When I was growing up, “British TV” meant either Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Good Life, the inexplicable Benny Hill Show or one of those well-acted but painfully dull movies on Masterpiece Theatre. Of course, looking back on it now, American TV wasn’t that exciting in the 1970s either, but Brit TV was well-known as being especially boring – not to mention cheaply put together.
If the last British TV show you watched was The Tomorrow People, you’ve been out of the loop for far too long! Thanks to the magic of DVDs and the Internet, you no longer need a passport and a plane ticket to watch most of the dozens of great British shows out there. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites, listed in no particular order:
Spooks – If you like 24, there’s a good chance you’ll like Spooks as well. It’s a gritty action\drama set in the anti-terrorism division of MI-5, which is Britain’s version of the FBI (sort of). Because most British shows still lack the big budgets that American shows have, most Brit TV writers rely more on cheaper things like, I dunno… character development. Whereas 24 is populated with a bunch of cartoon characters that we couldn’t care less about (excepting Jack, of course), we get to know each of the characters on Spooks deeply. And this makes us care. And when bad things happen to them, it’s like a kick in the gut. The show is tightly written, so whether the gang is chasing IRA or Muslim terrorists, computer hackers or rouge agents, you’ll almost always be on the edge of your seat. More than once I thought I was gonna have a heart attack before an episode was over. This show pulls no punches. At all. Yes, Spooks sometimes leans heavily on “technobabble” (not to mention technology that simply doesn’t exist in the real world). But still… this show will simply take your breath away!
WHERE TO FIND IT: The American cable network A&E used to have the rights to the show (which is called MI-5 in the USA), but they have since been sold to BBC America. Beware that the American version is highly edited to allow for commercials, so around 15 minutes of each show is lost. Although the editors do an admirable job of cutting the show, it’s inevitable that there is the occasional plot hole or non sequitur in the US version due to the show losing 25% of it’s content. It’s far better to watch it on DVD, as the American DVD box sets (available here) contain the complete and unedited British episodes. You can always order the box sets from the UK too, although I can think of no distinct advantage in doing so.
Life On Mars – Sam Tyler is a cop in city of Manchester, England. One day, while on the hunt for a killer that’s haunted him for years, he gets into a horrific accident, which puts him into a coma. And when he finally wakes up from his coma, he’s still a cop and he’s still in Manchester, only the year is 1973. Sam puts his game face on and tries to carry on being a cop but finds it extremely difficult to do so without mobile phones, computers, CCTV and any of the thousands of advances in forensics that have happened in the past thirty years. Crime investigation techniques that are mundane and commonplace to us – like criminal profiling or pulling prints off of skin – have yet to be invented yet in 1973, so the cops just give Sam blank stares when he asks them about it. But the world of 1973 is not only technically different, it’s culturally different as well. Manchester in 1973 is grimy and crumbling. The hard drinking, chain-smoking cops would just as soon smack a suspect around a bit than use clever interrogation techniques on him. “Darkies” and “poofters” are always the usual suspects, while “lady cops” are little more than gofers with a badge. It’s almost as if one of the characters from CSI somehow landed in the world of Kojak. And as if that weren’t awesome enough, not everything in Sam’s 1973 world is real. Sam can hear the doctors and nurses around his hospital bed in 2006 Manchester whenever he “zones out”, as he might when daydreaming or sleeping. And some of the people in Sam’s 1973 world are just figments of his imagination. Watching Sam trying to keep his sanity during all of this is amazing, especially once he gets on the wrong side of his boss, who’s more apt to punch Sam across the mouth than write him up to HR or send him to “sensitivity training” classes. The show was only intended to run for two seasons, and I think that this is one of the best shows that’s ever been on TV anywhere.
WHERE TO FIND IT: DVDs of season 1 are available from Amazon UK here. You can also find XviD versions of the show on Usenet and from the usual BT sites.
