Doctor Who — Series 5

Doctor Who's fifth series takes the strengths of Russell T. Davies' revival and smooths out nearly all the issues that routinely gave me pause. WIth the exception of an unnecessary two-parter and a useless Dalek return (now with Freeze-Pop colors!), the start of Steven Moffat's tenure as showrunner elevates the series from a whimsical but dodgy program to one of the best shows currently on television.

Admittedly, I think just about everyone expected an uptick in quality when Davies handed off the series to its best writer, but Moffat completely overhauls Doctor Who without sacrificing its innate charms. It still feels like the classic space serial it is, but Moffat trades Davies' only fitfully earned "golly gee whiz" mood for a more grounded wonder, one that is a payoff to the adventure rather than the default tone of voice. I'm told the original run of Dr. Who had its moments of darker energy, and Moffat very much targets that side of Who, to the point that the series, while still feeling appropriate for a family, might actually challenge, even alienate, viewers.

Doctor Who — "The Eleventh Hour"

So much happens in the first episode of Doctor Who's fifth series that there's no way I could address everything I wanted to in a season-encompassing review, so I'll lay out some thoughts in a separate post.

I had anticipated Steven Moffat hitting the ground running as creative head of Doctor Who; were I to list the 10 best episodes of New Who, all of his penned episodes would make the cut. As I've said in previous Who posts, Moffat's style combines wit, edginess and an atmosphere that relies on suggestion over confrontation to unsettle the audience. His approach was an antidote to the sometimes cloying sentimentality of Russell T. Davies, who stuck to the child-oriented side of the program while Moffat gave kids something to think and fret about.

Doctor Who — Series Four

Russell T. Davies' final series as showrunner of his triumphant revival of Doctor Who encapsulates the full range of his highs and lows. Its optimism is infectious, but at times its on-the-nose moralizing and weak plotting border on the insufferable, even if it is a family program. Davies looked to Joss Whedon for guidance, but he could never find a way to incorporate Whedon's thematic richness or attention to character in a children's show primarily built upon standalone episodes, partly because of his own love of preaching over subtlety.

After a rocky start, however, Davies accomplished something with his last batch of episodes for the series: he maintained an emotional arc that worked in tandem with the show's usual style. Armed with a foreknowledge of both David Tennant's and his own departure, a desire to leave one lasting imprint on the show and the Doctor's finest Companion yet, Davies overcomes his own limitations bring out the full potential of Doctor Who, using his final episodes to wistfully look back on the show he loved so much and worked so hard to bring back.

Blackadder

The fundamental difference between American and British television is that most of our quality television tends to be dramatic, while the best British exports are comedies. Naturally, each country has its own successes with the other genre -- the Brits seem to hold The Simpsons in an even higher regard than we do -- but generally speaking the States produces far more lasting dramas than comedies and the British follow the inverse. British humor is such a constant in the United Kingdom's cultural identity that, above the cultural humor of other nations, it allows a deep insight into the history and mindset into Britain and its people.

Keeping that in mind, Blackadder may be as beneficial to understanding England as a history course, and it's a damn sight more entertaining than listening to a professor drone on and on about the Norman invasion and the Magna Carta. Blackadder, created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, traverses great temporal leaps across its four series, touching upon four key moments in English history. Each of these periods -- medieval, Elizabethan, Regency and World War I -- are vastly different in technology, dress and thought, yet the overriding theme of the program is "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"; Blackadder reuses actors, character names and traits to illustrate why the Brits are still so hung-up about class.

The first series of the show, The Black Adder, introduces the anti-hero Edmund Blackadder, a supercilious, conniving creature who leaves a slime trail through England's timeline. In the medieval era, Edmund is a prince, youngest son of Richard IV (a magnificently insane Brian Blessed, setting a precedent for all future characters in the show in a superior position to Edmund's). Flanked by his dimwitted entourage of Lord Percy Percy (Tim McInnerny) and his servant Baldrick (the brilliantly deadpan Tony Robinson, the most consistently rewarding actor across the four series), Edmund spends most of the first series dodging his father's berserk rage and attempting to win his brother Harry's (Robert East) inheritance.

