DVD review-Little Britain USA

One Saturday morning after my heart attack and bypass surgery I was out running errands in Sparky's car. I was listening to NPR and one the weekend edition of Morning Edition they were doing an interview with a couple of British guys and a TV series called Little Britain that was just hitting our shores. It sounded like it was something right up my British comedy loving alley.


Then a couple of weeks later while in a book store that also sold DVD's Sparky asked me if there was anything in there I might like for my birthday. I said that we both might like this DVD I had heard about called Little Britain. Being the great gal she is she bought it for me and we went home and began watching it. It was, we soon discovered, better than our wildest expectations. We laughed ourselves silly while watching the exploits of the various characters. We fell in comedy love with Vicki Pollard, the Scottish innkeeper, little Dennis Waterman, the hypnotist, the little round shop keeper and his nemesis Mr. Man, and all the rest of the characters. When the second series came out on DVD months later we snapped it up, just like we did when the third series came on DVD. We fell in love so much with Little Britain that it was one of the reasons why we got digital cable.


After the third series came out there was talk of Little Britain coming to HBO. Knowing the track record of transplanting British comedy hits into American TV shows, I was hugely apprehensive. For every Steptoe and Son (which was the basis for Sanford and Son) there were train wrecks like Amanda's by the Sea (a terrible American remake of Fawlty Towers), the US versions of Coupling (ugh), Men Behaving Badly (ick), and Cold Feet. In addition to a version of Little Britain coming to a US TV screen near me, there were also rumors that Scientologist Kirsti Alley was behind a US version of The Vicar of Dibley and that there was also a remake of Father Ted in the works. I took all of that as bad news.

Thankfully the remakes of Dibley and Father Ted fell through but HBO did indeed give us, as promised, Little Britain USA. And it's not as bad as I feared it might be. David Walliams and Matt Lucas, the two men behind all the main characters in Little Britain, did a very smart thing in adapting their hit TV show to the American market, they assumed that no one had seen their old show and they transplanted some of their top characters to this version. They also added some new running characters to this new series.

Over all the US version works well. They struck a good balance of old characters in new situations, although if they had left the character of Emily Howard behind it would have suited me fine, she's a one joke character that should have been retired after the first series in my opinion. And most of their new characters are pretty funny as well, my favorites are Mr. Dog and his owner, Bing Gordon the eighth man on the moon, and Ellie Grace and her mother. I'm not crazy about the two hunter characters but others may find them funny.

My only problem with this new series is that a lot of it seems old to me. I've seen the older series so many times that I almost gotten burned out on some of the characters like Sebastian, Marjorie from Fat Fighters, and Daffyd the only gay in the village. I would have liked to see more new characters but I can see why they relied so much on older characters, not everyone watched the older series as much as Sparky and I did.

If this DVD is your first introduction to the world of Little Britain then you'll find it funny, if you have a sense of humor that is, and it's worth watching. I'd urge you to check out the first three series after you watch this one because on the older DVD's there are more characters, the deleted scenes show some characters that they lads Walliams and Lucas decided to cut but actually are funnier than and more real than what's on most TV shows now, and because you will gain an appreciation of the characters you see in the US version.