Hey I Remember This Show: Yes Minister

The classic British political sitcom that once inspired a mental parody in my imagination called Yes Commissar. Once one of the most highly praised British shows to be ever shown on American TV, it has been often dismissed in recent years by political southpaws who prefer a more black-and-white approach than the show's morally gray attitude.

Ironically, one of the many things I admire about the show is its refusal to stoop to a black-and-white approach. In some ways, it is more realistic than most of its American equivalents and I suspect anyone who has ever had to deal with a bureaucrat on either side of the Atlantic would find more truth in the show than most lefties would like to admit. Besides, the chief conflict in the show is not so much between goodies and baddies, liberals and conservatives or even hawks and doves. It's most often between those who would change the status quo and those who would keep it as it was. And every time I think the show is out of date, the latest newspaper headlines convince me that I'm wrong.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Comrade Dad

Back when I was still watching PBS on a regular basis, I used to joke about one day writing a parody of Yes Minister called Yes Commissar, in which a clever British bureaucrat loosely based on Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey Appleby would regularly pull the wool over the eyes of his immediate Soviet superior while living in a Russian-occupied version of Great Britain. I never went through with that concept, of course, which is just as well since this show seemed to have topped my idea without even knowing about it. Perhaps the creators of this show were psychic. Who knows?

Anyway, I would have never thought anyone on either side of the Atlantic would have tried seriously to find humor in the idea of a fictional Soviet occupation but apparently I was wrong. So is this show yet more proof that reality really is stranger than fiction? Or perhaps 1984 and A Clockwork Orange were more influential on British TV writers than I thought.

Hey, I Remember This Show: The New Avengers

I used to spend so much time watching this show as a teenager it was ridiculous. In fact, it was this show that got me interested in the original Avengers. (I'm referring, of course, to the British spy show, not the Marvel comic book.) For that matter, it also got me interested in actress Joanna Lumley but you probably guessed that much.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Sapphire & Steel

Well, I think it's nice that actress Joanna Lumley found something to do between The New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous but I still don't remember seeing this show on the air. My loss, I guess.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Hammer House of Horror

I don't remember this show ever coming to our side of the Atlantic. When you consider a lot of the British shows that did, that's amazing.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Love Thy Neighbour

Back in the early 1970s, adapting British sitcoms with strong racial elements into American TV shows was all the rage for American TV networks. And indeed, two of the most successful shows of the time -- All in the Family and Sanford and Son -- started out in just such a fashion.

Unfortunately, the American version of the British sitcom Love Thy Neighbor proved to be the great exception. Not only did the American version flop so badly that hardly anyone save yours truly remembers it, but the show which inspired it appears to have become one of the more obscure Britcoms of the 1970s -- so obscure, in fact, that I never even realized it existed until just last week. Perhaps because it wasn't classy enough to appeal to the type of people who liked shows like Benny Hill and Are You Being Served?...

Hey, I Remember This Show: The Avengers

For some reason, British spy shows tend to age better than American TV shows. Thus The Man from U.N.C.L.E. seems almost unwatchable today while The Avengers seems as stylish as ever. It didn't hurt that The Avengers was one of the first such programs to feature a strong female lead character while The Man from U.N.C.L.E. seemed to only feature women when it needed some ratings-friendly eye candy.

This particular intro is from The Avengers' 1962 season which paired Patrick Macnee with Honor Blackman, an actress who would later gain even more fame when she played the notorious Pussy Galore in the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger. Needless to say, this season was a bit before my time but then I never said I remembered every season of this series. Nor that I was old enough to remember watching it in prime time. Like most Avengers fans living today, I'm most familiar with the show through syndicated reruns and DVDs.



The intro I most remember:

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Hustle

So this is what actor Robert Vaughn has been doing since playing the lead in the old TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It's not the only thing he has done, of course but it appears to be the latest thing he has done. The show in question is a British show about con men which was apparently good enough to inspire the American rip -- er, version Leverage. So that means it must be worth watching, right?

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Dempsey and Makepeace

They're young, they're white and they fight crime. Such appears to be the premise of a rather obscure British show that was supposedly quite popular on the other side of the Atlantic back in the mid-1980s. I guess we Yanks didn't pay attention to it because no one here was watching cop shows in the mid-80s.

All kidding aside, the show's premise involving an American cop going overseas to work with his British counterparts does sound familiar.

Hey, I Remember This Show: The Thin Blue Line

I suspect writer Ben Elton and actor Rowan Atkinson would rather me remember this show for some other reason than the fact that I first came across actress Mina Anwar on this series but hey! I gotta be me. And it is not like there are a lot of British shows with a star who looks like Ms. Anwar. (Okay, there was The Invisibles and now there is The Sarah Jane Adventures. But all that is besides the point -- and anyway, it is Ms. Anwar in those shows too.)

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this brisk stroll down memory lane.