Joey and Dee Dee Ramone appear with their artistic director Arturo Vega and longtime buddy Michael Mckenzie on Efrom Allen’s Underground TV program in 1978.

This is classic Manhattan public access; chaotic, anarchic and fun. I used to call this cocaine TV because I was generally zooted to the gills when I was watching it. This show is particularly good. Instead of the usual assholes that would call in to insult the artists that were being interviewed, the callers on this night seem genuinely curious about The Ramones and the scene revolving around CBGB. This was a time when something very fresh and unpredictable was happening in the downtown clubs and the bands and their audiences were all discovering it together. Even the cynics were starting to pay attention.

Along with Robin Byrd and Al Goldstein, Efrom Allen was one of the pioneers of NYC cable TV talk shows. With its mix of porn stars, punk rockers and nightlife impresarios, Underground TV was always reliably weird entertainment on those nights when you just wanted to stay home and get fucked up.

Enjoy the roots of Youtube.
 

 
If John Cleese hadn’t gone into Monty Python, then he would “have stuck to his original plan to graduate and become a chartered accountant, perhaps a barrister lawyer, and gotten a nice house in the suburbs, with a nice wife and kids, and gotten a country club membership, and then I would have killed myself.”

Ah well, the best laid plans of mice and men. Sensibly, Cleese opted for plan B, and all the success that entailed. It was therefore a surprise when Cleese quit Python in 1973, after its third TV series, and joined up as a supporting player to stand-up comic called Les Dawson, in his comedy sketch show, Sez Les.

Dawson and Cleese could not have been more dissimilar - Dawson short and plump, Cleese tall and skinny. Dawson was working class and self-educated, who had worked a long apprenticeship of stand-up in the working men’s clubs in the north of England, while maintaining his day-job as a Hoover salesman. Cleese was middle class, university educated and was upper-middle management, white collar material.

Dawson had originally wanted to be a writer, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he had hitched the highway to Paris, where he found work as a pianist in a brothel. Unable to find a publisher for his poetry, Dawson returned homewards, and inspired by his experiences as a pianist, tried his hand as a comic. Though he made his name with mother-in-law jokes, Dawson was a clever and verbally dextrous comedian, who dismantled jokes, only to recreate them in a funnier form. Cleese described Dawson as “An autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words.”

After a winning run on the talent show Opportunity Knocks, Dawson earned his first TV series, Sez Les (1969-1976), and fast became one of Britain’s best loved comics. In 1974, Cleese joined Dawson on the series, and the pairing (like a hybrid Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) proved highly successful. Both men had great respect for each other, and more importantly had a genuine affection which came over in their performances together.

Cleese eventually left to make Fawlty Towers, but for 2 series of Sez Les in 1974, Dawson and Cleese were top drawer comedy entertainment.
 

 
More from Dawson and Cleese, after the jump…
 

 
I’m not certain we should be thanking special makeup effects artist Kevin Kirkpatrick for creating these IRL prosthetic busts of Beavis and Butt-Head. This is going to give me nightmares!

I can’t unsee them!
 


 
(via Nerdcore)

 
Minutemen unplugged on Los Angeles public access TV, 1985. The band’s stripped-down, percussive sound, gets into some sinuous grooves in this soulful acoustic set.

Setlist: The Meter Man/Corona/Themselves/The Red And The Black/Badges/
I Felt Like Gringo/Time/Green River/Lost/Ack Ack Ack/Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love/
History Lesson Part II/Tour Spiel/Little Man With A Gun In His Hand
 

 
I Am a Hotel is a rather odd (occasionally kitsch) musical written by Leonard Cohen which was broadcast on Canadian TV in 1983. The plot is composed of a series of five vignettes dealing with love, sex and longing. Each story is based on a Cohen song.

The action takes place in the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. Cohen portrays a character known simply as The Resident, a Greek chorus of one.

Co-written by Mark Shekter and directed by Allan F. Nicholls.

Scenes:

   1. The Guests - the characters enter via the lobby and are taken to their rooms; the bellboy and chambermaid meet in the corridor; and the manager and his wife apparently have angry words in the lobby after which she strides off.
   2. Memories - the bellboy pursues the chambermaid around the laundry and ballroom.
   3. The Gypsy Wife - the manager’s wife, in fetching attire, dances on the boardroom table.
   4. Chelsea Hotel # 2 -  two lovers try, and fail, to make love, and the admiral and diva at last face each other across the hallway.
   5. Suzanne - scenes of “Suzanne” with Cohen are interspersed with shots of the two couples reunited and dancing together, and the hotel manager distraught and then drinking at the bar.

