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Dad's Army
1968 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 9 seasons
Created by Jimmy Perry
Introducing the Walmington-On-Sea home guard. During WW2, in a fictional British seaside town, a ragtag group of Home Guard local defense volunteers prepare for an imminent German invasion.
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14 comments on Hacker News
There are several "holy grails" in British TV history.
Lost Doctor Who episodes are one of them. Dad's Army also has lost black and white episodes (the colour ones have been repeated ad nauseam all my lifetime).
I can think of a few others. Scotch on the Rocks was a political hit piece written by Douglas Hurd showing an armed Scottish uprising along the lines of Northern Ireland. It was supposed to frighten people away from Scottish nationalism, but ended up causing copycat incidents. It vanished shortly after being broadcast probably because of its unintended effects.
The ultimate would be some of the pre-WW2 television broadcasts. Most of these were broadcast in the London area and practically nowhere else. Almost no one had recording equipment back then.
"They don't like it up 'em" - well-known phrase from the British sitcom 'Dad's Army'.
It's got nothing to do with it being sci-fi, (except that maybe it makes it more likely to end up here) it's because it's popular & has lost episodes. Dad's Army would make the news for it (but maybe not Hacker News, sure) too.
> I've decided to take a different approach, and fight them in a > different arena, inspired by the principles of asymmetric warfare.
There's nothing so formidable as an enemy who has nothing to lose.
Relevant aside: Few know that not only did we British invent concentration camps, we more or less wrote the playbook on suicide bombing. I've seen rare and disturbing Home Guard training films. It was not all "Dad's Army". One tag-line was "You can always take one with you".
Anyway, the point is not about improvised explosives, and women using prams to walk right into a group of occupying soldiers, but about how a struggle changes once the underdog realises they really have nothing much left to lose.
Seinfeld was the first good sitcom.
That's such a silly thing to say I'll assume it's intentionally provocative and not intended to be truthful rather than representing genuine ignorance.
But for anybody young enough/daft enough to take it seriously, check out
Fawlty Towers
Young Ones
Blackadder
Yes Minister
Dad's Army
Etc
Etc
That's just a quick UK list off the top of my head, I'll leave others to correct the parent comment with US (Bilko?, Cheers?, etc) and other national (Let The Blood Run Free?) suggestions...
Another example of an actor who routinely played much older characters is Clive Dunn, who most notably at age 48 played the elderly Lance Corporal Jones in the UK sitcom Dad's Army [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Dunn
They didn't have a lead.
Channel 4 was first by a considerable margin. I remember using 4OD back in 2006/07, it was great.
Iirc, IPlayer existed but it was very limited in what it showed. It took them years to move off a 7-day window (as the article explains, there was massive hostility to streaming within the BBC). 4OD had rights issues but, iirc, they made full series available from day one.
ITV was shit though (and still is)...although that is partly a function of the weird corporate structure.
Also, Project Kangaroo was far more complicated than the article says. By the time that the parties had stopped arguing and BBC had got over their hostility to streaming, Netflix was already going and paying the BBC for stuff that was going to be in Kangaroo. The reason this is coming out now is the BBC lobbyists are going on the attack but this would have changed nothing.
In fact, all it would have meant is that you pay for more streaming services, and one of them would be very shit largely consisting of old episodes of Dad's Army...you can already get the best parts of the back catalogue on Netflix (the BBC should be offering this to licence-payers for free...but this wasn't what Kangaroo was either, it was a money spinner so the Islington boys could fleece licence-payers a second time...Netflix helps them, it isn't competition).
Eh, not sure it's all art. Some mediums (like hollywood blockbuster movies and video games) lend themselves to more of a team effort than a solo artist one, and there are classics in those mediums/artforms too.
There are also quite a few British TV shows made by duos and small teams rather than a single creator, including some of the best in the medium. Like Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army and Monty Python's Flying Circus.
For those interested in historical steel production, I'd recommend watching this beautiful documentary from 1945, made by the British Council in postwar Britain.
It shows massive industrial steel plants operated entirely by hand - highly trained teams of men spending their days doing what we'd do with computers, pulling levers and operating wheels to control individual parameters of steel-making machines, and turning out steel made with incredible precision.
The narrator, John Laurie, later became famous for playing Private James Frazer in the UK sitcom Dad's Army.
http://film.britishcouncil.org/steel
I remember when a lost episode of Dad's army was found on a cassette because some guy happened to record it from the radio and never lost it.
A lot of classic British TV shows from the 70s and 80s hold up really well today. After all, Fawlty Towers was a 1975 and 1979 series, with other greats from the era including Dad's Army (1968-1977) and Steptoe and Son (1968-1972). Blackadder and Only Fools and Horses were good in the next decade as well, and that's only counting some of the comedy ones.
As for whether TV now is better or worse... well, probably the same to be honest. Sturgeon's Law reigns supreme where any fiction is concerned, so every generation will have about 90% utterly forgettable crap and 10% amazing classics. The crap just gets filtered out over time as people choose to preserve the stuff that truly matters.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NostalgiaFilter
Either way, there's really not any one era where 'no TV shows' or 'all TV shows' hold up well.
Is there a place here for Blake's Seven, (esp the early episodes) and of course Tom Baker's Dr Who incarnation? Incidentally, for those who didn't know, Douglas Adams wrote some classic episodes and was script editor (head writer) on Dr Who for at least a season or so.
And I think Dad's Army remains a classic, about the Home Guard in WWII, with some of the finest comic actors.
There's even a case to be made for The Sweeney and the Professionals which dealt with grittier more modern reality stories, darker sides of law and intelligence enforcement which is often glossed over in the modern glitzier procedurals.
Aha, and though maybe it was largely in the 80s, how about Minder?
Not in the UK. I don't think the tongue-twister is well known here, but the phrase is used in the other sense in the TV show Dad's Army[1], which is still shown on the BBC. However, it's only used by one character[2], who's supposed to be 70 at the time World War II starts. So, I think it's a very outdated expression, and not likely to cause offence when used in the context of a programming library. I've certainly never heard the expression used other than in the TV show (where, as far as I know, it's still not censored - it's understood that the character's views were outdated even at the time the show was set).
The term is from a Kipling poem[3]:
"A derogatory term for a black person, especially one with fuzzy hair... From... one of Rudyard Kipling's... poems, written in 1918. The poem is in the voice of an unsophisticated British soldier and expresses admiration rather than contempt, although expressed in terms that sound patronizing today."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dads_Army
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance-Corporal_Jack_Jones
[3] http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/146100.html
Doesn't look like it's a generally applicable process, and the article is somewhat lacking in detail, but I still found it interesting.
"Dad's Army" was a 60s/70s sitcom made by the BBC, fondly remembered and oft repeated, but like so much of the output of that era many of the episodes were not recorded, recorded but wiped, or only recorded on "Telecine" black and white film.