Not much work these days, plenty of time for silly lucubrations...

I've been watching, lately, a not too well-known sitcom titled "Waiting for God", set in a retirement home, which might sound rather depressing already...

Well, my main purpose here was actually seeing Graham Crowden as a lead, after appreciating him as a character actor in supporting roles in many other shows.

One of those careers, I guess, where hardly anyone remembers him as a young man, although he MIGHT have been , having been professionally around since the mid-late fifties, but where we all  know his grin in the typically British parts of an elderly, avuncular and rather eccentric geezer...

This makes no exception with the character, absolutely the same, but he surely CAN keep up a lead with that, in the right situation, and with good co-stars like in this, with Stephanie Cole as cynical spinster Diana, and one of the great supporting actresses, Janine Duvitsky (better known as Victor Meldrew's next-door neighbour in "One Foot in the Grave", perhaps).

So, I quite like it, and tried it on my mum, in my ongoing cunning plan to take her mind off soaps...

No way, her reaction was the same as with "Last of the Summer Wine", she finds those, in her own words, "old codgers" (she's 76 herself, mind... ), silly in the best of cases, if not plain boring...

What I find absolutely out of my ability to understand is that she seems to appreciate the same kind of old codgers when they die, possibly of cancer, and possibly after 2 or 3 years of daily pain and related drama, in her favourite soaps...

Now, even though I'm a dedicated fan of comedy, I don't mind well-done drama, although I'd rather go looking for that in the cinema than TV serials, but that's a different kettle of fish altogether, my experience with my mum is that she seems to be rather impenetrable to comedy in general, never mind age-related, but she seems to inordinately enjoy drama, the soppiest the better, and I just can't get round the idea that this is somehow "natural", that soppy soaps are in fact sort of a psychological defense, if not an "exorcism" against ageing in a "better a fictional character than me" way...

Well, as I said, I've got some time to waste, but what's your experience, if any, with your old folks, family or friends? Do they actually appreciate comedy or would rather get paralised stiff with Eastenders and such?  

Ah, I almost forgot to mention that my dad, 82, is himself hooked on a German soap, of all things... but he's got no sense of humour whatsoever, never had, it's not age, he was born like that, must be a genetic deficiency, that's something I had to come to terms with years ago...

Well, I'm not QUITE sure about that...

Of course, the definition of actual "rubbish" might take some time to deploy, but one of the big problems in modern show business, I find, is indeed that everything has to be taken down to the lowest possible common denominator to have a chance of "success", and that's statistics and maths, not "quality", another term which would probably need some further definition, I admit.

Still, and Comedy makes no difference than Drama there, the tickling of SOME brain cells is rather appreciated here, commercial success means little to me, looking back, there certainly are quite a few commercially successful Shows and Films I appreciate also artistically, you certainly CAN commercialise good art, what I doubt it's possible is creating a commercial product that has artistic value, the starting points are too different.

However, back to anecdotical, I managed to actually get me mum interested in two comedy shows, with time, and you'd never guess what they were... well, that she would like "Only Fools and Horses" is actually reasonable, that's a well-balanced show to use as a GOOD example of a show for ALL people, but I was rather surprised when she took a shine on "Red Dwarf"...

Well, that was no BIG surprise to me, really, she was the one who passed on to me my first S/F book when I was 12, so she was no stranger to most of the concepts there, but still she managed to be all "mumsy" in her comments on it, she liked Lister but disapproved of his scruffiness, while she approved of the orderly Rimmer, never mind he was TWICE fake (an actor playing the part of a hologram ), and although she made reservations about his being a bit too showy, she could see the Cat's constant grooming as a certainly positive trait...

Well, what can you do when your son actually tends to look, if not behave, very much like Lister himself, without even the excuse of living in a spaceship with a hologram and a mutant cat, but rather in a condo?

But one of my favourite memories while still living with my parents has to be the time my father and I watched Woody Allen's "Take the Money and Run" together on the telly...

I was literally on the floor laughing, half because of the movie itself, and half because of me dad's reactions...

He sat throughout it stone-faced, every now and then asking questions...

"Why do they wear moustaches?"

It's Virgil's parents there, doing a mock interview while wearing Groucho Marx's masks in order not to be recognised... they shouldn't have bothered with dad, he has no idea who the Marx Bros. were in the first place...

But the pearl of the crop was as good as a written gag itself...

"What's funny about having sex with a horse?"

I love my dad, but that's one I didn't care to explain...

Gomez - respectfully, I disagree...  how can something be rubbish if everyone else likes it??  Something can be great, but you dont find it funny.  There are comedians I HATE but they have been very successful for 40 odd years, so nobody who is that successful is rubbish.  It just means that you dont like it.  Otherwise if it was rubbish why would people watch it???  Unless we are all successful comedy writers / actors then we have a right to call it rubbish if we have created something better...  but I dont think any of us have...

Lol!

My mum watches the soaps religiously.  Whenever I go and visit I have to sit through them, of course, I spend most of the time asking 'who's he?' because I have no idea what is going on.

But each to their own.  It would be a boring world if we all liked the same things wouldn't it?

