcast and the archives of old xFM shows.

Though really, the later episodes should be the Karl Pilkington Show. Him and his enormous head, guest-starring Stephen and Ricky.

[spatch]

Spaced took some getting used to. The opening sequence of the first episode is very confusing if you go in without any idea of the characters -- the shots of Tim outside on the street breaking up with his girlfriend up in the window intercut with the shots of Daisy shooing away a bum on the street from her window-- at first I thought "Is this going to be a series about a relationship where we watch the breakup first and then see everything before?"

The series definitely gets better the further you get in. The episode in the second series where Tim leaves his job at one comic shop (because he's giving kids shit for buying Jar-Jar Binks characters) and goes to work for the competing comic shop is great.

I can't remember if that's the episode where we learn Tim was so disillusioned by The Phantom Menace that he burned all his Star Wars memorabilia, Jedi funeral pyre-style (with a snippet of the John Williams score in the background), but that's another great scene too.