Number 67...

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

 

...in BBC's list of all-time best sitcoms!

 

Mind you, it's got to go some way to beating Heil Honey I'm Home for offending the PC Brigade.

 

Heil Honey I'm Home was a 50's-style sitcom set in the late 1930's about an American guy called Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun. All was well until the Goldenstein's moved in next door.

 

I kid you not. And this wasn't made in the 70s either - it was made in 1990!!

 

Only one episode was ever shown!

 

I see they've got the complete set of Mind Your Language DVD's in HMV!!

 

 

 

 

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva live somewhere in 1930s American suburbia, next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein, and their dour niece, Ruth.

 

This most infamous of all British sitcoms attracted controversy out of all proportion to the number of people who saw it. Naturally, the hullabaloo was built on the shocking notion that anyone would mount a comedy about Hitler and the Jews - seemingly the definition of poor taste. In reality, the show was no more than a spoof - and not of 1930s Germany but of the kind of 1960s/1970s American sitcoms that would embrace any idea, no matter how stupid. The title, the corny dialogue, the applause when anyone arrived on set, the acting (McCaul's Hitler was more reminiscent of Chaplin's The Great Dictator than your actual Fuhrer) - all were clear signposts of parody. Mel Brooks had already explored the concept of pantomime Nazis in his masterpiece movie (and eventual stage musical) The Producers. In case anyone should have missed the point, an opening caption card explained that Heil Honey I'm Home! was a long-lost US sitcom created by one Brandon Thalburg Jr, just re-discovered in archives in Burbank, California.

 

Having said all this, the show really wasn't very good - at most, the idea might have made for an interesting sketch. And hardly anyone saw it because it was broadcast in the earliest days of the short-lived British Satellite Broadcasting, on its Galaxy channel, when the total number of viewers - those who had installed the company's famous-for-15-minutes 'squarial' (square aerial) - could be counted on just a few hands. Although Heil Honey was partly fashioned in order to attract media attention the project was soon considered too hot to handle; seven additional recorded episodes remain unseen, for when Sky took over BSB, remodelling the joint company British Sky Broadcasting, they wished no part of it.

 

www.bbc.co.uk

 

 

[Laz]

I quite liked that series at the time. But you can't beat this geezer...

 

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

Spurs fan in real life, of course!

 

 

[Laz]

Obviously, he's a f**r-b*-tw*.

[JKiF]

your avin a bubble me ol cockle