Believe Nothing

 
There's something quite engaging about genius; the ability to think and perform in a way that mere mortals can only dream of is incredibly entertaining. And Rik Mayall was an absolute genius of comedy, so it's no surprise that he swaggered across our screens for 30+ years.

What happens, though, when you get Rik Mayall cast in the role of a fictional genius? Will these two clashing concepts of intellectual weight cancel each other out? There's only one way to find out and that's by taking a ganders at Believe Nothing.

5 Lesser Known British Sitcoms Starring Sitcom Greats

Through a combination of natural talent and mental fortitude, a number of British sitcom actors manage to carve out the most wondrous careers. Some actors, meanwhile, have an additional spark, that mercurial comic talent which sees them defined as sitcom greats.

And this magisterial touch combines with equally stratospheric scripts and supporting characters to produce shows with legacies which joyfully traverse the decades. These are the shows from which we remember these sitcom greats.

I think, though, that it's a bit reductive to purely concentrate on the big hitters of a sitcom actor's CV. Sure, there should always be time taken to celebrate the marvels of comic genius they conjured up on screen, but what's necessary in a retrospective is a more holistic view of their career.

That's why I've decided to investigate 5 lesser known gems and downright curios of some of Britain's sitcom greats.

An Adventure into the World of Used VHS

For quite a while, I've spent time perusing Ebay for used VHS tapes. Now, when I say used VHS, I mean ones which were bought blank originally and then used to record stuff off the telly. After all, it's a great way to discover hidden treasures which aren't available either commercially, on YouTube or through the black market of rare TV.

Sure, I can always head down to the BFI Archive, but that costs time and money. Two commodities that, ideally, I'd like to preserve to help hold onto my sanity.

The problem with Ebay, though, is that I'm never 100% tempted by anything I see; the seller's descriptions are always vague e.g. "GOT FILM, SPORTS, FILM" and when I ask them how old the tapes are, I just get "DON'T KNOW BUT THEY'RE OLD - YOU INTERESTED, MATE?"

On the Trail of Fat Tulip’s Garden

You may have noticed, on these pages, that I've got a certain fondness obsession with revisiting the TV shows which coloured my most early years. Now, it's all very well and good to research and write about these shows, but what would happen if I literally revisited one?

Well, today, I did! And the show in question was Tales from Fat Tulip's Garden!

Breakfast Serials

Waking up in the morning is a frightful affair, but this is tempered somewhat by that delicious breakfast which is seductively lurking just a short stumble from your still warm bed. Breakfast has got a reputation for being the most important meal of the day and it's hard to argue with a meal which transforms you from lumbering zombie into the requisite approximation of appearing compos mentis.

Sure, we may be dressing the humble meal of breakfast up with a bit too much hyperbole, but it's importance should never be underestimated. Although, for many people, breakfast amounts to nothing more than a bowl of mundane wheaty mush, ultimately, it helps to break down the sense of ease and dischord which clouds our foggy morning minds.

Helping to squeeze out a few more drops of escapism to the inevitable onslaught of another long day is breakfast television. As the hot, sweaty hand of work snakes ever closer to your jugular, you can lose yourself in the banality of those tellywaves for just a few moments and forget that you'll soon be creaking under the strain of the 9 - 5. And if anything's going to offer you a brief victory in evading that crushing realisation that it's time to put on your tie, it's Breakfast Serials.

Time Riders

Do we love the idea of time travel? Of course we bleeding well do! In fact, since 1986 - when we first encountered Doctor Who - we've constantly fantasised about travelling through time. And, curiously enough, we're rather obsessed with going back to 1986.

Just imagine how amazing it would be! We could go and check out some retro trainers, revisit shops that we had only fleeting memories of and digest an absolute gutload of retro TV - absolutely everything on the box would be retro, sounds like heaven!

However, once we discovered that it was nigh on impossible to get hold of any absinthe in the UK we'd more than likely suffer a prolapse. So, yeah, time travel it's a dangerous old game and one that should be approached with due care and attention. Because not only can you be deprived of anise-flavoured spirits, you can get yourself into a right lot of bother just like in that Time Riders.

Aliens in the Family

Humans are born a right immature bunch. Not only are we incontinent, but we cry almost non-stop and we can't do much more apart from lie on our back. Take a look across the animal kingdom at, for example, horses and you'll find that their darling little foals are on their hooves and walking within a few hours. However, who ends up riding and whipping who at the Grand National?

It's us, of course, and this is partly because we're able to grow into such intelligent (and gambling mad) beings due to the family support network surrounding us. And the buck doesn't stop at abandoning us when we can walk and fend for ourselves. Families are a lifelong bond and this gives them an exclusive, almost sacred feel, but they can easily be fractured by a breakdown in parental relations.

The pursuit of familial life, though, means that different sets of divorced families often combine into new hybrid families. This disrupts the status quo of these individuals' concept of family and can take a lot of readjustment. And things are made even harder when they also take in an alien on the run from a rival bunch of aliens who list genocide as their number one hobby. This is Aliens in the Family and we're your looking glass into this crazy mixed up scenario!

LifeSpam: My Child is French

 
There's always a kid at school who's got at least two webbed fingers. It's a fairly minor quirk of evolution and completely innocuous, but it becomes somewhat of a fascination to everyone. And in particularly boring geography lessons all you can do is stare at this webbed fingered entity and wonder if their mum had a bit of how's your father with a frog.

And it's this lurid obsession with the abnormal that leads to a grotesque desire to shine a light on these harmless souls. Way back in the olden days the freak show was a popular carnival treat which promised to highlight the rarities of Mother Nature's hand, but it's not the olden days anymore, so TV reigns supreme. Hence the endless glut of shows on Channel 4 and Channel 5 which propose to document the lives of people who are physically unnatural in the eyes of a perfectionist society.

It's a fairly modern phenomenon of the TV schedules and one that don't seem to be going anytime soon, so it's ripe for lampooning and satirising. And that's exactly what Alice Lowe did in LifeSpam: My Child is French.

Alfonso Bonzo

When you're a kid, mastering the art of swapping is pretty essential. After all, there's always something your mate's got that you want and vice versa. Cold hard cash, of course, is a commodity so scarce to kids that it's not even worth saving up. And waiting for Christmas or your birthday takes absolute aeons when you're a little squirt, so yeah, swapping, what a great way to get what you want!

Actually, you know what? Eradicating all currency and purely relying on swaps wouldn't half be a good system to consider for the entire world. Ownership is purely transient, so why should we bother fumbling around with coins and notes when, instead, we could reduce the clutter of possessions that, the pursuit of which, causes us untold and biologically unnatural stress?

And money don't even exist anyway! It's purely a series of numbers floating around in the cloud (probably, everything's up there now except God and his unfashionable peace and morality), so let's consign it to the trashcan because quite frankly we've all had enough of bankers running round with their trousers down and their shirts off whilst glugging jeroboams of champagne.

So, to sum up, in just a few paragraphs we've managed to solve all the financial stresses and injustices that riddle society. The future of market trading lies in swapping and we're all gonna live happily ever after like in that John Lennon song 'Imagine'. Oh wait, hang on, we'd only gone and forgotten about bloody Alfonso Bonzo! Now there's a cautionary tale on the dangers of swaps if ever we heard one, so let's take a quick ganders at it!