Britainology 41: Little Britain
For this month's first Britainology, Milo subjected Nate to the early-2000s hit sketch comedy show 'Little Britain,' the brainchild of Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Has it aged well? No. But was it at least funny? Also no. Prepare your body for the literal worst bit of content we may have faced yet.
Comments (54)
The show milo is thinking of is New Tricks & it’s not bad imo
There are a couple really offensive episodes of The mighty boosh. It's mostly just weird stuff though.
I mentioned it a bit but I'll love your thoughts on Big Train, from the one of the writers of the wonderful Father Ted.
I remember come fly with me being slightly funnier as a show since there was a whole pastiche element to it- though there was like 4x more black/brown face so fucking yikes. That also came out in the 2010s which blows my mind
The baggage handler (Tez?) who keeps blathering on about films was fun. Of course Lucas felt the need to brown up and put on an accent to do it.
So, anyone know what those alleged rumours about Walliams are? 👀 he does give off an incredibly cursed vibe alright
yeah also very curious (and, importantly, living in a country with better libel laws than the UK)
such bad jokes, and so few of them
Screw you! Invader Zim still holds up! …as a manic and occasionally black comedy, which is the only thing it was really ever trying to be.
My partner recently described Little Britan as 'the early 2000s Facebook minions'. Which I felt summed it up nicely.
Little Britain was early meme culture. Every episode was the same set of sketches, the same characters making the same joke with a slightly different set-up. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t funny because each sketch had the shape of a joke, it’s own memorable catch-phrase, and the hammer of repetition.
my god... youre right
Shit, Big Train was good too!
Big Train is my favourite sketch show ever. I'd love Nate's opinion of that one.
Hugh talking about drum and bass! and the internet one, when it was all in black and white the and when you'd log off everyone would stand up and sing the national anthem. Boosh is shite but Black Books was good and Dylan Moran did a good job writing it by himself. imo.
In regard to commissioning anything, please make Nate watch Monkey Dust.
Don’t know if obliviousness really cuts it as a response.
The only sizzlers left are on the west coast. The furthest east one I’m pretty sure is the one in Gallup, New Mexico
West Coast=Best Coast
Dennis Waterman gets the short jokes because (for some reason) most of the people he was supposed to be intimidating on Minder were taller than him. He did also do a sketch for comic relief Little Britain about how he's not that short.
About the Van Wilder donut joke: there's a throwaway off-screen comment that one of the people eating the donut makes where he says "this tastes kind of familiar" as of to say he's gargled dog spooj before
Walliams and Lucas have a real 'talent' for taking interesting sketch ideas and utterly destroying them by being offensive. One that comes to mind is a sketch in the even more offensive 'Come Fly With Me' about Japanese Schoolgirls obsessed with c-lister Martin Clunes. There's a gem of a decent surreal sketch there, but rather than hire Japanese people they decided to do it themselves in yellow face. Bizzare. And the sketch itself is completely unfunny.
Milo: Mighty Boosh. What were we smoking? 2007 me: Weed.
Love how teens loitering outside is considered a threat, so they try to disperse said teens like raccoons and they go home and get radicalised online and then complain about that instead. Do you want them indoors or outside? Pick one. It's just a controlling boomer thing of, "teens be making jokes about something, and it might be about me and I don't like that"
I think the annoying noisemakers aimed at annoying the young never really took off in America because, moms dragging their kids along are a really important demographic to businesses, and the car centric infrastructure here discourages those under 16 from going anywhere without their parents dropping them off. You absolutely get people annoyed at the idea of children loitering here, but it's people freaking out over parents choosing to drop their kids off at a public place without staying with them the whole time. And the number of drop offs isn't that common. Plus the bars wanting to make money off of everyone who has an ID claiming they're 21 potentially seeing a threat to their business (which would give them grounds to sue) who would put a stop to any proposed in their vicinity. The only articles I can find on the US use of them are a few cities turning them on when the park is supposed to be closed to everyone at night.
