news:o4pbdat881hrn6dvd...@4ax.com...
Well that explains it then. You just have to ask which program makers and
which programmes did they make?
Obviously they don't want to be associated with Playschool but still they
want to be associated with Tellytubbies. That doesn't make sense. Playschool
was more influential in Children's TV than Tellytubbies ever was. It was
probably the first if not only programme on British TV which had black
presenters and treated Black people as equals such as Floela Benjamin and
Derrick Griffiths and by doing that it did more for racial equality and
racial tolerance than any of the arty farty rubbish to please the
establishment. It also gave us Brian Cant who also hosted Playaway which
gave us Jeremy Irons. Johnny Ball went on to present Think of a Number and
other spin offs. Derrick Griffiths also got his own show and Floela Benjamin
appeared in the Sarah Jane Adventures.
> come across it before... and even more surprised to find DW so highly
> regarded within the industry.
I thought it was more recent since it attributes the 2005 series of Doctor
Who along with the original.
>
> As for the others... Cathy (perhaps forgotten by the general public) has
> inspired generations of film makers. World at War was a seminal assembly
> of wartime archive footage, and a documentary that still performs well in
> the dvd market. A lot of the choices seem odd or outright ridiculous, but
> it's not a definitive empirical guide to quality. Many of the
I was assuming it was supposed to be a list of programmes that influenced or
changed British culture. The programmes they seem to be citing are those
espoused by the clueless establishment. Ordinary people didn't need Cathy
Come Home to make them aware of homelessness and it didn't influence popular
writing either.
The World at War didn't influence society and wasn't all that remarkable as
a documentary. It was WW1 and WW2 themselves which changed society.
> contributors, who would have been active when those programmes were made,
> will be retired or dead by now. But unlike the viewers who regularly
> contribute to polls, they were all making their own contributions to the
> national cultural archive.
Well that's debatable.
The plays and novels and other literature from the past that made the
biggest contributions to modern society aren't the ones that won the Booker
Prize or the equivalent of their day, they were the ones which were popular
with ordinary people and those were the ones which influenced later writers
and film and TV makers as well, not the arty farty rubbish which hardly
anyone read and no one remembers today.
I think we need to compile a better list and split everything into genre
putting the greatest influences of each genre on the main list.
So lets start off with Comedy.
At the top of the list should come Aristophanes whose work is the biggest
influence of modern satire. Programmes like Spitting Image, Drop the Dead
Donkey and Black Adder Goes Fourth are all derivatives not influences.
Next comes Menander. All modern sitcoms are derivatives of Menander, who was
influenced by Aristophanes and Terrance and Plautus who were influenced by
Menander. Even though Menander didn't obtain critical acclaim in his day he
was the one who irreversibly influenced a whole genre.
Black Adder Goes Fourth and all it's processors were clearly based on Up
Pompeii and Up Pompeii deliberately followed the style of Terrance and
Plautus therefore if Black Adder Goes Fourth had to be on the list then Up
Pompeii must go above it.
In fact it's better just to cite Aristophanes, Menander, Terrance and
Plautus and leave everything else all because everything else is just a
derivative including Fawlty Towers.
Anyway if we must compile a list it should be in chronological order.
So for Classic Situation Comedy we have Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus &
Terrance together, a long gap including Shakespeare who pinched most of this
work from earlier playwrights, Hancock's Half Hour, the Carry On movies,
Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Dad's Army, Up Pompeii, Fawlty
Towers, Are You Being Served, Some Mother's Do Av Em, It Ain't Alf Hot Mum,
Terry and June, Yes Minister, Hi Di Hi, Black Adder, Allo Allo and then the
genre dies.
For Alternative Comedy we have Aristophanes, a big gap, Musichall &
Vaudeville, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy (silent era), Harold Lloyd,
The Marx Brothers, Abbot and Costello, The Goons, Q, Monty Python, The
Goodies, The Young Ones and then the genre dies.
For Relationship Based Situation Comedy we have Laurel and Hardy (talkies),
The Rag Trade, The Likely Lads, On The Busses, George and Mildred, Robin's
Nest, The Liverbirds, The Good Life, Happily Ever After, Porridge,
Butterflies, To The Manor Born, Just Good Friends, Only Fools and Horses,
Bread, Birds of a Feather, Two Pints of Larger and a Packet Of Crisps
Please, Gavin and Stacy, etc..
There's obviously stuff I missed out but others can fill the gaps.
If were dealing with Drama then that has to be judged solely by its
popularity and historical influence and influence on later works and almost
all the arty farty crap doesn't fit the bill and will never be remembered in
generations to come.
So we'll start with Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Apollonius of
Rhodes' Argonautica, Heliodorus' Aethiopica, big gap, Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, another gap, The Arabian Nights, Alexandre
Dumas, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stephenson, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelly,
Jane Austin, the Bronte Sisters, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lewis Carol, Arthur
Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Edger Rice Burroughs, Philip Nowlan (Buck Rogers),
Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), King Kong (original), Superman (comics), J. R.
R. Tolkein, Marvel (comics).
Every popular movie or TV show today is a derivative of the genres pioneered
by the above so doesn't really deserve to be listed. This makes King Kong
the definitive and most influential movie of both the 20th and 21st
centuries whereas ignorant clueless critics would have you believe it was
something like Citizen Kane.