Oh no! Little Britain 'not funny' oh no.

hillarious last week.

I would find it a bit funny if it wasn't for the point I made uptop. But I guess it's not funny enough.

It's just a crap League of Gentlemen really isn't it?

OTM

The other chap in Little Britain was funnier in the Xmas EastEnders than he is in his own programme.

And yes, Catterick should be on BBC2.

Lou & Andy are the Ted & Ralph of LB - richer than everything else in the show but still no funnier than a good Bob Fleming.

Basically if you don't like the TV series then there's no point in getting the radio eps.

I didn't find the first series repetitive at all and I think it's only this second series where it's become that.

I'm not sure if the skit where the guy administers the Heimlich Procedure to the friend's grandmother he's keen on was the funniest or most violating thing I've ever seen.

I laughed twice. Can anybody beat that?

The incontinent old lady is presumably the 'same joke every week' character for this series (the vomming old lady was last seasons)

The Daffyd one seems to be the only actually funny 'sitcom' part worth watching.

Vicki Pollard is now over, it seems.

Oh, and Andy and Lou is this seasons 'right, let me guess what happens' 'Oh, I'm right' scenario.

Boot boot boot.

Except it isn't funny

I was watching it simply because Little Britain is pile of steaming shite that is hugely popular in primary schools up and down the country.

I think he meant it in a "I was one of the lucky ones" way, but came across as a classically British "musn't grumble" attitude.

That made me laugh a little.

Did you know that the whole disaster was basically caused by an illogical filing system that required two permits for repair work on two linked pieces of equipment to be filed in two different places?

yeh! i knoe.

there is this whole genre of physical-exertion-for-charity (as a counterbalance to kids selling chocolate bars door to door for charity...)

Isn't this what Sport Relief is about? A lot of people like sport, same as a lot of people like comedy. The sponsored event is a medium used to draw attention (and therefore donations) to the cause.

what about birthday presents? I mean fair enough occasionally there could be a present of something that someone couldn't just get themselves because they don't know about it or don't know where to get it or whatever but if you're just buying a present out of convention and it's something the giftee isn't really bothered about and then they're going to do the same thing to the gifter when the gifter's birthday comes around then it's all a bit pointless really same thing goes for birthday cards

i mean, it does seem like a waste. if you're going to do something onerous for a good cause, why not have that actually involve direct work with the community you're trying to help. then you'll get your donations plus the direct work you've done. of course your legs won't be as toned, which is probably the dealbreaker

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 13 September 2011 12:12 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

Sure, but why not do something you're good at to raise that money? Walliams might well be terrible as a community worker, but he's a brilliant swimmer and also a well-liked celebrity, so he's using those qualities in a positive way. I don't see anything wrong with that.

^^pretty much how my family operates now we're all adults lol - well that or we just ask for whatever practical thing we happen to need at any given time

xp

i'm not saying there's anything wrong with it dog latin, i just don't get why it's a thing that works, because it has so little to do with any reason i'd donate to a charity

so tracer, rather than say an organised group of 500 joggers raising half a million for a village in africa

you'd think it would be better if that group did some direct work with the community themselves?

if you're going to do something onerous for a good cause, why not have that actually involve direct work with the community you're trying to help

Instead of raising money for cancer research, why don't you just stay at home and experiment on some monkeys yourself?

better yet just post about the idea of it on the internet

dudes i'm not criticizing it, just trying to figure out why physical exertion and sport in particular have become the accepted way of "helping"

it's a weird thing I agree along with the other weird things

and yes i'll admit there is something a little weird to me about going to great lengths to raise money to help people but remaining at such arm's length from them

i'm not saying there's anything wrong with it dog latin, i just don't get why it's a thing that works, because it has so little to do with any reason i'd donate to a charity

― i asked for "HALF" a glass of wine, because i am TEMPERENT (lex pretend), Tuesday, 13 September 2011 12:20 (57 seconds ago) Bookmark

Well, that is you, to be fair. But this is one of the most high-profile celebrity sponsored events of recent times and it's drawing attention to a cause which many many potential sponsors would be indifferent about if a comedian weren't swimming through a polluted river to raise money for. The sponsored event is the medium rather than the message in this case. People are more willing to part with their money if they feel they're actually paying for something they can see, so there's a kind of psychological effect of "I'm giving money to charity, but I'm also giving money to see Walliams get covered in untreated effluent", which is like a double win.

it's drawing attention to a cause which many many potential sponsors would be indifferent about if a comedian weren't swimming through a polluted river to raise money for

seems to me to have drawn more attention to the swimmer, which is kinda my point.

c'mon lex if it was kerry katona you'd be all over this, fawning over her choice of swimwear, telling us what a megahero she is getting her hair wet

dunno about your arm's length tracer - bet the walliams guy does some more hands-on stuff even if it's just meeting and chatting with the subjects of his charity work but that's kind of an ego thing too

this organised charity stuff makes sense in a way that it's easier to organise and has a cash outcome - maybe birthday presents could learn something from this

lol why would i care if it was kerry katona?

seems to me to have drawn more attention to the swimmer, which is kinda my point.

― Upt0eleven, Tuesday, September 13, 2011 12:30 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh man. can't believe you 'went there'. my eyes have been opened.

draw it more to the attention of the sheeple

I think it's kind of cynical to see Walliams' thing as self-serving. Sure, it's not going to hurt his reputation, but it's not like he needed an extra boost since he's quite a popular comedic figure. And yeah, there are a lot less excruciating ways to raise your profile than swimming around the Thames.

actually that wasn't really my point. rather I'm questioning the idea that something that serves the self so strongly, and is such a personal accomplishment, can be seen as heroic. nm.

