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SOMETIMES I think I'm a total snob about Britcoms. But there are people worse than me, those who automatically like anything with a British accent better than our L.A.-made sitcoms.
Actually, I don't like many of the Britcoms. Some are dreadful. (Some day I'm going to have a contest on which public TV station has the worst Britcoms. Ch. 21 has been the leader; that's because they run the most of them. I've stopped watching and mentioning them in print, they are so downright embarrassing. They give sitcoms a good name.) The average Britcom on public TV these nights proves the theory that British TV is the best - and worst.
An exception to the rule in this bad Britcom period is called "The New Statesman," which opens exclusively on WNYC / 31 tomorrow night at 10:30. The most promising satirical comedy since "Hot Metal" stars Rik Mayall in a 14-part series from Yorkshire Television about a rising British politician.
Rik Mayall is, of course, a distinguished member of The Comic Strip group - which includes French and Saunders, and Robbie Coltrane - the best comedy troupe in the U.K., the equivalent of "SCTV" in its prime. They were stolen away from Channel Four last spring by the newly invigorated BBC-2. The Comic Strip was on the cutting edge of new wave comedy that developed in the U.K. at the end of the punk movement (late 1982). The theory was that if anyone could play music, anyone could get up and tell jokes.
"Alternative comedy" began with "The Young Ones," the series about the four anti-establishment blokes, which played on MTV Sunday nights since 1987 off and on. It was a ground-breaking sitcom which, as Roy Greenberg of East Hampton put it, "often appeared...