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Alas Smith And Jones
''Alas Smith and Jones'' is a British comedy sketch television series starring comedy duo and namesake Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones that originally ran for four series and two Christmas specials on BBC2 from 1984 to 1988, and later as ''Smith and Jones'' for six series on BBC1 until 1998. A spin-off from ''Not the Nine O'Clock News'', the show also had a brief run in the United States on A&E and PBS in the late 1980s, as well as on CBS in the early 1990s during their late-night block. History Background The show's creation followed the ending of ''Not the Nine O'Clock News'' in 1982. Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson followed individual career paths, whilst Smith and Jones opted to form a double act instead. The first post-''Not…'' appearance as a duo was in a short sketch in the BBC1 comedy special ''The Funny Side of Christmas'' in 1982, where Jones played a complete stranger who annoyed hospital patient Smith to the extent that Smith's character walked out in a r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sketch Comedy
Sketch comedy comprises a series of short, amusing scenes or vignettes, called "sketches", commonly between one and ten minutes long, performed by a group of comic actors or comedians. The form developed and became popular in vaudeville, and is used widely in variety shows, comedy talk shows, and some sitcoms and children's television series. The sketches may be improvised live by the performers, developed through improvisation before public performance, or scripted and rehearsed in advance like a play. Sketch comedians routinely differentiate their work from a "skit", maintaining that a skit is a (single) dramatized joke (or "bit") while a sketch is a comedic exploration of a concept, character, or situation. definition 3b, Merriam-Webster online. Retrieved 5/4/2019 History Sketch comedy has its origins in |
Colin Bostock-Smith
Colin Bostock-Smith (born 1942)"I was born in 1942, so I was exactly the right age for rock and roll when it all happened./ref> is a British television and radio comedy writer. Early career Until the age of 30, he was a journalist, noting in a review of an early performance by The Beatles ("four young men with four fringes, three guitars, and some drums") that they were "not nearly as bad as they might have been".http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/environment/in-focus-she-loved-them-yeah-yeah-yeah-1-151119 He later edited the music newspaper ''Top Pops''. However, he always had—in his words—"this feeling that I would like to write comedy", starting in this area with contributions to the BBC Radio 4 show ''Week Ending''. Bostock-Smith has contributed to a significant number of British television comedies. In a 2008 interview, he noted that he was the sole writer of all 41 episodes of the early-1980s ITV sitcom ''Metal Mickey'', and claims to be most proud of his work on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Minghella
Anthony Minghella, (6 January 195418 March 2008) was a British film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was chairman of the board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for ''The English Patient'' (1996). In addition, he received three more Academy Award nominations; he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for both ''The English Patient'' and ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' (1999), and was posthumously nominated for Best Picture for ''The Reader'' (2008), as a producer. Early life Minghella was born in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England that is a popular holiday resort. His family are well known on the Island, where they ran a café in Ryde until the 1980s and have run an eponymous business making and selling Italian-style ice cream since the 1950s. His parents were Edoardo Minghella (an Italian immigrant) and Leeds-born Gloria Alberta (née Arcari). His mother's anc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graeme Garden
David Graeme Garden OBE (born 18 February 1943) is a Scottish comedian, actor, author, artist and television presenter, best known as a member of The Goodies and a regular panellist on ''I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue''. Early life and education Garden was born in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and raised in Preston, Lancashire, England, only son (with a daughter) of (1910-1982), an eminent orthopaedic surgeon who created the Garden classification of hip fractures, and his wife Janet Ann (née McHardy). R. S. Garden's parents, John and Elizabeth, farmed at Macduff, Banff and Buchan, Aberdeenshire. Garden was educated at Repton School, and studied medicine at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club and served as its president in 1964, while also performing in the 1964 Footlights revue, ''Stuff What Dreams Are Made Of'' at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Garden qualified in medicine at King's College London, but has never ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Screenwriter
A screenplay writer (also called screenwriter, scriptwriter, scribe or scenarist) is a writer who practices the craft of screenwriting, writing screenplays on which mass media, such as films, television programs and video games, are based. Terminology In the silent era, writers now considered screenwriters were denoted by terms such as photoplaywright, photoplay writer, photoplay dramatist and screen playwright.Steven Maras. ''Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice.'' Wallflower Press, 2009. pp. 82–85. Screenwriting historian Steven Maras notes that these early writers were often understood as being the authors of the films as shown and argues that they cannot be precisely equated with present-day screenwriters because they were responsible for a technical product, a brief "scenario", "treatment", or "synopsis" that is a written synopsis of what is to be filmed. Profession Screenwriting is a freelance profession. No education is required to be a professional scree ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comedian