No doubt in twnety years time the generation of our children will be saying exactly the same about what we watch.  Maybe a time will come when we are so disillutioned that we think today television is actually good, rather than the embarrasing line up it actually is - television is clearly worse than it has ever been, (with the rise of so-called "Reality" telvision - a very close friend of mine is a storyliner on Big Brother, who, with his colleagues, works out whats going to happen before the series starts)  and with the fact we havent produced a decent sitcom since 1996.  But no doubt we will look back fondly in 20 years times and think we know it all... just like they do now... however hard you try not to, you WILL turn into your parents...

Well, Rogue, I thought my idea in starting this topic was just finding out which comedies, if any, could be better appreciated by old folks, but I guess the underlining theme that developed is indeed, as Phil says, will we become our parents?

Again, I'm not quite sure about that... in the broadest possible sense, yes, I guess we will (but which one is what worries me... )

However, when specifically talking about our perception, and fruition of TV, I think the generation gap is too wide...

Dunno about yours, but TV simply didn't exist when my parents were young, they got to know it as adults, and for them it always looked like a bit of a miracle, I guess, something that MUST be watched simply because it's there and, besides, it costs money, so you HAVE to make the most of it, of course the War had left its mark there.

In our house, TV was turned on at a certain time, and whatever was on was being watched, no matter what. Of course, there being only ONE channel available at the time, there wasn't much you could do in the way of making choices, except NOT watching it, which is what I mostly did myself...

Now, I am myself slightly older than TV in my native country, although just a few months, so I don't really remember there not being a TV, and my own attitude has ever been, indeed, I like TV, but if there's rubbish on it (yes, I've always had that tendency, too ), I'll do something else, go out and play football, when I was a kid, go to the pub later...

When I moved on my own and got my first "personal" telly, commercial TV had just made its debut in Italy, and we had no less that 5 channels to choose from, o wonder, and that's when I first heard, and understood, that Bruce Springsteen's song about "49 channels with nothing on", of course America was way ahead...

I made two important discoveries then, first that TV schedules clashed with my... biorhythms, most of what I would have liked to watch was aired in the middle of the night, and second and possibly even more important, I was absolutely incompatible with ad breaks, they made me go berserk, and still do...

The only answer could be the also new technology of video recording, I bought my first VHS machine 2 or 3 weeks after the telly, it cost me about 3 times as much and obviously I had to take a crash course in quantum mechanics in order to operate the timer successfully, but it was all worth it, for the peace of mind it gave me...

What has changed in the intervening 30 years or so is just technology, nowadays almost nothing of what I watch comes straight from "traditional", public TV, it's DVD collections for old stuff I already appreciate and know I will watch again and again, my PVR/SAT receiver and, of course, the internet, all I watch "live" on TV is football, thanks God ad breaks didn't quite make it there, with most channels at least (The Italian "national" TV RAI, the local equivalent of BBC, DO ad breaks even during football matches, much to their shame).

Meanwhile, at my parent's house...

Hardly anything has changed since 1957, except they got technology, too, I saw to that, everything I have and more, VHS, DVD, DT, SAT, multi-room, for Pete's sake, they have FIVE tellies, and I wouldn't be surprised to find a sixth one in the bathroom next time I visit...

And what do they watch on 'em? Some of the 500 or so thematic channels they have at their fingertips, surely, anything from cookery to gardening to sports, 50 movies a day,
documentaries on cats, lizards, the sexual habits of crocodiles or those of Hitler...

No, they watch German soaps on the Italian public channels, taking the battering of advertisement that comes with it without batting an eyelid...

Well, what to make of all that, and sorry for going on quite a bit, but it's all been a matter of some concern to me, lately, and I'm very glad I can discuss all this at some length, hoping not to be an utter bore...

My idea is that I won't become my parents, at least as far as TV is concerned...

It's not a matter or age alone, nor education in an academical sense, it's a matter of philosophical culture, if you want, I can't help thinking that my parents were brought up by the Fascists, culturally speaking, if such a decent word as culture could be applied to that shit, they certainly weren't encouraged to think with their own head and make their own choices, they just don't know how to do it, they were the same 30 or 40 years ago, I should know...

Now back to Rogue's comment... well, I've been watching "Waiting for God" myself, lately, and liking it very much... should I be worried?

At the same time, however, I jumped on the new series of "The I.T. Crowd" as soon as it appeared in my mailbox and, prompted by recent discussions on a possible replacement for Father Ted, and Graham Linehan's new series, I'm now watching Father Ted again as well...

So, while I'm aware that mother nature, or whomever, WILL try, and very likely succeed, in turning my brain into a pulp without even the need of much help from TV, I'm dead set to fighting it for as long as I could, trying to keep my synapses clicking...

And, Phil, I don't really think no decent sitcoms were produced after 1996... few and far between, yes, but I don't mind some "modern" stuff at all...

Which brings us back to square one, indeed... if we all like this stuff, and we do, why can't my mother like "Summer Wine" or "Waiting for God"?

It makes sense to me that you'd rather watch characters of your own age mucking about and having fun, than die horribly in tractors accidents, but no...

The question that scares me is, does old age take out the humour from life as well?

As a HUGE fan of comedy beginning to consider the idea of growing old himself, sometimes, THAT's what I find deeply worrying...

Mind you, I don't mind a good bit of drama myself, but let's not delve too deep into that, or we'd start arguing again over the concept of "rubbish"...