For some reason my Dad visited England in the 2000s and brought back a bunch of Region 2 DVDs of this and I am Alan Partridge with absolutely no way to play them. Partridge still rocks but this show is like a British sketch version of Gozu or Nothing But Trouble, just really troubling all around.
A show that I watched all the time when it aired on Comedy Central despite not finding it all that funny. Something compelling about its grotesqueness. Like a photo book of Victorian crime scenes.
That's impressive even for England but I would also consider how badly Papa Lazarou aged, like they pulled the show from streaming in 2020 because of that.
Tbh my problem with lazarou is more him being a racist romani stereotype, the blackface is less of an issue for me cause it's more about how creepy minstrel shows are then trying to appear as a black person
I enjoyed how fucked up and weird this show was when it was on cc but papa was bad even then. I don't even remember trans stuff bc he was the overwhelming yikes
barbara at least was sort of nice and largely accepted in the original. like relatively normal by the town's standards. the panto show and 2017 eps just handled it way worse. aside from that I liked the 2017 ones though.
I think there is something to the concept of being in a town so small that every interaction is vaguely full of menace in a hard to articulate way (horrors over innsmouth) but placing it in the North is fucked up in a way that I did not have a context for when it came out.
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Guys from LoG are still doing inside no. 9, similarly very dark sense of humour and some of that excellent