The 20 greatest proggy TV shows ever!
Mar 30, 2020 6:24:43 GMT
nonrabbit, bunkerfan, and 2 more like this
Post by maddogfagin on Mar 30, 2020 6:24:43 GMT
For those who are self isolating at the moment, this is a fine article to read and remember some of the "curious" tv shows ever produced.
www.loudersound.com/
The 20 greatest proggy TV shows ever!
By Tommy Udo (Prog) 15 hours ago
Did what you watch as a kid inform your later musical taste? Here's 20 very proggy TV offerings we've watched over the years
Before the mid 60s, TV in the UK was dreadful – monochrome, Muffin The Mule, the potter’s wheel, 10pm shutdown, ITV game shows, cheap programmes with limited ambition and strangulated posh voices. Things started to improve, thanks in part to classy US imports and their British imitators. The raft of excellent American sitcoms and dramas that started to show up on UK screens between 1962 and 1967 was the televisual first wave of rock’n’roll: The Twilight Zone, Bewitched, The Addams Family and Star Trek. By comparison, UK TV looked dowdy and out of touch. Before long, programme-makers on both sides of the Atlantic were looking to push the boundaries within the confines of the format.
It was the same sort of creative drive that, in a few months, saw no-frills R&B groups mutate into ambitious, pretentious – in a good way – prog combos. Like prog rock, prog TV looked beyond its limitations, and started to bring in material and ideas from art, theatre, film and philosophy. When Lew Grade, the great TV magnate and enabler of this new wave of creative TV, commissioned actor and producer Patrick McGoohan to make a sequel to his successful Cold War spy drama Danger Man (aka Secret Agent Man), he gave British TV a drop of something hallucinogenic that changed it forever. The Prisoner was to TV what Sgt Pepper is to albums. It was a marvellous demonstration of the possibilities of popular drama. As for comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus blew apart the doors conceptually and culturally – and made its mark on Jethro Tull, said Ian Anderson in Prog 15: “Python challenged the perceptions of what people were doing. It was prog humour, surreal expression. We [musicians] liked that… and found new boundaries.”
There is no single paradigm for prog TV: PTV ranges from psychedelic children’s shows such as The Banana Splits, to frustrating Gordian-knot mysteries Twin Peaks and Lost, where the viewer is never entirely sure what is going on. And, as with prog rock, it isn’t for everyone.
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Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969)
There’s always been an absurd kink to British comedy, but Python transformed the genre. The surreal skits and Terry Gilliam’s animated inserts made it unlike anything that had gone before. The Pythons signed to Charisma and became labelmates of Genesis, appropriately.
link
www.loudersound.com/
The 20 greatest proggy TV shows ever!
By Tommy Udo (Prog) 15 hours ago
Did what you watch as a kid inform your later musical taste? Here's 20 very proggy TV offerings we've watched over the years
Before the mid 60s, TV in the UK was dreadful – monochrome, Muffin The Mule, the potter’s wheel, 10pm shutdown, ITV game shows, cheap programmes with limited ambition and strangulated posh voices. Things started to improve, thanks in part to classy US imports and their British imitators. The raft of excellent American sitcoms and dramas that started to show up on UK screens between 1962 and 1967 was the televisual first wave of rock’n’roll: The Twilight Zone, Bewitched, The Addams Family and Star Trek. By comparison, UK TV looked dowdy and out of touch. Before long, programme-makers on both sides of the Atlantic were looking to push the boundaries within the confines of the format.
It was the same sort of creative drive that, in a few months, saw no-frills R&B groups mutate into ambitious, pretentious – in a good way – prog combos. Like prog rock, prog TV looked beyond its limitations, and started to bring in material and ideas from art, theatre, film and philosophy. When Lew Grade, the great TV magnate and enabler of this new wave of creative TV, commissioned actor and producer Patrick McGoohan to make a sequel to his successful Cold War spy drama Danger Man (aka Secret Agent Man), he gave British TV a drop of something hallucinogenic that changed it forever. The Prisoner was to TV what Sgt Pepper is to albums. It was a marvellous demonstration of the possibilities of popular drama. As for comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus blew apart the doors conceptually and culturally – and made its mark on Jethro Tull, said Ian Anderson in Prog 15: “Python challenged the perceptions of what people were doing. It was prog humour, surreal expression. We [musicians] liked that… and found new boundaries.”
There is no single paradigm for prog TV: PTV ranges from psychedelic children’s shows such as The Banana Splits, to frustrating Gordian-knot mysteries Twin Peaks and Lost, where the viewer is never entirely sure what is going on. And, as with prog rock, it isn’t for everyone.
----------------
Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969)
There’s always been an absurd kink to British comedy, but Python transformed the genre. The surreal skits and Terry Gilliam’s animated inserts made it unlike anything that had gone before. The Pythons signed to Charisma and became labelmates of Genesis, appropriately.
link