Lock, Stock – This series is loosely based on the Guy Ritchie film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Even though none of the characters or actors from the film are present in the TV version, this show has the unmistakable look and feel of the film – especially the pilot episode, which was co-written by Ritchie himself. Although Lock, Stock the TV show isn’t quite as profane and violent as the movie, it’s still got plenty of the swearing, gunplay, assorted violence and witty writing that made the movie such a hit. The show is centered on a gang of young hustlers that are always looking for the next big score, but somehow always end up just breaking even in the end whilst others around them end up filthy rich. Like Lock, Stock the movie, the show speeds along at a breakneck pace, sucking you into the dark English criminal underground with complex plots that sometimes require a scorecard to figure out. The show as a whole is far from perfect: the quality of some of the show’s seven episodes are less than stellar and seem to be written solely for their outlandishness instead of their cleverness. Some episodes are far, far better than others – but it’s still worth checking out… especially if you loved the film.
WHERE TO FIND IT: XviD versions of the show occasionally show up on Usenet and the usual BT sites. A 2-disc DVD set of the entire series is available from Amazon UK here if you have a DVD player capable of playing R2 PAL DVDs. It’s currently a decent value if you buy it from Amazon (all 7 episodes plus some “behind the scenes” footage for around $25), although I didn’t buy it from Virgin on my last trip to the UK because they wanted £39.99 ($75) for it!
Mile High – Fresh is a brash young airline run by a brash crew of beautiful twenty-somethings. And whether they’re at their London flat, at a crew hotel on the sunny Spanish coast or even at 30,000 feet, this crew enjoys nothing more than stirring up the pot. They might be swapping expensive perfumes in the duty-free trolley for cheap knockoffs that they’ve purchased beforehand. They might be skimming money from the drinks trolley or transferring a customer’s frequent flier miles to their own accounts. They might be slipping Ecstasy into a new employee’s drink. They might be planning to take down a hated supervisor as a revenge against some transgression (real or imagined) he or she has committed. Most likely, they’ll also be having sex too – whether for fun or for career advancement! Mile High is a skeezy soap opera in the grand tradition of Melrose Place or The OC, only it’s set six miles up in the sky. Being British, the show is able to show far more skin, drug\alcohol use and let loose far more swearing than those American shows, so Mile High is actually more a combination of Melrose Place and one of those late night Cinemax flicks than anything you’d see on broadcast TV here in the US. And it’s absolutely delicious, especially the fantasies that one of the crew has about his domineering (yet sexy) female supervisor.
WHERE TO FIND IT: XviD versions of the show occasionally show up on Usenet and the usual BT sites. DVD sets of seasons 1 & 2 are from Amazon UK here if you have a player capable of playing R2 PAL DVDs.
Sugar Rush – Kim is a 15 year-old girl. She’s fairly certain that she’s a lesbian, too. It isn’t until her family moves from London to Brighton that she becomes absolutely sure, as she falls completely head over heels in love with a girl named Sugar. Although the main arc of this show is about Kim becoming comfortable with her sexuality, it’s about far more than that. Kim’s family – who made the move to Brighton to “bring the family closer together” – is actually being torn apart by her wine-swilling, pill-popping mother and clueless doormat of a father. Although many of the storylines for this show seem pulled from the “ABC After School Special” archives – topics touched on include stealing from your parents, drug and alcohol abuse, sexuality and homophobia, date rape and racism – the show doesn’t dwell on it, nor does it beat you over the head with a “message”. Sure, Kim is the show’s protagonist. We cheer for her. But we don’t cheer for her simply because she’s a lesbian. And nor is Kim pure. She does almost as many bad things as Sugar, whom we alternately love and hate throughout the series. Season 1 of the show had only 10 episodes, and the season finale is a bit predictable… but it’s still one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time, with excellent performances from all involved. Sadly, season 2 was nowhere near as good as season 1, although it’s still better than 99% of the stuff you see on TV these days!
WHERE TO FIND IT: XviD versions of the show occasionally show up on Usenet and the usual BT sites. DVD sets of the each season are available from Amazon UK here, but I’d actually advise against buying the sets and looking for the actual TV rips instead. The DVD sets have that godawful “replacement music”, while the TV rips have the best soundtrack of any show I’ve ever seen, period. Watching poor Kim walking down Brighton Pier, tears streaming down her face, to the strains of Emiliana Torrini’s “Today Has Been OK” will absolutely break your heart into a million pieces. Interestingly, buying season 1 & season 2 separately is around £1 ($2) cheaper than buying them as a set. There doesn’t appear to be any difference between the two, as far as features go.