"heroic" isn't the right word, no. "brave", "thoughtful", "altruistic" maybe. heroism implies a more impulsive, selfless kind of act, so I agree on that count.

greek and norse heroes weren't really at all self-denying or self-abnegating or self-sacrificing (or necessarily uncalculating): this is a "christian" revision of the concept

(nietzsche to thread!)

^ troo

to me i think heroism implies risk?

you can drown or catch lymphoma or be eaten by a stray croc if you swim in the thames.

xp I don't think Walliams' swim is self-serving in the publicity sense but I do think it fulfils a psychological need which is not just about raising money. If he did this without fundraising people would think he was having some kind of nervous breakdown and I don't think charity suddenly removes all the weirdness. Maybe this says more about me than about him. When Eddie Izzard did all those marathons the general reaction was "What a hero!" Mine was "What a midlife crisis!"

he has been a keen and highly-dedicated swimmer since at least the early-2000s, well before his career took a big leap.

..........it's a psychological need

wikipedia says his original surname is "williams" - wonder why he changed it?

xxp I was thinking about the Eddie Izzard marathon running earlier and had exactly the same thought.

for the attention

this is not about raising money, it's about getting back in the womb

The "a" in Walliams represents his mother's vagina. It's obvious really.

iirc he changed his name for Equity reasons - there was already a David Williams. More fun to choose a new surname completely, I'd have thought - I like the fact that David Tennant (ne McDonald) named himself after Neil Tennant.

If you give £50 to charity, £50 goes to charity. If you organise a sponsored run and get 1,000 people to do it, and they each get £100 sponsorship, £100,000 goes to charity. I'd wager it's easier and takes less time to organise 1,000 people to do a charity run than it would take to work £100,000 worth of hours building an orphanage in Africa yourself, ergo the return is way, way larger.

I've watched, sponsored, and taken part in charity events over the last several years and wondered why we're, as a society, so happy to chuck £5 at a charity in the name of a vague work colleague doing a run or swim or bike ride or whatever, and you know what? You can be as holier-than-though liberal about it as you like, suggesting they should give the money spent on trainers direct to charity, or go and build an orphanage themselves, or whatever, but the simple fact of the matter is that these events and undertakings capture people's imagination and raise a lot of money that just would not be raised otherwise, trainer-money-to-charity or orphanage-building or whatever else be damned. Doing active, physical things that improve your health is good. Getting sponsorship so that they also improve other people's health too is even better, odious comedy celebrity or not.

What Nick said. I don't see why people doing this kind of thing in the name of charity is such a conundrum.

Two approaches to the "but you'd do it anyway, why invoke charity?" idea: my boss did Land'sEnd to John O'Groats by bicycle earlier this summer with a friend - they'd decided to do it three years ago, researched, trained, set it as a big life goal. Fair enough; I want to do it myself. They hadn't considered doing it for charity until about a month before they set off, at which point they went "well, why the hell not raise some money and do someone else some good?", picked a cause, set-up a Just Giving page, and actually raised a couple of grand or more. Brilliant. Secondly, my mum's doing a 26-mile swim for diabetes research (she has type 2), and has X weeks to do the distance in, in as many individual swimming sessions as she liked. She'd normally do that distance in that time anyway, as she swims to keep fit, but instead of doing 40 lengths a day has upped to 50-60 in order to make it an extra effort. She's raised a few hundred quid. Brilliant.

Easy tiger!

I agree those things are great

but confusing

How is it even slightly confusing?

I don't like it..

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_OI0trFw5zCQ/SieR0CMjAUI/AAAAAAAAAf8/zDS_rlAkr-A/s400/Matt-Lucas-as-Andy-1339210.jpg

I've just done a bit of searching and it appears that charity pub crawls are not as rare as I'd thought

:D

pubs are basically charity cases these days anyway.

I'm going out on a bender anyway why not raise some money for charity while I'm at it

If these things result in more money for a charity that's great - we can leave second-guessing motives up to God. I do find it interesting, at least as a thought experiment, that if a friend raised lots of sponsorship to run a marathon, yet twisted their ankle on the way to the starting line, none of us would refuse the promised money (which is usually given in advance anyway. And there are probably some assholes who would refuse payment, especially when the national public is concerned). It seems we don't need the act just the promise of the act? I don't know.

Taking sides, Bono asking for donations "because I'm right about this", or Walliums asking "because I'm making an effort and taking time out to do it"...

I work for a charity that has a lot of high-profile reps, so I'm deeply biased here, but just wanted to address a few things:

** Having seen how our money gets allocated to the field (Pakistan or Haiti, for example), the charity language cliche -- that "sending just a fiver could save lives" -- really is true. People have different personal reasons, good and neutral, why they want to give, but the money really does get used, for mosquito nets, cholera medicine, education programmes. That's great.

** Celebrities generate more media coverage (and therefore donations) for a charity than anything else a charity does. Media coverage of an emergency tends to dry up after a few weeks -- there's still a famine in Somalia, for example, and it's just as bad it was two months ago, but no one's writing about it any more. That can change instantly if -- say, to give a spurious example -- Lady Gaga tweets about it with a link to donation page on your website.

** Sponsored runs/swims/whatevers are work. Celebrities work for charities for free, and in return for the publicity, they're expected to work a certain number of days a year for the charity, or they'll lose their "ambassador" role. Swimming the Thames might seem frivolous, but DW is just doing the work he's been employed by the charity to do.