'allo?

Some of my favorite childhood memories involve sitting in front of the television with my parents watching britcoms. I rarely got to watch them when I started college, but now they show 'Allo 'Allo every weeknight at 11 pm, and several others show on Saturday nights.

One of my earliest favorites was Are You Being Served? - about a group of salespeople at a rather cheap department store in London always getting into scrapes over the cheapness of the administration and their personal agendas. I've grown out of it, but the slapstick still amuses me.

'Allo 'Allo is also very slapstick, but being that it's about incompetent Nazis in occupied France clashing with both the Communist and the regular French Resistance, with the Gestapo thrown in for good measure, I find it very entertaining. All these are tied together by Rene Artois, local cafe owner and philanderer, whose sole desire is to get out of the war alive, with plenty of money wheedled out of his customers' pockets and a chance to feel up the waitresses without his wife interrupting.
I understand it a great deal better at 21 than I did at 12, but any age can appreciate the glory of failed "silencing" attempts involving German officers dressing up as nurses and planting exploding bedpans in the hospital bed of patients who could get them in trouble with the Gestapo.

The last time I was in London with my family, some four or five years back, we spent a night in a comfortable hotel and found a new britcom to love: New Tricks.
New Tricks is the kind of television show that you will never find in America: it revolves around a new cold-case police unit comprised of 'retired' detectives who were crack minds in their day, an attractive lady detective boss in her forties who is constantly stressed between her detectives' rule-bending tendencies and an overbearing boss who expects miracles, and a young black sergeant who is in charge of all things technical.

It's brilliant, involves pathos and drama in solving all the cold cases, digging up past hurts and trying desperately to end the wrongs and set disrupted lives right. The detectives all have vastly amusing personal lives, one is a thrice-divorced womanizer, one has problems with his health and his wife is at the end of her tether dealing with his quirks, the lady detective is determined to break the proverbial glass ceiling, etc, etc.
And the characters involved with crimes provide all the other emotions and plotlines one could wish for: philandering mothers, double-crossing business partners, liars, opportunists, hopeless romantics, eternal optimists, soft-hearted family members, bullied friends and the easily swayed lovers.
New Tricks has actually started broadcasting in Orlando on Monday nights (Tuesday nights?) but it hasn't come to Gainesville yet.

I just wish America would look at the supreme mastery of mixing slapstick with true drama, pathos of lovers with the shrewd brashness of greed, inspirational desire to do right with base motives for personal gain. How can "reality" tv possibly compare?

My perceptions of good tv have changed a great deal since my childhood, watching PBS and sports and VHS tapes with my family around our sole television set. It's just lovely to escape into a world that I understand better than this Puritan one, with gentle reminders of the cultures I love and comedies that tickle my sense of humor.