Cold Feet – This show is a “dramedy” about three couples in Manchester, England. It’s hilariously funny and lighthearted overall, yet can sometimes be deadly serious too. What makes this show enjoyable are the characters: Adam (James Nesbitt), the confirmed bachelor that falls head over heels in love with Rachel (Helen Baxendale, whom you might remember as Ross’ fiancée Emily from Friends). There’s also Adam’s best mate Pete (John Thomson), who has a kid on the way yet still wants to be “one of the boys”, Jenny (Fay Ripley) who’s Pete’s wife and is trying to figure out the whole “motherhood” thing, David (Robert Bathurst) a high-strung yuppie type, and Karen (Hermione Norris), David’s suffering wife who just might remind you of Felicity Huffman’s “ragged mom” character from Desperate Housewives. As I mentioned, the show is very lighthearted, focused mainly on “playah” Adam falling for Rachel, Pete and Jenny’s growing pains as a young family and David and Karen always being in a constant state of argument over whether to save his big bonus for a new car for David or whether to hire a nanny to keep Karen from going crazy. It’s a great show, and it’s refreshing to hear the Mancurian and Northern Irish accents in this show (assuming that you can tell the difference). Although it’s from 1998, it’s aged really well (in my opinion, of course). Beware that the last couple of episodes will rip your heart out!
WHERE TO FIND IT: This show rarely (if ever) shows up on the Internet, so the best way to see it is to buy the DVDs from Amazon UK. Each season is available as an individual set (around $26 each), but you can also buy the entire series as a single box set for around $103 (which is around $30 cheaper than buying them individually).
Tony Robinson’s Worst Jobs In History – Yes, I included a documentary series on this list. But before you run away screaming, just know that this series is not only highly entertaining, it’ll actually make you feel much better about your lot in life. Each episode of this short series focuses on a particular period in English history (Roman times, Tudor times, Stuart times, etc.), and each episode features five or six of the worst jobs you can possibly imagine. How would you like to stand in urine all day (part of the wool-making process)? How about scraping the remnants of flesh, fat and hair off of a cow skin that’s been sitting in urine for weeks (part of the ancient tanning process)? How about walking around all day in Scottish bogs collecting leeches on your legs to sell to doctors? How about killing dogs and cats all day long for 1 or 2 pence each to combat the plague? How about cleaning the feces and blood from a knight’s armor after the battle’s over? Any takers for any of these jobs? Anybody? No? Well, rest easy – some of the worst jobs in history weren’t as awful as they were downright bizarre – like the job of being a human garden gnome, which was apparently all the rage in Georgian England. And just so viewers will get a real feel for what the job was like, Robinson attempts to do each job himself, to varying degrees of success. You’ll cringe as Tony pours a massive jug of urine – collected that day from various members of his own film crew! – into a huge bucket full of raw, greasy wool. Still, Tony handles it all in stride, and with a decidedly un-stuffy approach to history. So the next time you think you hate your job, remember: you could always apply for the job of “Groom of the Stool” – the job of the man that wiped Henry VIII’s butt! Yep, that was a real job.
WHERE TO FIND IT: It’s not yet available on DVD, but XviD versions of the show occasionally show up on Usenet and the usual BT sites.
