I didn't see this show when it first aired, as I had hopped the Atlantic, and it took a while to go through the backlog of stuff I had missed in the transition. Eventually I got PAL equipment and all was well, but it took a few years.

At some point I received a DVD of the Vicar of Dibley (hereonin refered to as V.D.)in 2002, and was prepared to be mildly amused. And I was amused. Mildly.

This sit-com is so retrogressive that it makes shows such as Terry and June, which was actually made in the seventies, seem ahead of their time.

V.D. is set in an imaginary village - imaginary not only in name, but also in its setting. Yes there are still villages in the UK, but they're largely full of upper middle class people who have taken the mint they made when they sold their London houses, and dropped the lot on a thatched 'cottage' (i.e.a five bedroom vicarage) in the South Downs or the Cotswolds (as long as it isn't too far from the M4 of course).

The 'locals' end up being pushed out to the local council estate (which V.D. pointedly never shows for fear of revealing the truth about English villages - they all have vile council house estates attached to them). So as I said, the setting is plain bogus.

Next up, the characters. Yes there really are people as posh as the Hortons - indeed, I actually work with someone who is, in almost every way, just like Hugo Horton (ho ho ho, alliterative name!). These guys are way out on the edge of reality though. It's astonishing how out of touch with the world posh people tend to be. If only either of the Hortons had had a little more dimension, I might have bought them as real characters.

Alice Tinker - funny, yes. Realistic. No.

Geraldine Grainger (ho ho ha ha, oh my sides are splitting at the alliterative name) - funny- yes, but she's Dawn French. That's her job. And all she does is play Dawn French. In that respect she is exactly like Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis - no acting required, just be yourself. So Dawny does her BBW vicar, and her big grinny gurny thing, and the audience goes mad for it. You know that being the fat girl at the private all-girls school she attended as a child caused her to develop comedy as a defense mechanism - the story we've heard a thousand times from comedians al over the world.

The others - what a bunch of absolutely ridiculous caricatures of country folk. The 'No no no no yes' bloke deserves to be slapped for each repetition of the word 'no'. That would sort him out. 'No no no no no no yes' wasn't even funny the first time. And yet people of small brain girth guffaw loudly and unattractively each and every time the guy does it. Incredible.

Then there's the recurring Liz Smith bad-cooking joke, which doesn't stand up at all. Someone would have told her. Someone would have said,'no your cooking is rubbish, and bananas don't go with herring, not even in Belgium'. But in this world, apparently not.Much as I adore Liz Smith (Royle Family and about a thousand other movies and TV shows), she deserved better. That role must have been a piece of cake.

Then there's the Trigger bloke (Roger Lloyd-Pack) from Only Fools And Horses, who was palin vile. And the boring one. Barely two dimensional characters that never grew at all in the entire ten year run of the show. Extraordinary.

The Alas Smith and Jones tribute they always did at the end of the show was possibly the best and usually the funniest part of the show.

This programe really was the King's New Clothes,and the slightly-brained majority fell for it.

Where does one start?

These characters should have stayed in the pub where they belonged. Amidst all the great comedy that was being made in the eighties by the likes of Ben Elton and Rowan Atkinson, Rik Mayall et al, there was this abberation in the British comedy continuum that somehow allowed not funny old-fashioned 'comedians' in the vein of Cannon and Ball, and Little and Large to produce this skin tearingly bad 'comedy'.

In the eighties, ITV was famously left behind with its face in the dust as BBC and Channel 4 bought up all of the cutting edge comedians (although they managed to get hold of things like Spitting Image and the New Statesman in the late eighties). So ITV were left with the chaff, such as the dismal Hale and Pace.

The ONE skit that Hale and Pace had that was funny (at first) was The Management, which was essentially two night-club bouncers riffing off one another. The Hale and Pace show was suspended from this sketch, which simply was not strong enough to carry the weight of even the lightweight and very dated material we were presented with each week.

But ITV knew their audience - so gay jokes, sexism and so one were the order of the day.

I heartily recommend that you never rush out and buy the extended DVD edition boxed set of Hale and Pace, unless you are perhaps suicidal or masochistic.

I recently purchased the DVD boxed set of all the Comic Strip movies. Whilst i cannot say that I should demand my money back, I was not over impressed.

A large number of these films were of low quality, not only in the obviously low budget production values, but in the obviously contractually obligated scripts.

What happened guys? Was it closing time at the pub, and you suddenly remembered you ahd a script to present to Channel 4's head of comedy on Monday?

