h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can only assume you adapted your name from Simon Munnery's character in this truly amazing television series that no-one else appears to have had the fortune, or misfortune, to see.

Excellent choice!

(OTOH, I may have got you completely wrong, and just dreamt that there is a programme called _Attention, Scum!_ and your name is, in fact, derived from your hate of helium.)

~ Bork!

Yes, well spotted Owlofdoom, my name is my small tribute to possibly the best, oddest, clinically lunatically funny thing I've ever stumbled in from the pub to catch on late night TV.

Wisdom from The League to be found at: http://www.leitchs.free-online.co.uk/

"Look at the sea and think of your evolutionary past. Look at the sky and imagine the future. Look at the land and think of the present. And at the most profound place where land, sea and sky meet - there ye shall play volleyball."

Ohhhh, I wish I still had cable TV...

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They're showing it on cable?

Not at the moment, but I caught the whole of both series repeated on Play UK (which I'm told doesn't even exist any more...)

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Yes I think I saw it there too... why do they always cancel the wrong shows and channels? Like canning Futurama at it's best, with all the good writers working on it, while leaving The Simpsons to become as toothless and dull as Grandpa Simpson.

Instead we get left with all the aspirational consumer makovers shows reworked over and over for houses, clothes, gardens, haircuts ad nauseum.

Blargh! Yes.

Mind you, they've canned Friends, Frasier and Sex & the City, so there's hope for us all. NBC have already bought the rights to Stephen Moffat's excellent BBC comedy 'Coupling' with the plan of releasing an Americanised version which they hope to be as big as Friends... yay!

And didn't I hear something about a potential new series of Futurama, after much complaining from the world over?

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Coupling USA? It'll never work. Expecting that you can change the characters and situations in a sitcom and somehow still retain the things that make it great is an absurd idea: it's like thinking you can wear two left-handed gloves and feel perfectly comfortable just because they're both vaguely hand-shaped.

They have to be commended on signing up something good, but is the idea of marketing and showing the original programmes over there so bad?

Nah, they've also commissioned Stephen Moffat to write at least a few of the episodes... although I don't know if he'll keep the characters.

Did you know that Coupling is supposed to be semi-biographical? It's written and produced by a husband-wife team who are called Steve and Susan. The other characters were made up from bits and pieces of their other friends, though.

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Has he/she/they/it written much else? I always worry about those ones: it goes back to the old adage about everyone's first work being significantly autobiographical. Mind you, a good chunk of Kurt Vonnegut's best stuff was marginally autobiographical, and his supposed autobiography was pretty much another way to repackage his short story ideas. This sounds like I'm writing the writers off, doesn't it? I'm not - I'm just rambling.

Still, it's promising that the jokes will still be coming from the same pen. We'll see what happens, I suppose.

Imdb credits him as having some involvement in 'The Office' and he was the lead writer on the silly Rowan Atkinson Doctor Who story, so he's clearly not a one-comedy man - especially as Coupling is his most-recent, not his eldest, work.

One other thing I discovered when flicking through the net is that Coupling is 1/3 improvised on the spot, so I guess some of the talent will be lost if they don't get actors of similar calibre to play the American ones... somehow I doubt they'll find anyone to replace Richard Coyle for the part of Jeff...

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No, Jeff is definitely a one off. Kind of makes the show for me to be honest. He easily gets all the best gags too - I wonder how many of them are his own then?

Oh hang on, I've just twigged who he was in Human Traffic.

I never saw Human Traffic.

Have you been to the Coupling web site? http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/coupling/ ... every episode has a little box entitled "The Wisdom of Jeff"

Hmm http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/coupling/episodes/s3ep2.shtml is the pick of them, but I'm sure there were some much better ones they could have chosen. Maybe it's just that they're five to ten times funnier when seen in context, uttered by Jeff and backed by the laugh track. Any favourites?

I'm trying to remember now... I do think the one you picked out was a great one though...

I think that 'The End of the Line' (s2e8 ?) was the best half-hour of comedy ever made by anyone... the whole confusion with Susan pretending to be French, and Steve pretending to be Australian ... "I'm Dick Darlington!" "No, I'm Dick Darlington!" "So who is Giselle?" "I'm Giselle!" "We're Giselle *w-tsh*!" "I'm sorry Jeff, I am Giselle..."

nnng! surfing dangerously close to farce in places but very funny. Recent attempts at this kind of thing have me cringing more than someone scraping their nails down a blackboard, but that episode was an exception. Best half hour though? Not a chance.

I'd be tempted to plump for a Blackadder episode instead, if I could single one out.

I think Blackadder is certainly worthwhile too, but an episode? _Not_ "Bells" ... that episode has no repeat value at all, and yet the BBC choose it as their most-repeated one......

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I quite liked "Chains" from that series, but I suspect that it's been so long since I saw most of the Blackadder canon that it has all merged into one unrealistically funny gestalt episode.

I really like the first series, with Brian Blessed in and Tony Robinson having a much better part than in the other series... the archbishop episode is a classic!

nononono "The Queen Of Spain's Beard" - that was the one that felled me.

I can still remember my favourite bit from that one. Bl'adder tries to get out of marrying the comically ugly Infanta by having Baldrick deflower her before they can be wed. He attempts to placate Baldrick before the act by saying something like "We'll give you a hero's funeral; bury you at sea; say you died in combat with an enemy vessel".