Compared to the other seasons, The Black Adder looks hopelessly weak; it uses a number of location shots, much to its detriment as it, like all the other classic BBC programs, uses cheap film stock for location shooting (it's taxpayer money, after all), and the jokes chiefly concern silly voices and the usage of "thous" and "thines" in more modern speech patterns. Blessed is wonderful as the rapacious, murderous Richard, who seems to be covered in blood every time you see him, even if he's supposed to be in bed sick with fever; everyone else, though, has not yet found the true core of each character. Atkinson in particular threatens to kill his own show, his Edmund as asinine and fatuous as his idiotic buddies. There's hardly any intellectual distance between him and Baldrick, for God's sake (a potentially incisive attack on the incestuous vapidity of Britain's ruling class used merely to give Atkinson's ability for silly voices a venue).

Only one episode of the first six hints toward the show's future quality: "Witchsmeller Pursuivant" isn't too far removed from the rest of the series -- Edmund's schemes to become king take a back seat to merely saving his own skin -- but it adds a quality of satire generally missing from the first season, perhaps because it's set too far back for any reasonable and believable sociopolitical commentary. "Witchsmeller Pursuivant" offers a deliriously enjoyable send-up of the frenzy of a witch hunt, in which Richard's court is consumed with hysteria over the threat of witches, a paranoia the titular character -- an oddly dressed freak claiming to know how to identify conjurers and sorcerers and "very highly recommended" according to Harry -- directs onto Edmund's shoulders. The sheer insanity of the trial, in which all of Edmund's protests are twisted into "evidence" of his Satanism, is a brilliant take on witch hunts and the way that cases are still swayed by the cheap manipulation of public opinion.


The first series ends, as would become a recurring element, with nearly all of the characters dead in a comically short burst of mass expiration. At the time, it likely seemed like the end of a program that was interesting and well-constructed but limp (£1 million for only six episodes was a hefty sum then, and The Black Adder has a detail in the design that it sorely lacks in the writing). Surprisingly, the BBC agreed to finance a second series, albeit with a smaller budget and less-than-subtle notes calling for improvement. The result, Blackadder II, sets the story in the Elizabethan era, porting over Edmund and his two buddies and leaving the rest behind to start anew with a smaller cast.

More importantly, Atkinson stepped down as co-writer to be replaced by Ben Elton, thus freeing the actor to focus on his role, which Elton and Curtis reworked to return to Atkinson and Curtis' original, un-aired pilot for the program: they recast the slimy, weaselly Prince Edmund as the Machiavellian, witty, razor-sharp Lord Blackadder. This established a common theme of the show's progression, with Edmund slipping further down the social ladder with each series as he increased in intelligence. Somehow, Baldrick becomes even dumber -- though he was the most intelligent of the basic trio of the first series -- allowing for a now-classic rapport between the vicious Blackadder and the fool he does not suffer lightly. (Few actors have ever played dumb as magnificently as Robinson; attempting to use sarcasm on Baldrick is like yelling at a brick wall. Made of shit.) The new Blackadder heavily recalls iconic Britcom protagonist Basil Fawlty: like Fawlty, Edmund is acerbic and condescending yet also under direct control of someone in his inner circle.

Blackadder II also makes better use of its time period; where The Black Adder loosely appropriated vague medieval tropes for plots -- the Black Death, witch hunts -- the series now integrated actual historical content into the program, giving it a sly, upper-crust bent even as it cheekily re-imagines actual events throughout. The best of these alterations involves Miranda Richardson's performance as Queen Elizabeth I. Blackadder sardonically asks Baldrick if he's one of those people for whom "the Renaissance was something that happened to other people," but "Queenie" is childish, vain, incapable of processing anything other than that which gives her pleasure, only just smart enough to recognize when her obsequious Lord Chamberlain Melchett (the incomparable Stephen Fry) is trying too hard that day to please her (relatively speaking, of course). Here Elton and Curtis flesh out the underlying themes of the program for the first time, illustrating the reasoning behind Britain's history of class jealousy and derision through the infantile avarice of its leaders. The imbecilic nature of Queenie and, in the third series, Prince George, show that, while America might suffer its share of dangerously ignorant leaders, we at least have the luxury of electing them out of office every two, four or six years, even if we don't always take advantage of it; until the power of the monarchy dwindled over the last two centuries, England was at the mercy of its inbred, out-of-touch nobility.