A comedian or comic is a person who seeks to entertain an audience by making them laugh. This might be through jokes or amusing Amusement is the state of experiencing humorous and entertaining events or situations while the person or animal actively maintains the experience, and is associated with enjoyment, happiness, laughter and pleasure. It is an emotion with po ... situations, or acting foolish (as in slapstick), or employing prop comedy. A comedian who addresses an audience directly is called a stand-up comedy, stand-up comedian. A popular saying often attributed to Ed Wynn attempts to differentiate the two terms: "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny." This draws a distinction between how much of the comedy (drama), comedy can be attributed to verbal content and how much to acting and persona. Since the 1980s, a new wave of comedy, called alternative comedy, has grown in popularity with its more offbeat and experimental style. This normally i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Two Ronnies
''The Two Ronnies'' is a British television comedy sketch show starring Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. It was created by Bill Cotton and aired on BBC1 from April 1971 to December 1987. The usual format included sketches, solo sections, serial stories and musical finales. Origins Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett met in 1963 at the Buckstone Club in the Haymarket, London, where Corbett was serving drinks between acting jobs. At the time, Barker was beginning to establish himself as a character actor in the West End and on radio. They were invited by David Frost to appear in his new show, ''The Frost Report'', with John Cleese, but the pair's big break came when they filled in, unprepared and unscripted, for eleven minutes during a technical hitch at a British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards ceremony at the London Palladium in 1970. In the audience was Bill Cotton, the Head of Light Entertainment for the BBC, and Sir Paul Fox, the Controller of BBC1. Cotton was so i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
London Weekend Television
London Weekend Television (LWT) (now part of the non-franchised ITV London region) was the ITV network franchise holder for Greater London and the Home Counties at weekends, broadcasting from Fridays at 5.15 pm (7:00 pm from 1968 until 1982) to Monday mornings at 6:00. From 1968 until 1992, when LWT's weekday counterpart was Thames Television, there was an on-screen handover to LWT on Friday nights (there was no handover back to Thames on Mondays, as from 1968 to 1982 there was no programming in the very early morning, and from 1983, when a national breakfast franchise was created, LWT would hand over to TV-am at 6:00am, which would then hand over to Thames at 9:25am). From 1993 to 2002, when LWT's weekday counterpart was Carlton Television, the transfer usually occurred invisibly during a commercial break, for Carlton and LWT shared studio and transmission facilities (although occasionally a Thames-to-LWT-style handover would appear). Like most ITV regional franchi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RTL Group
RTL Group (for "Radio Television Luxembourg") is a Luxembourg-based international media conglomerate, with another corporate centre in Cologne, Germany. The company operates 68 television channels and 31 radio stations in Germany, France and other European countries. It also offers national streaming platforms, content productions and a range of digital services. Important segments of RTL Group are RTL Deutschland, Groupe M6, Fremantle and RTL Nederland. The company, in its present form, was established by Bertelsmann, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (GBL) and Pearson in the year 2000. Over the years, Bertelsmann, a conglomerate based in the German city of Gütersloh, continued to increase its stake in RTL Group and currently owns just over 75% of the shares in the company after holding a stake of more than 90% in the past. RTL Group is one of a total of eight divisions of Bertelsmann: It is responsible for more than a third of its revenue and a large share of its operating profit. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pearson PLC
Pearson plc is a British multinational corporation, multinational publishing and education company headquartered in London, England. It was founded as a construction business in the 1840s but switched to publishing in the 1920s.J. A. Spender, Spender, J. A., ''Weetman Pearson: First Viscount Cowdray'' (London: Cassell (publisher), Cassell and Company Limited, 1930). It is the largest education company and was once the largest book publisher in the world. In 2013 Pearson merged its Penguin Books with German conglomerate Bertelsmann. In 2015, the company announced a change to focus solely on education. Pearson plc owns one of the GCSE Examination boards in the United Kingdom, examining boards for the UK, Edexcel. Pearson has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts. History Construction business: 1844 to the 1920s The comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thames Television
Thames Television, commonly simplified to just Thames, was a Broadcast license, franchise holder for a region of the British ITV (TV network), ITV television network serving Greater London, London and surrounding areas from 30 July 1968 until the night of 31 December 1992. Thames Television broadcast from 9:25 Monday morning to 5:15 Friday afternoon (7:00 Friday night until 1982) at which time it would hand over to London Weekend Television (LWT). Formed as a joint company, it merged the television interests of British Electric Traction (trading as Associated-Rediffusion) owning 49%, and Associated British Picture Corporation—soon taken over by EMI—owning 51%. Like all ITV franchisees, it was a broadcaster, a producer and a commissioner of television programmes, making shows both for the local region it covered and, as one of the History of ITV#The Big Four and Big Five, "Big Five" ITV companies, for networking nationally across the ITV regions. After its loss of franchise i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
