Is it still funny?
funny is funny
Hancock is still magisterial
Quote: Oldrocker @ 26th October 2014, 1:56 PM GMTAgree or disagree Chums?
My opinion of each show has not changed since I first saw it.
As for the article, anyone who thinks The Likely Lads is not funny but Spaced is I struggle to take seriously.
Clichéd to say it is subjective, but that's what it is - lists that is, which seem to predominate on the IMDb and to me seem totally pointless.
At least they got it right with Hancock. 
Quote: Tursiops @ 26th October 2014, 2:49 PM GMTMy opinion of each show has not changed since I first saw it.
As for the article, anyone who thinks The Likely Lads is not funny but Spaced is I struggle to take seriously.
I think it's because the Likely Lads was clever and realistically funny.
Quote: Chappers @ 26th October 2014, 4:40 PM GMTI think it's because the Likely Lads was clever and realistically funny.
But apparently Terry Collier was an "unreconstructed racist, homophobic misogynist". That the whole premise of the comedy was that Terry was a man adrift in a changing world seems to pass by the po-faced Guardian hack responsible for the article.
The whole of the Guardian is even more po faced that Joh Suchet's fae.
And they rate the dreary AbFab over Python, oh f**k off you tossers.
(Tursiops)
........and sootyj
Who really takes the Grauniad seriously? Apart from themselves?
Exactly........
Any article that thinks Jessica Stevenson was the token female in "Spaced" despite being the co-writer and one of three females out of the 6 main characters is really not worth the virtual ink it's written with.
Good point the land lady was an awesome character.
And frankly accusing Python of rambling, compared to say Armstrong and Miller [all of whom are very funny]. Just doesn't understand sketch comedy.
Does the Guardian actually still have journalists working for it.
Some of the list is political in the same way that NME used to be political about music. The comments on "The Likely Lads" make that very clear. At some point, society is going to have to decide whether the mere mentioning of illiberal sentiment is objectionable or if it depends on where the sympathy in any audience is intended to be. Even back in the 1960s/1970s, the most prejudiced characters tended to be depicted as flawed because of their prejudices. Rationally, the humour that is found in them varies according to whether the viewer has empathy with those flaws or regards them as preposterous. The Guardian style approach is well-intended but dictatorial. It requires all of the audience to think and feel in the same "correct" way.
Some of the politics is understandable. Arguably, there is a post Savile strand in a few of the assessments. Part of the content of "The Day Today" doesn't seem quite so clever now, particularly the edition that led to the series's demise. Bill Cosby - once loved for being first black and edgy and then via reinvention almost audaciously family friendly - is now considered in terms of who he was allegedly in reality. Of course, there was always just a slight doubt about the truth in the cloying sentimentality. It never rang wholly true to many. The show could give a sense that the radical change was on the surface and of itself deliberately subversive. There was always a less than subtle point there about perceptions of power along racial lines.
Another strand in the Guardian piece is time-based. It completely, if inadvertently, supports the theory in popular culture that there is never anything more outdated than the last big thing. The 1990s and 2000s do not score very highly. What was being done in comedy terms has been microscopically analysed - "The Office", "The Fast Show" etc - so critics can congratulate themselves on how they have sussed it all out. By contrast, the 1950s and the early 1960s - "I Love Lucy" etc - are so ancient as to have positive retro appeal. In broad terms, that is probably how things should be but not as required in any rigid manifesto.
In short, I think we all agree that the article is bollocks written by nitwits.
Sadly Aaron that could be applied to pretty much all of the Guardian these days.