Walliams or Lucas being anywhere near public life still is completely bizarre.
Well, it's like anything in the British entertainment industry. Once you do something that big, you can basically coast off of that and do fuck all for the rest your life.
Ye boys should take bout monkey dust
Football never came home now boris is out of ten downing and the queen is dead Britain is a bloody shambles
Tried to rewatch Mighty Boosh recently and stopped at the Noel Fielding black face. No reason to continue after that I can think of
Was gonna say. There's definitely blackface in Mighty Boosh. Julian Barrett does it in another episode too.
I absolutely would contribute funds to help make the Nate + Milo + Dan Balkans Tour docuseries happen
Get Ciaran from Corner Spati on that, too.
It's really weird to imagine Milo in Tennessee
Pretending I'm not crying as the lads viciously trash possibly two of my favorite shows of all time. Boosh and Invader Zim are good actually smdh
Yes, I was a fan of Jhonen Vasquez at the time, edgelord tendencies notwithstanding, so I liked “Invader Zim”. I can only imagine the reaction in Nickelodeon when they realised what they had commissioned
Similar vibe to little Britain was mind of Mencia in the mid 00s, it was a sketch show hosted by joke stealer Carlos mencia . It was like an unfunny bootleg of Chapelle show, but it was mostly him getting to say slurs and low hanging shit mostly just punching down on migrants, Mexicans and people with intellectual disabilities.
Gotta love that moment where Milo is worried about libel and Nate is like "i edit this show gimme the gossip"
I would argue that America did have the equivalent insanely offensive and most distasteful sketch comedy show at the same time and that was Mad TV. Between Stewart and Mrs. Swan, I'd say it's pretty close.
Not sure I'm ready for the psychic damage I'm going to take from this
I'll admit to having fond memories of the Mighty Boosh, but also the character of Old Greg, who at the time was just quite unfunny, was in retrospect transphobic as all fuck.
Yeah like also like a pretty innovative way to be transphobic. I've never seen anything that was transphobic and quite the same way since then.
Discovering they were both actors is really kind of illuminating because the jokes really are like just characters even the one vaguely funny one of the tory mp with his family who had "accidentally" had gay sex which worked a bit because even though the jokes were tired they were performed well but the rest of it was rancid
feels like basically every sketchshow of that time was just the same few sketches, repeated every episode, and Little Britain was the absolute nadir
Yes, I wonder if the unfunniness of a lot of the sketches arose because they were coming at the end of a long stretch of comedy shows whose popularity seemed to rest on how many catchphrases they originated (“The Fast Show” being a culprit here), so instead of actually developing a joke, the writers, on reaching the point where the catchphrase was said were just like, “job done”
Dennis Waterman died this May!
I have a powerful sense of liking a couple of their sketches, but an even more powerful sense of not remembering what those sketches were.
With Eastern Europe, you may have actually overshot to the outside of EU too quickly. If you want properly cursed Balkan vibes, Bulgaria and Romania have a truly hauntological “what if the Soviet Union was Euro but also Ottoman” experience. Sofia offers a surreal juxtaposition of inexplicably numerous Lazio Ultras neonazi graffiti beside a vast soviet brutalist cultural centre building, and the faint melodises of death metal coming from a skater dude’s phone clash with an oriental ethno-pop fusion coming from the taxi down the pavement. This scene overlooks a soviet interpretation of a boulevard, (basically a landscaped stroad), where an extremely bald thicc mafia imposter in a G wagon waits at the lights beside another identically looking guy in a newer G-wagon who is actual mafia.
ok Sofia sounds like the best kind of surreal, gotta see this
Oh lord I have been waiting for this
I have been prepared like a Samurai studying the blade on a mountaintop for this, hoping for when the day would come. Let's, fucking, go!
Sorry
Looool
Yeeeeeaaaah