Ironically, the show's sudden basis in solid historical fact -- "Potato," an episode about Blackadder sent by Queenie on an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope, begins with Sir Walter Raleigh's return from America -- gives it the freedom to branch out into the levels of the magnificently absurd: Blackadder invites Lord Melchett and some other guests over to his home for a drinking competition in "Beer," only to receive a visit from his arch-Puritanical aunt and uncle, the Whiteadders, prompting him to juggle a night of debauchery with an image of saintly, ascetic purity to win his family's inheritance as well as the bet with Melchett. It's a freewheeling ride that mocks the extreme orthodoxy of dogmatic followers, places a pair of comedy tits on a friar and features my favorite exchange between Blackadder and Baldrick ("You're fired." "But, my Lord, I've been in your family since 1532." "So has syphilis. Now get out."). The finale, "Chains," begins simply enough, with a take on the etiquette of ransoming involving the abduction of both Blackadder and Melchett, then spirals slowly off the axis of logic, first showing Blackadder and his Spanish torturer circumnavigating their language barrier with insults delivered in charades -- the torturer crawls around on the floor and mimes breasts until Edmund triumphantly deduces that the man is telling him he's "a bastard son of a bitch" and the two shake hands like old friends -- then introducing a German prince (Hugh Laurie). A master of disguise and pretender to the English throne, the prince has been infiltrating the upper ranks of the English nobility for years; he tells Blackadder that he dressed as a waitress who served the lord. "But I went to bed with you, didn't I?" asks Blackadder; the prince later confronts Melchett and reveals that he was a sheep at a monastery where Melchett lived. "But didn't we...?"

Both the absurdity and the commitment to historical fact-ion are expanded with Blackadder the Third, which tragically loses Richardson but gains Hugh Laurie in an equally gonzo performance as George, the Prince Regent. Edmund, now a butler, reaches the apex of his cunning, a charming, erudite intellectual who takes advantage of his position to bilk his master out of any and all money that the prince receives. Where Queenie represented the reckless abandon of Britain's ruling class, George shows the impotence of the waning monarchy as they emptily consume the nation's resources to maintain their image; European comics like to joke about Disney's muted reception across the Atlantic because they "have real castles," but it's also because their princesses and kings are just as two-dimensional and fake as our fictional creations.


George exists only because Parliament bankrolls his lavish lifestyle, which engenders great resentment in -- especially in the House of Commons -- but not enough to cut his funding. Only the newly appointed PM Pitt the Younger, depicted as an adolescent whose platform includes "more stringent punishments for geography teachers," dares to suggest that the Prince, acting as regent for his father, George III, who'd by then gone almost completely mad -- he makes an appearance at the end of the series, under the impression that he is now "a small village in Lincolnshire, commanding spectacular views of the Nene valley." That George is technically the ruler of the country almost never occurs to me, as he's so vapid and unconcerned with anything but...does he even have any interests? His fickle tastes lead him through money-draining hobby after money-draining hobby -- from socks to theatre patronage to cards -- all of which provide Blackadder new and exciting ways to con his master out of cash he doesn't really have.

George's status, combined with his own passivity, allows historical figures and then-contemporary issues to pass through his opulent home, from Blackadder rigging a rotten borough to ensure George remains on the Civil List to the Scarlet Pimpernel's rescue of lingering French royalists. Even when the dates do not match -- the episode involving Dr. Samuel Johnson asking the prince to patronize his dictionary neglects to mention that Johnson published it nearly 60 years prior -- the inclusion of these historical figures and events asks something of the audience even as the stories spiral further into silliness; the finale brings back Fry to play the Duke of Wellington, come to duel the prince for sleeping with his beloved nieces, leading to a Prince and the Pauper situation wherein Blackadder capably assumes the throne and charms the duke while George proves just as hapless as a manservant and earns hysterically violent rebukes from Wellington.

With the fourth series, however, Curtis and Elton curtailed the absurdity. No, that's not true; Blackadder Goes Forth is just as mad as the rest of Blackadder. The difference is that its insanity is placed in brutally realistic context, against the backdrop of World War I. Once again, the status of the characters drops slightly: no longer is Blackadder within whispering distance of a royal but a captain in a trench, in a position of superiority over George's "descendant" but unable to do anything about his situation.


