A lot of people (myself included) tend to regard sitcoms as a sort of comfort food - this is why they enjoy such enduring popularity in syndication."Are You Being Served" used up all its originality after 1 episode!! It ran too long as it was in OTL! Even "Dad's Army" went on too long and that was still funnier than most other comedies on TV in its last series.
Thank you, Lindseyman!Lindseyman said:Other than those personal opinions still a great last update.
If only you were alive and in power during the nineteenth centuryI'm from California! But I've always been fascinated by differently-sized Canadas.
An intriguing interpretation. It's very obvious, watching that clip, how much that program owed to Doctor Who, thoughGreat ! Although I was thinking that her character might be more like Sapphire ( e.g. See this episode from about the 37:40 mark)
I think Almighty Janitor is probably too strong a term to describe either Mash or Harman. They're just foils to the sales staff.
It appears that his hunger strike was precipitated by a broken campaign promise on the part of the Conservatives, who had pledged to create an exclusively Welsh-language service in 1979. So it depends on whether Whitelaw would be as amenable to that as Mrs Thatcher was (or at least pretended to be) IOTL.viewcode said:IOTL BBC and ITV had a statutory duty to transmit a certain amount of television in the Welsh language. This meant that the schedules for BBC and local ITV station (HTV) differed noticeably from their English equivalents (so instead of "Star Trek" at 7pm, you had "Newyddion" or "Heddiw"). This splitting across TV channels was intended to continue until the hunger strike of local politician Gwynfor Evans[1][2]. To avert his death, a separate Welsh language fourth channel (Sianel Pedwar Cymru/S4C, which literally means "Welsh Channel Four") was spun off. After this point, television in the Welsh language would be limited to S4C only. I assume something similar has happened ITTL
Isn't it amazing, the stories that parents come up with to tell their children when the truth is too complicated for them to wrap their heads around?When I was a wee lad, my Dad had me convinced that ITV 2 existed, we just couldn't get it up here because the reception was bad...
Thank you, Daibhid!Daibhid C said:Another intriguing update. I love the idea of Richard Griffiths playing the Doctor!
That reminds me of the jokes about the ever-rising number of blades on the razors - how many are they up to by now?Reminds me of how there's all these old jokes in programmes about offending the Director General and being "transferred to BBC 3", people now miss the point of the joke because there was no BBC 3 back then and now there is.
Fortunately, that serial has been butterflied away ITTL. The hints that the setting might be Next Sunday A.D. ITTL are fewer, and farther between.BBC Three was also refered to in the Doctor Who episode The Daemons. The archaeological dig that freed the Daemon was being broadcast live on that channel. Just one of the indications that the Unit stories were supposed to be set a few years in the future.
Hard to believe the practice of numbering movie sequels only really got started in the 1970s; and so you have to play guessing games with franchises like Dirty Harry or Planet of the Apes. Even the original Star Wars movies, known in the 1980s by their titles, are today often (though not always) recalled by episode number.A related phenomenon may be how, fifteen years ago, a film series (with very rare exceptions like Rocky and Star Trek) was NEVER allowed to get to number 4; number 3 or 4 ALWAYS had no number and a subtitle instead. People of course often mentally inserted the number because they wanted to keep track of what order the films were in and often referred to it even when that wasn't the film's title. I do think that in recent years established practice has started to crumble and conform more to common sense, perhaps because people who grew up watching these blockbuster film series are now entering the business and are airing their grievances about oddly titled sequels
Reminds me of the old chestnut about how anybody in the late-19th century could have predicted the rise of the automobile - but it would take a real genius to have predicted urban sprawl and gridlock. For all that we've proven remarkably adaptable as a species, we sure seem to have trouble thinking outside the box.Thande said:It's always curious when you come across examples of people glimpsing 'the shape of the future' that way: I have a book of future predictions sent into Blue Peter by children in 1993, and one of them predicts e-readers like the Amazon Kindle exactly, down to every detail--except that it assumes you'd have to go to a newsagent and plug it in to download books and magazines. Even then it correctly realises that you could get books from any download station and thus traditional bookshops would start to decline.
I wouldn't dare presume to attempt writing synopses for what has often been described as the greatest sitcom in the English language.It was my pleasure. I was wondering if you could do an episode summary of the Fawlty Towers finale, like you do with Star Trek. But, then again, writing one for Fawlty Towers may be more complex since Cleese and Booth took weeks to write one episode, and writing a fictitious episode (Or a summary of one) might not do justice.
Columbo followed a very similar progression to the one he did IOTL, due in large part to the chronological proximity of its debut to the POD.By the way, how did Columbo fare in this time-line? Inspired by this article: How We Created Columbo
Not to mention MuppetVision.
I'm sure Griffiths would play the Fifth Doctor in a manner deemed appropriate by the writers and producers of Doctor Who.My only worry about Richard Griffiths as the Doctor is that a picture of Mr Pastry (Richard Hearne) keeps popping into my head. Surely he wouldn't play him as that type of character which is the reason why Richard Hearne was passed over for Tom Baker to replace Jon Pertwee in OTL?
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