Birthday Bits - Part One

Birthday Bits - Part One

As those of you who are friends with us on Facebook will have seen yesterday was Andrew's birthday.

And as it was his 50th birthday I decided to get him a range of DVDs that covered each decade that he had been around for.

So for the 60s I got him 'The Secret Service' starring  Stanley Unwin in human and puppet form as a vicar/spy.

I must admit to not really liking Stanley Unwin, his comedy not being to my liking, but I'm interested to see how the series works and to see if I warm to it and him.

For the 70s I picked up 'Strangers' featuring the much missed Don Henderson as D.S. Bulman. This was inspired by Andrew mentioning in our video covering 'Delta And The Bannermen' that we should watch 'Bulman' as that what Don Henderson was known for at the time of transmission.

But having discovered that the complete series isn't out until the end of the month I decided on a whim to pick up 'Strangers' as it introduces the character.*

And according to Warren it's a very strange series, so I look forward to watching some of that.
Now when I got to looking for something from the 1980s I must admit to looking for quite some time before decided upon 'Alfesco', which is a comedy sketch show from the early 80s and featuring many future stars, such as Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane and Ben Elton.

I must admit to there being a little bit of "oh that will do..." about this choice,  but it also showcases these extraordinary people at the very start of their careers and should be a interesting watch.

And then for the 90s I had already decided upon 'Paul Merton in Galton and Simpson's ...' which features him in remakes of many of Galton and Simpson's most famous episodes and plays as performed by the likes of Tony Hancock and Les Dawson. I thought it would a goood thing to cover for the podcast and also good to see how he plays the parts differently from those the stories were orignally written for.

There is also one more thing to come as one DVD that covers the 2000s and 2010s has gone astray on the way to us and will be resent by the seller. But that is a very diffeerent thing and may be reported on at a later date.

You can of course expect all of these DVDs to be covered on 'Round The Archives' at some point in the future. The very distant future as the next two issues are pretty much planned out.

And all of the mentioned DVDs are available from the Network and other websites.

So stay tuned. as somebody else once said...

(By Lisa Parker)

* Actually Bulman first appeared in 'The XYY Man', which we've also got but haven't got round to looking at either!