Blackadder answers to General Melchett, a symbol of the outmoded aristocracy who played World War I like a game. Stephen Fry was too young, by most standards, to play Melchett, but he gives by far the most memorable performance of the entire show as Melchett, a deluded nutbar who received his position solely through his social status. His plans, passed down from Field Marshal Haig, always involve the men in the trenches going over the top and proceeding slowly toward the enemy trenches where the defense is strongest; according to him, running this same plan for the 19th straight time "is the very last thing the Germans would expect." Queenie was childish and Prince George was an outright buffoon, but Melchett is the first character in a position above Blackadder who is simply insane; "Corporal Punishment," a sly spoof of Kubrick's Paths of Glory, involves a court-martial/execution trial for Blackadder for the grievous offense of shooting Melchett's carrier pigeon in order to not receive its message ordering an attack. Blackadder has enough problems, what with George being his defense lawyer, but Melchett appears as the judge of the military tribunal and begins to hysterically attack Blackadder for his crime, fining him £50 for even showing up to waste the court's time with a defense and viciously shrieking the phrase "the Flanders' pigeon murderer" to refer to Blackadder.

Much of Blackadder Goes Forth focuses on the needless horror of World War I, and the incestuous relationship between the two fighting powers; Lt. George has noble ties -- and thus receives special dotage by Melchett -- and when he's sent to a field hospital suddenly beset by a German spy, we learn that the informant is actually George himself, casually writing of his activities to family members in Germany. In the same episode, Blackadder, tasked by Melchett to sniff out the rat, uses the opportunity to gain revenge on Melchett's assistant, Capt. Darling (McInnerny), and the resulting interrogation offers up a delicious sideswipe on the insanity of England's bitter feelings toward Germany: "I'm as English as Queen Victoria," Darling cries as Blackadder squeezes the vice with his roundabout questioning (which recalls "Witchsmeller Pursuivant"); "So your father's German, you're half-German and you married a German?" asks Blackadder in kind.

Occasionally, this series reaches the levels of absurdity of its previous seasons, such as the appearance of ace pilot Lord Flashheart (Rik Mayall, updating the Series Two character for WWI), a vainglorious ball of testosterone who "can give orgasms to the couch just by sitting on it." But what sets this series apart from its predecessors is its pathos; as he did in the first series, Edmund attempts to stave off death, but here he's not a sniveling caricature but the victim of a despicable system that allowed the landed gentry to send working and middle class men to die in the millions for mindless, petty aristocratic disputes. In the final episode of the show, "Goodbyeee..." Blackadder at last runs out of excuses to stave of advancement; the noose tightens around his neck, and he knows it. Amazingly, we start to pity him, and we pity the callous, smug Darling when Melchett, so completely consumed by the lie he helped to craft, sends his assistant to the front lines to gain honor in battle (Melchett actually thinks he's doing Darling a favor). When Darling arrives at the front line, all animosity between the two captains dissipates, and George, so gung-ho the entire series about engaging the enemy, quietly admits how scared he is.


The final moments of Blackadder elevate a classic Britcom into the upper echelon of TV history. Blackadder, who spent the entire episode attempting to fake insanity, gently refuses to hear Balrdick's latest and last attempt to think up a cunning plan: "Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be mad," sighs Edmund. "I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here?" After four series' worth of sarcasm, arrogance and selfishness, Blackadder turns to his companions and wishes them good luck before they go over the top. Purportedly, the actors were originally going to, as they must at the end of a Blackadder series, die suddenly and horribly, but they kept bouncing on the soundstage floor. Thus, they shot the current, vastly superior ending, in which their movement out of the trench plays in slow motion before fading out, and the final shot of the program shows the barren mud of No Man's Land gently morph into a beautiful and fertile meadow. In a program that visualizes the centuries-long grudge between the classes in Britain, what ending could be more beautiful than the intimation that, some day, it finally won't matter anymore?

Fawlty Towers

Of the five members of Monty Python, John Cleese was always my favorite. Graham Chapman had the leading man charisma, Eric Idle could parody anything, Michael Palin had the only real acting range, Terry Jones funneled the absurd silliness into social commentary that could reach back centuries and Terry Gilliam has had the most rewarding career post-Python, exploring the great spectrum of imagination and dreams with a handful of modern classics. But something about John Cleese always fascinated me. As cliché as it might be, I think the key lies in his most notable of Python sketches, The Ministry of Silly Walks. In that bit of daft frivolity is Cleese in a nutshell: a man of imposing height and deadpan severity, who will without warning explode in physical or verbal insanity.