Even the ones I did find myself laughing at, twenty plus years after the fact, were funny either because Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson just were funny all the time, or because the fondly remembered Five Go Mad, or Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, or Dirty Movie etc took me back to a time when that kind of thing was pretty new and different, and I was young and wide-eyed and actually thought that life wouldn't turn out to be crap (now THAT's funny).

The recent ones - Four Men In a Car, Four Men in a Plane, were just not funny. Not at all. And these guys were being paid to make these shows, and were given a budget to make the show. I mean for goodness sake, I could have got more laughs by videoing my cats.

When these shows were at their best, they were very good. But the very good ones constitute about thirty per cent of the total.

Here's a list of the bad ones that I can think of:
Gino
GLC
Didn't You Kill My Brother?
Bullshitters
The Yob
The Strike
Consuela
Slags
Eddie Monsoon, a Life
The Beat Generation
War

and here's the kicker - Bad News wasn't funny. I watched in in horror and disbelief - it's just some blokes messing about. There's obviously very little in the way of the script. Nigel Planer revives his Neil character from The Young Ones because apparently that's all he can do other than the Filthy character from Filthy Rich and Catflap.

Very sad.

However the good ones are obviously:
Dirty Movie
Five Go Mad in Dorset
Five Go Mad on Mescalin
Mr Jolly Lives Next Door.

And patchy:
A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques

Feel free to disagree, but the Comic Strip is definitely not worth a second look.

After the Young Ones it was high time that Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson (husband of Ab Fab's Jennifer Saunders) and Nigel Planer went off to do something brilliantly innovative and original.

Instead of that they elected to make Filthy, Rich and Catflap. At the time I had anticipated a new show from them with such longing that I think I laughed at every word, every pratfall and every knob gag. I laughed that Eddie was called Eddie and that Richard was called Richard. I laughed at how disgusting Nigel Planer's 'Filthy' character was. How we laughed. But when I saw this show again on video a couple of years ago, oh how I didn't laugh. But perhaps I was watching it out of context - after all, the Young Ones doesn't stand up twenty years later. But at the time it was massively new and funny and brilliant, because there hadn't been anything like it before.

At the beginning of the eighties there was amassive backlash against the old guard of comedy, the comedy establishment if you will - we were presented with 'alternative' comedy, a sort of punk new-wave comedy that was rude and shouty and violent. Ben Elton was young and brash and out there - now his Queen musical is packing them in, in the West End and Las Vegas and on Broadway. Rik Mayall became a household name and made a mint from Nintendo commercials. Alexei Sayle became a motoring correspondent in 'car' magazine.

What was new is now old, and Filthy Rich and Catflap is certainly that.

Still, at least Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson went on to do the brilliant and innovative Bottom - oh yeah, right. Sorry...

Oh God it was so bad! Bad bad bad!!! Bad effects. Bad stories. Really bad acting. Left over sets from Doctor Who. Left over monsters from Dr Who. Left over scripts from Dr Who.

Example:
Alien: Expungify!!! Expungifyyyy!!!!
Avon: What?
Alien: Expungificatifyyyyy!!!!
Avon: Oh for God's sake.
Alien: Er...expungi...
Avon: You're a dalek, aren't you?
Alien: What? No er...extermin..no I mean expunge!Expunge.
Avon: You're a dalek with a hat on and a toilet brush instead of a plunger.
Alien: Oh I am not!
Avon: Now just go away so that I can shout at Vila.
Alien: oh well alright then. (dalek buggers off)

And then there was the whole Vila/Avon thing. Evidently gay, their love/hate relationship was an allegory for blah-de-blah.

Avon was ridiculously strident. He never actually shouted per se, but he wasn't the kind of person you would want to be sitting at the next table in a restaurant if you were having a quiet night out with your soul mate.

Waiter: Can I take your order now sir?:
Avon: Yes, I'll have the pate de foie gras followed my the mussels in...(bbbrrrgghhhh-cell phone rings)
Avon: (even louder and more strident, and on cell phone) Helllooo!! Yessss!!! I'm in a posh restaurant!!! Yes it's full of noisy selfish people shouting!!! Speak up I can barely hear you!!!etc etc...

Anyway it turns out that only reason ever to watch B7 (as I imagine the geeks must call it)was to see if Servalan would get her kit off. She was absolutely divine,and she happened to coincide with the height of my pubation, so it didn't take a whole lot to trigger a reaction, and Servalan was much more than a whole lot...

OO-ER MISSUS! Ser-va-lan!

and Blake looked like Jeremy Clarkson.