john cleease

A rather amusing video popped up on the Internet's neverending series of tubes earlier this week: one of Hugh Laurie's early acting gigs as a rather rude person.

Laurie plays the world's worst customer service clerk in this instructional video opposite Jennifer Saunders, star of Absolutely Fabulous and one-half of the comedy duo French & Saunders, called How to Lose Customers produced by John Cleese's Video Arts company. Laurie not only becomes the rudest clerk since the dark days of Service Merchandise, but Saunders becomes one of the few people to successfully put the overbearing House in his rightful place.



[via Fark]

When I was a kid, I remember seeing episodes of a couple of strange British shows on my local PBS affiliate in Rochester, NY. I never caught them regularly, not even sure when they aired, but I remember one of them was a peculiar little period piece with some funny gags, and a storyline I never completely grasped.

I learned later this first show was the classic Blackadder series with Rowan Atkinson, and the reason the storylines never made sense from show to show is that there are four seasons of the show, all taking place in a different historical period. I saw them out of order, and mostly caught the first season.

Watching the new Black Adder Remastered - The Ultimate Edition DVD set from BBC America (video and audio both remastered), it's clear the best way to watch Blackadder is to at least watch each series in order. And if you can watch the whole run in order, so much the better. From the first series set in the Dark Ages to the last set in World War I (Blackadder Goes Forth), Atkinson's character, Blackadder, remains a scheming coward. But he changes, too.