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – Most Americans came to know Scottish superchef Gordon Ramsay from his Fox show Hell’s Kitchen. But trust me – if you think you know Gordon Ramsay from that show, you don’t know him at all. The Gordon Ramsay from Hell’s Kitchen is polite and well behaved… almost an altar boy compared to the one seen on British TV. In Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay visits several failing restaurants and tries to whip them back into shape. Most of the restaurants are complete disasters: filthy kitchens manned by indifferent staff that would just as soon use mixes and microwaves than whip up “real food” from scratch. Most of the chefs of these places are completely out-of-touch primadonnas. They run the kitchens of restaurants in the middle of nowhere, never wondering why the “rubes” don’t come in to partake of their oh-so-clever Franco-Mexican cuisine… meanwhile competing restaurants are jam-packed. Ramsay takes an obvious delight in knocking these guys off their pedestals, even going to far as to humiliate them in public! And then there’s Ramsay’s always sharp tongue – do not watch this show with your grandmother! But it’s not always about incompetent chefs with inflated egos. Ramsay visits one soul food restaurant whose owner is simply a control freak and tries to do everything herself – which makes the food quality suffer. Ramsay actually seems to have a soft spot for her, which might come as a surprise to many that thought he had no heart. All in all, it’s a great series and is not to be missed!
WHERE TO FIND IT: It’s not yet available on DVD, but XviD versions of the show occasionally show up on Usenet and the usual BT sites, especially the site that’s all about the DIGITAL type of DISTRACTIONS. A special note about season 2: the first 4 episodes of season 2 are the only “new” episodes of that season. The final 4 shows are “revisited” episodes where Ramsay goes back to a particular restaurant from season 1. Only the last 10 minutes of each of these “revisited” episodes contain new material, as the first 50 minutes is just a rehash of what happened on Ramsay’s first visit. I didn’t bother downloading these and maybe you won’t want to either.
Coupling – This name might ring a bell, as there was a disastrous attempt to do an American remake of this show. It failed after only a couple of episodes, and to it I say: “good riddance!” Perhaps the main reason the show failed here in the US was that it was billed as “Britain’s answer to Friends” – which it sort of was, yet sort of wasn’t. Yes, both shows had similar characters: the “grounded” one (Ross\Steve), the “kooky” one (Phoebe\Jane), the “dumb ladies man” (Joey\Patrick), the “friend that always says the wrong thing” (Chandler\Jeff) and the “hot” one (Rachel\Susan). And yes, most of the action of both shows took place in drinking establishments (a coffee house in Friends and a pub in Coupling). And of course, both shows are mainly about the interaction of a group of close friends. But that’s where the similarities end. Friends was usually a PG affair you could watch with your grandmother most of the time. Being British, Coupling was far more randy than Friends. And while Friends would occasionally branch off and have an entire story arc about a single “friend” caught in some conundrum (like getting stuck in an elevator), such arcs are rare in Coupling. It’s almost always about the main characters, and it’s almost always connected to some other Coupling character. And although Friends is the show most commonly associated with Coupling, this show reminds also me of Seinfeld in many ways – not for its content, but for the clever writing as well as the way the show is shot – flashbacks, flashforwards, split screens and themes that run continuously through episodes. And even though I’ve mentioned a lot about the show’s sexual innuendo, the show is oftentimes a very clever study on relationships within a circle of of friends. Which makes it a bit like Friends. But it’s not. OK?
WHERE TO FIND IT: Available on Region 1 NTSC DVDs from Amazon USA here, either as a complete set of all four seasons (around $80) or individual seasons (between $21 and $30, depending on how many shows there were in a given season). It’s also available on BBC America and BBC America OnDemand.
The Office – Lastly, if you like the American version of The Office, you should check out the original British version sometime. This version has characters that are very similar to the American one. In fact, anyone that’s seen the US one will be able to pick out their British counterparts immediately – especially since both have an “Assistant to the Regional Manager” character. (For what it’s worth, one “Office Comparison” website claims that Gareth is a moronic idiot but that Dwight is an idiotic moron!) Also, many of the first episodes of the American version are closely based on the originals, so even the stories themselves will be familiar. But you’ll definitely need an appreciation for British comedy to enjoy this show: although the characters are very similar and many of the plots and overall story arcs are the same, there are definitely some huge differences between the shows. For example, Ricky Gervais’ boss character is far meaner and less “goofy and clueless” than the one played by Steve Carell. It’s still a cracking good show – put it on your “must see” list!
WHERE TO FIND IT: Both versions are available on DVD from Amazon USA (click here for the series box set from Amazon). Now that the British version is a few years old, it only rarely shows up online. The show is also available on BBC America and BBC America OnDemand, if you have those channels on your cable system.