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Limmy's Show!
2010 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Brian Limond
Limmy's Show is a Scottish comedy sketch show written, animated and directed by Brian Limond. The show stars Brian Limond, Ryan Fletcher, Paul McCole, Alan McHugh and Kirstin McLean. Previous stars include Debbie Welsh, Tom Brogan and Raymond Mearns.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
As in surreal British sketch comedy? You'd like
- The Goon Show (it's this 1950s radio serial that inspired the Pythons... it's surprising how many tropes the Pythons borrowed from it)
- The Goodies
- The Kenny Everett Television Show
- Absolutely!
- The Mighty Boosh / Unnatural Acts / Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy
- Vic Reeves' Big Night Out / The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer / Bang Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer
- Big Train
- The League of Gentlemen
- On the Hour / The Day Today / Brass Eye
- Jam / Blue Jam
- The Armando Iannucci Shows
- Limmy's Show
Also, to throw in a US programme, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson was pretty good
The clip is from Limmy's Show, an offbeat, and relatively niche sketch programme that was only shown at odd times on TV south of the border. It definitely isn't mainstream comedy and makes most sense in the context of the series and its reccuring characters, themes and the bouncing between surreal and mundane. He's probably best known for the mundane - e.g. a whole self-filmed sketch about repairing a single broken tile in his actual bathroom.
I'm not sure the fact that he's Scottish has much to do with your appreciation of the comedy in the linked sketch per se. It falls into a tradition of British sketch comedy which is quite different in style to improv originated sketch comedy in North America - more confronting and unsettling.
Before you completely write it off, watch a few episodes of the series, or look at his Twitter.
Limmy's Show Season 3 is the exact same: https://twitter.com/daftlimmy/status/542009546588581888
The fact that the BBC could make this mistake several times does strike me as incompetence.
The Monkey Dust situation is a real shame, as it was such a ground-breaking and innovative comedy programmes of its time. Ridiculous that something so influential can now only be watched thanks to piracy. Also kind of ironic considering some of the themes of Monkey Dust...
The Wikipedia article also says this: "Another reason for the lack of DVD releases of the later series is thought to be the 'teenage jihadi' sketches being considered unsuitable in the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings that occurred a few months later."
I really wanted to like Limmy's show, I really did, but after 3 episodes I found I'd barely laughed, and even then only at Deedee's overanalysis of what the hardest item in his kitchen was.