Cleese himself must have pinned down what people like about him, as Fawlty Towers, the series he created when then-wife Connie Booth after he left Monty Python's Flying Circus, plays to all of his strengths. Over the course of 12 episodes, none of which connected to any other, Fawlty Towers rewrote the book on British sitcoms, and today it stands as perhaps the country's most enduring comedy program, more popular in its home country -- if polls are to be believed -- than even Monty Python.

Cleese plays Basil Fawlty, owner of a tinpot hotel in Torquay on the "English Riviera." He views hotel ownerships as a ticket into some level of class, yet he's so middle-class (to take from Lord Alfred Douglas' put-down in Wilde) that he refuses to spend any of his money to convert the hotel into the sort of place that will attract a better class of clientèle. So, Basil's days are spent dealing with British snowbirds and twenty-somethings who wear gaudy '70s clothing that I suspect somehow excreted these people into a greasy existence -- if this show had lasted long enough I imagine we might have seen some of these Studio 54 floor scrapings come to Fawlty Towers expecting, and John Cleese might have filmed the mock birth of the world's first chav.

Basil's life can be characterized as an uproarious dichotomy between his obsequious worship of class and wealth and his general hatred of, well, people. Everything you need to know about his character is perfectly summarized in the first episode, as he wearily converses on the phone with a builder who recently performed shoddy work. A customer approaches the desk and asks for a room, much to Basil's annoyance. After rudely tossing some forms to the man and continuing his phone conversation, Basil freezes when the man signs his name Lord Melbury. With only a moment's pause, Bail calmly blurts "Go away" into the phone and immediately doubles over in servitude to this illustrious guest.

Nearly all of the episodes follow an identical blueprint: Basil either serves his upper-class guests with too much zeal or attempts to undermine the working class' right to live, until he runs like Wile E. Coyote into the painted rock wall that is his wife, Sybil (Prunella Scales). Then, his uncontrollable urge to lie and cover up whatever he just did, failed to do or is about to ruin kicks in, and the whole thing spirals until he ends the episode on the precipice of utter madness. Sybil, the henpecking wife, strikes more fear into Basil's heart than all the hotel inspectors, tacky gold chain-wearing disco freaks and critical guests combined.

She's such a terrifying presence in Basil's life that the show needs two characters to field the psychological aftermath of Sybil's harping: Manuel (Andrew Sachs), an immigrant bellhop/waiter who cannot understand English past two or three words in a row -- "He's from Barcelona," Basil explains to the guests when Manuel inevitably performs the wrong action -- suffers the physical and verbal abuse arising from Basil's Freudian gender confusion. Meanwhile, Polly (Booth), ostensibly a waitress but typically the one who must shoulder all of the jobs as she's the only competent one of the bunch, provides Basil the opportunity for Basil to vent his emasculation at a woman, though Polly is clever enough to deflect Basil before he could really say anything hurtful to her to get out whatever misogynistic rant lies just below the surface. Polly also serves as the primary plot mover, as Manuel's language barrier separates him from Basil, who can't very well confide in Sybil since she's the one he's trying to work around.


Do not let the rigidity of its character types and basic plot structure fool you, however; every episode of Fawlty Towers manages to wring fresh laughs out of its situations and the way that the bad can always get worse in Torquay. Fawlty Towers refined and perfected the style of comedy in which the protagonist will dig a hole for himself, then dig deeper in an attempt to escape. Take the episode "The Psychiatrist": Basil attempts to catch out a lascivious young man he believes secreted a girl into his room, only to routinely burst in on a gorgeous young female patron instead. All of his feeble tries to make amends for inadvertently harassing the woman only compound the matter, especially as the old-fashioned Basil worries how all of his sentences will be analyzed by the visiting psychiatrist. Naturally, Basil ends up speaking in unfortunate innuendos anyway, and you believe the doctor when he remarks near the end that he could write a whole conference on the hotel manager.

