[kristianc]

Little Britain just hasn’t aged well. The sketches were always more about repetition than wit, relied on caricature a lot and mistook shock value for satire.

You couldn’t make Little Britain today mostly because it wasn’t very good, and the standards of the time were lower.

You could absolutely remake The Day Today, Brass Eye, Goodness Gracious Me or Peep Show today and they’d be just as good.

[rightbyte]

I think Little Britain kicked downwards.

I really distasted it when it was running.

[kristianc]

I agree, it’s often held up as a “risk taking” show but I don’t think it wasn’t really anything of the sort.

At the moment post 1997 when Britain was starting to change and become more diverse and sure of it itself it reinforced an identify of Britain as it used to think of itself: silly voices, binary identities and oddballs.

It has more in common with Love Thy Neighbour than anything that came after.

[rightbyte]

The contrast to Monthy Python's take is quite stark.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jF-CkMpQtlY&pp=ygUUdmlsbGFnZSB...

[fidotron]

Yeah, that whole era of things like the Jimmy Carr gameshows were honestly a sort of mass nastiness as entertainment.

This business where we're all supposed to be surprised by what Russell Brand was up to despite him being incredibly open about it at the time is the same thing: society wants to blame the highly visible individuals of that era but in truth it was the audience that wanted this stuff that were the problem.

[lmm]

You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved, never mind today. And you absolutely wouldn't get away with Goodness Gracious Me.

[SkyeCA]

> You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved,

I still hold that special up as one of the best pieces of satire to ever air on TV, but at the same time I'm shocked it was ever able to be produced and shown since it satirizes the one topic above all others you aren't "allowed" to joke about.

For those interested I highly recommend watching it: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6shgvw

[foldr]

The episode was also made at a time when it was fashionable to hold the view that the country was gripped by a kind of irrational hysteria about child sexual abuse. Monkey Dust's 'pedofinder general', from around the same time period, reflects a similar attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCywGhHQMEw

Decades later this all looks rather naive. The BBC, especially, could hardly make a program satirizing exaggerated concerns about child sexual abuse, given that the Savile scandal proved that many such concerns had in fact been taken nowhere near seriously enough.

[arp242]

Their "Paedogeddon" special would have been highly controversial in any time and was also far beyond what they did before. Do you really think it could have been made in the 70s or 80s?

[rozenmd]

I've seen a few Instagram reels of folks remaking Peep Show for 2025, it works ridiculously well.

[harvey9]

Chris Morris made a career, early on, of getting fired for stuff he did on air. Not many people would risk that.

[barnabos]

It's aged perfectly fine but this infantile and maoist-like philosophy shouldn't.