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In the UK: Mondays, 9pm, ITV1/ITV1 HD
I’d really like to be able to cheer on ITV. For years, it made some of the best dramas and comedy this country ever produced. Then it fell into a deep, dark hole which looked like it had no bottom. But under Michael Grade and Peter Fincham, it started to look like it had a future again and even began to put out some semi-decent programming.
I’d like to say that Identity, which stars as Ashes to Ashes‘ Keeley Hawes, The Wire/Queer As Folk‘s Aiden Gillen and Soldier Soldier‘s Holly Aird as a crack police squad dedicated to foiling identity thieves, is at the spearhead of ITV1’s resurgence, a gleaming piece of taught drama, intelligent plotting, realistic dialogue and plausible characterisation that any network could be proud of.
I’d like to.
It’s Erin C who’s given us this week’s most captionable Sitting Tennant. Isn’t she a star?
Over in captionland, it was a joint win for Electric Dragon and Dani – well done to you both and thanks to everyone else for contributing. May you all enjoy your runners-up prizes.
Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below or email me and if it’s judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. Don’t forget to include your name in the filename so I don’t get mixed up about who sent it to me.
The best pic in the stash each week will appear on Tuesday and get ten points; the runners up will appear on Friday (one per person who sends one in) and get five points.
You can also enter the witty and amusing captions league table by commenting on Tuesday’s Sitting Tennant photo, the best caption getting 10 points, everyone who contributes getting five points.
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It can’t have escaped your notice that international "format" sales are quite big in the TV world. This is when a foreign TV network, rather than buying your successful TV show, goes and buys the rights to remake it. So Life on Mars, while it was sold to the US and shown there, John Simm, Philip Glenister and Manchester intact, also had its format sold to ABC where it was relocated to first LA then New York and recast with American actors. It’s also been sold to Spain. We, in turn, buy in things like The Golden Girls and turn them into Brighton Belles.
Totally successful idea then, I’m sure you’ll agree. 100% success rate, in fact.
Surprisingly, the UK is actually the number one exporter of formats and it wouldn’t surprise me if Germany were the number one importer. For years, German TV has had a strong tradition of buying in overseas shows, particularly comedy shows, and remaking them.
In very rare circumstances, it’s managed to get the original cast to do everything in German. And by rare, I mean Monty Python’s Flying Circus, aka Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus:
More typically, they’ve been relocated. The conversion of the US’s Saturday Night Live into RTL’s Samstag Nacht (Saturday Night) kept all the ‘furniture’ of the US show, while coming up with German sketches and German hosts.
However, when it comes to comedy, German TV sometimes chooses to do a more or less straight translation. Take for example, Geht’s Noch (it’s going now), which was the German version of Big Train. Have a look at these two sketches, one from Big Train and one from Geht’s Noch, and see if you can see some similarities.
And then things just get a little stupid. Here we have an almost frame-for-frame remake of Channel 4’s The IT Crowd called Das iTeam – die Jungs an der Maus (The iTeam – the boys at the mouse, although originally it was ‘die Jungs mit der Maus’ since Maus is also slang for girl). You can have a side-by-side, compare and contrast on YouTube of the remake of the first episode, or stay here and compare the remake of the second episode with a really bad quality vid of the original:
So what do you think? Does the humour translate? Good plan or should people come up with their own ideas? I’ll let you be the judge.
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