It must be said, though, that as masterful as the show is, it is not without flaws. Basil's old-fashioned sense of morals is intentional, a means to cast him as an obsolete relic of stiff-upper-lip class consciousness whose absurdly reactionary opinions of social behavior are merely the outgrowth of his own sexual dysfunction; however, it is still a bit too far-fetched to watch the series today and think that only 30 years ago a man could be so outraged by sex outside of marriage that he could work himself into such a bother. Cleese and Booth even resort to some easy stereotyping in "The Builders," featuring inept, rowdy Irish workers and a genuinely violent Sybil (as opposed to her usual intimidation), undermining some of the fantastic comedy in the rest of the episode. One episode, "The Anniversary," breaks from the traditional Fawlty Towers setup as Basil does something genuinely nice for Sybil, but she misunderstands his actions and storms out, leaving Basil to field questions from their friends who have come to celebrate Basil and Sybil's anniversary. One might think a change of pace would add some freshness, but "The Anniversary" is about as close to a complete failure as an episode can get without being outright terrible: you can argue that it places Basil in a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" scenario, wherein a marital life filled with lies and dispassion have left Sybil so suspicious of his every action that when he finally does something right she assumes that he's ballsed it up as usual. But there's just nothing particularly funny about someone who does the right thing being punished for it (unless you're Lars Von Trier).


Still, these weaknesses can be easily overlooked when placed in the context of the brilliance of the rest of the series. Cleese and Booth have a supreme command of mounting chaos, but there is also subtlety at work here: Basil plays at old-fashioned ideals, but the semi-permanent residence of an old codger simply referred to as "Major" allows the writers to poke fun at how these supposedly quaint elders from a more majestic time carry with them horrifically blasé attitudes concerning imperialism and racism. Their portrayal of Irish punters might strike many as questionable, but foreigners generally shed the most illuminating light on Basil and his foibles. In the series' most famous episode, "The Germans," Basil suffers a concussion just as a group of German visitors arrive, leading to Basil's incessant referencing of World War II in front of them, culminating in the gut-busting exchange between one of the frustrated Germans and Basil:

"Will you please stop talking about the war?"
"Me? You started it!"
"We did not!"
"Yes you did, you invaded Poland!"

It's a brilliant piece of dialogue, but the true comedy of this scene comes not from Basil putting down those dastardly Germans but in Cleese's satire of the lingering British arrogance concerning the war. Note that, in the lead-up to this exchange, Basil's incessant references (he's wracking his concussed brain not to mention the war that everything comes out in some way linking the guests' requests to Nazism) make one of the German ladies burst into tears. There, in a comic nutshell, are the respective responses to World War II: the Allies drone on and on about our might and morality, while the Germans continue to stand shame-faced of the sins of their parents and grandparents. Even Americans get a positive spin: in "Waldorf Salad," a typically brash, stand-offish American proves the only guest willing to challenge Basil's gross incompetence, and the man emerges as a sort of hero by the end.

Through it all, however, the draw is Cleese. The "digging to China" method of cringe humor would later be adopted with exacting realism by Ricky Gervais for his masterpiece The Office, but Cleese veers dangerously close to pantomime. He's the best coiled spring in the biz, capable of acting rationally one moment and lashing out the next, and the way that Cleese can literally fold over onto himself when the world is just too much for Basil, and even how he makes his 6ft 5in frame look feeble and impotent, even when he's berating a guest he knows he can insult. In my favorite episode, "Communication Problems," he messes with a (selectively?) deaf patron as a form of service charge for putting up with her insufferable demands. The seething sacrasm with which he responds to her demands for a better view ("Why? Because Krakatoa's not erupting at the moment?") and the sly way he moves his lips in silence to make her turn up her hearing aid, only to then shout at the top of his lungs, is pure Cleese.

BBC Video recently re-released Fawlty Towers in a remastered collection. To be honest, I couldn't tell any difference in video or audio quality, but for those of us who never bought the old DVDs this new version comes with a lovely set of commentary tracks from Cleese. As he is a polite and genial British man, these tracks often slip into typical actor luvviedom, but there are a number of behind-the-scenes information and amusing anecdotes worthy of a fan's time. The unassuming nature of these tracks reflects the series itself; Fawlty Towers was never as incisive a look at Britain and its decried class warfare as Blackadder, nor did it feature the sort of anarchic slapstick satire of Cleese's previous place of work, Monty Pyton. Yet the simplicity of its structure and the cheeky way it approaches the typical themes of British comedy from the flanks as opposed to the headlong charge of the aforementioned programs makes it the most accessible of British programs, one that continues to influence comedy across national borders as much as any other comedy you'd care to name.