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| TV,
jerry carpenter,
21:26:37,
18 May 2002 |
Rating: F1
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I set my all-powerful Samsung 3-1067XX video recorder to tape this show last Friday and came home so boss-eyed drunk that I failed to notice I wasn’t watching C4’s cutting edge sitcom but instead BBC2’s cut edge show ‘To the Manor Born’. Thanks Samsung. Thanks beer. Not that I don’t still have the hots for the beaked beauty of Penny Keith. Luckily they repeat on Saturdays, so now I can leave the Manor for Space. Ahem.
A lot of folk including myself were put off this show at first sight if only because it does look like it’s trying to hard to distance itself from any other UK sitcom – ultra flashy editing!, weird high contrast video quality !, floaty camerawork !, no title sequence ! But being snobby was obviously a mistake, because on finally catching the repeats recently and then the beginning of the second series it hits me that this is a GREAT show, and very much better than it’s flashy cover suggested.
First off, it’s got the great cast/script thing going on perfectly, surely because the two principles ( Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson ) are also the two writers of the show, so it’s unlikely anyone is fudging anyone’s lines. Secondly it actually uses the flashy shotgun editing to it’s advantage -most other ‘hip’ shows just whack sound and image together for cosmetic reasons ( see the ‘lock, stock’ series and ‘as if’ for perfectly mindless examples ), where ‘Spaced’ uses it to pack in the maximum amount of esoteric one-liners, ironic flashbacks, and movie references. My only niggle on the movie reference thing is occasionally they anally over-work a reference too much in favour of moving the events on.
For all it’s innovations, this is another in a line of sitcoms that successfully play out the comedy of losers, from ‘Steptoe’ through ‘The likely lads’ and more recently ‘Men behaving badly’. As I was saying just the other night, it’s great that stories of degradation and depression are still the ones that make us laugh the most, eh ?.
various directors
Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson
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