British Comedy Guide

Foreign Holiday Based Sitcoms? Page 3

Love Thy Neighbour went to Majorca in the first episode of series five.

Everybody Loves Raymond...they bugger off to Italy and eat gelati amongst other things.

Duty Free was terrible. I could not believe it was half the team that did Rising Damp and Only When I laugh!

Oh, and The Inbetweeners' camping trip :)

Frasier had quite a lot of holiday episodes when the Cranes went off somewhere (Canada, cruise ships, etc). And Modern Family had one when they all went off en masse.

Quote: MTpromises @ August 2 2011, 10:46 PM BST

Love Thy Neighbour went to Majorca in the first episode of series five.

What both neighbours? How would that work??

Quote: Tim Azure @ August 11 2011, 1:36 PM BST

What both neighbours? How would that work??

Club outing. Arranged by wives. Any number of ways.

(It was actually the former.)

Quote: Aaron @ August 11 2011, 2:46 PM BST

Arranged by wives.

Doubtful...

Why? The wives were fairly good friends, particularly once the babies had come along.

Quote: Aaron @ August 11 2011, 4:52 PM BST

Why? The wives were fairly good friends, particularly once the babies had come along.

Almost best friends, I thought. That's why it wasn't racist, as people wrongly think it was. It was the same sort of set up as Till Death. The women took control and got on with each other really well, to make the bickering men look like idiots. Good premise.

Anyone giving the show more than a cursory watch can tell it's not racist. Bill and Eddie themselves actually got on fairly well when forced together - and of course, far more of an issue to Eddie than Bill's skin colour, was the fact he was a Tory.

The problem was more that the show circulated and legitimised racist taunts. The names Eddie called Bill could be heard the next day in the playground; we only had the one black lad in my school (not unusual in the suburbs in those days) and I am pretty sure he did not appreciate the humour.

Oh certainly; but then brandishing Love Thy Neighbour itself as racist isn't a million miles from blaming Twitter for causing riots in the past week: it may facilitate society's idiots and those who do not understand their actions, but it doesn't make the thing itself inherently bad.

Anyway.

Quote: Aaron @ August 11 2011, 4:52 PM BST

Why? The wives were fairly good friends, particularly once the babies had come along.

So? They can go on holiday on their own. No particular reason why they should go on holiday with their husbands and have hilarious situations...

This is the problem when characters in sitcoms go on holidays, the characters that somehow all manage to end up in the same place, people go who probably wouldn't be able to afford that resort, and so on.

Not just sitcoms of course. What about when EastEnders visited Ireland?

>_<

Quote: Tim Azure @ August 12 2011, 7:39 AM BST

So? They can go on holiday on their own. No particular reason why they should go on holiday with their husbands and have hilarious situations...

If you're going to analyse to that level, then there's no particular reason that anything that happens in most sitcoms has to happen. But a certain train of events occurs that leads to a plot.

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