Comedies (so labeled)
R. U. B.-ing Saved? Zany musical hall revue set in a huge cathedral, in which cast of no-hopers cavorts, tells jokes far older than Joe Miller and engages in non-stop cross-dressing, the Number One Staple of all British humor. The ecclesiastical puns and rebuses are always incomprehensible.
As Swine Drift By Sentimental sit-com with near-Shakespearian actors meditating on lost time (without benefit of madelaine), trading poignant and sometimes intelligible one-liners and very slight moments of activity, to keep the cameraman from falling asleep. Dame Barbra Buxholme, Lyle Gingerbeer.
Bad Buddies A 1970s post-hippy diatribe about self-sufficient householding in Pooterville, with Delicia Kimball (woo-woo!), Peter Bizboddie and other troupers from sitworld. Occasional slapstick revives audience near end of each episode.
Tickety-Boo! Sidesplitting comedrama about the Few in the Battle of Britain and their constant struggle to shoot down swarms of Komic Knazis who seem to have been recycled from a Ritz Brothers movie. French Resistance fighters are portrayed as onion-wearing, beret-clad dolts with wee-wee accents. Always good for a derisive chortle.
High-toned drama
Masterputz Theatre [prod. WGBH Boston --eds.], a random compilation of hoity-toity stuff introduced convincingly by ancient sage and cultural potentate Allsfair Lovenwar. This season’s picks include such titles as Upwind, Downwind; I, Clod; The Foreskin Saga; The Jew in the Crown; Jeeves's Wives & Wooster's Daughters; and Bleak Housing Projections.
Our Mutual (of Omaha) Friend Highly edited and adapted Dickens work (the comedy and sentimentality are ruthlessly expunged) about an illiterate garbageman whose daughter is taken up by a poncy semanticist and made to act and talk like ’er betters, till she gets riled and relapses into slum-dwellery and raggedness with a hearty sigh. Six 1 ½ hour parts.
The Goonstone Dour mystery about a giant ruby ripped from the forehead of an Indian Idol (just after the final voting), which deposits a hideous curse on the stuck-up bastards who acquire it. Complete with knife-wielding thugees in grotesque turbans, cobras, mongeese and belly-dancers who act as look-outs. Major role for Spike Milligan. Eleven two-hour episodes.
Commodious Vicus: Emperor and Plumber Toga drama about madman who gets to be caesar by poisoning, stabbing, garroting or boring his rivals to death. Increasingly whacky, Commodious invades
Pride & Phlummery Tedious girlie romance about a huge family with eleven daughters who want to be sold into prostitution, married off or entered in the Prince Regent’s newly-devised Royal Flush Raffle. Doddering father can’t find checkbook, Mama is a brass-bottomed dragon, the butler is gay and the household staff are all escapees from Doctor Martin’s Hospital for the Bothered. Stars Eulalia Whynce, with only a trace of an Ozzie accent. Five half-hour jolts.
Reely Condnsd Shkspr Thr Half-hour versions of the Bard’s best works with all-star casts from Blackpool, East Wemming, Lower Puddleton and other centers of Advanced Bardiology. Alternating between comedies such as All’s Well That Ends, Comedy of Arrows, Forty-second Night and The Iron Duck and histories, tragedies or chrestomathies like Richard MCVI, Percolater, Prince of Pythia, William O’Tello or Tonio and Pat. The editing is like super fast-forward, dude!
Mysterioso, a bunch of stories from spinsters with three names, written before bread was sliced, turned into oleaginous renderings in period costumes, with shiny old cars—and check out those men’s hats! Best-known series: Cadfeelophile starring Drek Jacobite; Rumphole with the Belly; Christie Brinkley's Miss March - Miss Marple Mishmash; and Inspector Remorse (chronically depressed detective, obsessed with personal woes, gets nowhere on his cases).
Haggis McScottishplay Morose puzzlers set in empty glens with stately stags in the background, featuring capercaillies, ghillies, foulards, musketoons and other unknown Caledonian people, places and things rendered in strict Glaswegian, otherwise called “Klegle of gunges”-speak. Features Robert Basquard and a sizable herd of Scotties and Westies, all wearing plaid jackets and caps. One hour, weakly.
Rosewort and Parslee Chick fantasy of old girl detectives who double as itinerant greenskeepers for championship golf clubs. Oddly enough, there are always several gruesome murders at any course employing them, and no one has ever noted this statistical improbability. The gals swing into action by riding around on mowers and golf carts, showing a lot of leg and cleavage (even if in long shot) and gathering clues like posies in May. Stars Delicia Kimball (woo-woo!), lovingly preserved from her Bad Buddies days in the last century, and Phantasia Alwright, bigger than ever. One and a half hours in alternate weeks.
Murder, She Spewed Ancient musical comedy star Brontosaura Boskowitz appears as mystery-writing crone who relentlessly stumbles over corpses wherever she goes on speaking tours, solves intricate puzzles offhandedly and demonstrates the collection of acting skills, enunciation and posture that made Broadway great in the years before World War One. Genteel and without violence in thought, word or deed. One hour, more or less.
Herlock Schalomes. Ethnic mystery about a traveling rabbi who solves mysteries on any day but Shabbat, when he has to rely on his dimwitted goyischer sidekick Doc Whichone, a comedic dolt who is nonetheless a dab hand with a giant magnifying glass. Classic cases like “The Break-Dancing Men,” “The Sign of Six and Seven-Eighths” and “The Case of the Dog That Didn’t Bark or Go Pee-Pee in the Middle of the Night.” Two hours on every other Tuesday (or so).
Hercules’ Parrot Long series about diminutive Bulgarian dick who toddles about waxing his goatee, drinking infusions of herb-water and expressing moral, social and theological superiority over every mortal crossing his path. Insufferable dialogue and cunning solutions to locked-room murders, ad lib blackmail and frequent occurrences of uttering false currency, lese majeste and mal de mer. Thicko sidekick cashiered Captain Spaulding applies muscle or Luger-bullets in his aid. Fourteen one-hour farragos.
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