A short epilogue repeats the opening material from ‘The Guests’.

 
There was an interesting letter in that scurrilous rag, the Daily Mail yesterday, printed under the headline, “Let Ken’s movies inspire a new audience”. It was written by Paul Sutton, of Trumpington, Cambridgeshire, who gave a passionate plea for the BBC to stop using edited clips of Ken Russell’s early TV work to liven-up crap shows made by today’s lesser talented directors:

These Ken Russell films aren’t entertainment fit only for ‘found footage’. They’re films, works of very real cinema in which every frame,pictorial composition, cut and music cue has been thought through with a craftsman’s hand and an artist’s mind and eye. They constitute a body of work which stands with the best of any director working anywhere in the world between 1959 and 1970.

Mr. Sutton went on to explains how both Lindsay Anderson, in If…, and Stanley Kubrick, in A Clockwork Orange, lifted from Russell’s TV work, and concludes:

Every one of Ken Russell’s 35 BBC films displays the master’s art. We should be boasting about them and using them to inspire the next Lindsay Anderson, the next Stanley Kubrick and the next Ken Russell.

I for one, certainly do hope the BBC listen up and release all of Ken Russell’s TV films for all of us to enjoy, very soon.

Most recently, the Beeb made this fine documentary Ken Russell: A Bit of a Devil , and while it doesn’t cover all of the great, genius director’s work (no Savage Messiah, no Crimes of Passion, no Salome’s Last Dance) it does manage to show why Ken Russell was England’s greatest film director of the last 50 years, and one of the world’s most important film directors of the twentieth century.

Presneted by Alan Yentob, this documentary tribute includes interviews with Glenda Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Twiggy, Melvyn Bragg, Amanda Donohoe, Robert Powell and Roger Daltrey.

Read Paul Sutton’s blog on Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson and Stanley Kubrick here.
 

 
With thanks to Unkle Ken Russell
 
More on L’enfant terrible Msr. Russell, after the jump…
 

 
Legends Of The Super Heroes was the name given to two Hanna-Barbera-produced live action TV specials from the late 1970s. Batman’s Adam West and Burt Ward once again donned their capes and cowls (which fit a bit tighter by that time) for these atrocities which were about on the same level as Donny & Marie and featured a laugh track.

In the second special, “The Roast,” Ed McMahon served as the master of ceremonies while various lame insults are leveled at the chuckling, good-natured Super Friends.

In this clip, uh… “Ghetto Man,” an inner-city super hero tries to bring the funny and fails miserably.
 

 
Forget The Beatles and The Stones, the sixties was really about “Two Ton” Tessie O’Shea vs. Sing-a-Long Pianist Mrs. Mills.

These two giants of British Music Hall slugged it out during the 1960s and 1970s, each selling shed-loads of records, making top-rated TV shows and performing sell-out concerts across the globe - from Las Vegas to The Wheel-Tappers and Shunters Club - in a bid to be top Light Entertainment Star.

Celebrated ukelele and banjo-player, Tessie O’Shea debuted with The Beatles on the same legendary Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 - their appearance drew the largest audience in the history of American television at the time. It also made both international stars over-night. Though Welsh-born O’Shea was already a star of stage and screen back in Blighty (cast in plays by Noel Coward), her performance on the Sullivan Show guaranteed her a highly successful career on US TV and in Hollywood, making such films as The Russians Are Coming and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Mrs Mills was signed to the same label as The Beatles, Parlophone, and rubbed shoulders with the Fab Four at the Abbey Road Studios, where they both recorded. Mrs Mills was also for a time under the same management as The Stones. While Mrs Mills was arguably a bigger star in the UK, with a dedicated following across Europe and Australia, she never took off in the States as Tessie O’Shea did. However, Mrs Mills did release over 50 albums in 20 years, all of which were best-sellers. No mean feat.

I liked Mrs Mills, but preferred Tessie, who had an infectious twinkle and jolly sense of glee. Here, then, is “Two Ton” Tessie, decked out in a Dolly-Parton-wig and what looks like the living-room curtains, serenading an audience (that looks straight out of Michael Caine’s Get Carter) with a paper bag. From the bizarre Wheel-Tappers and Shunters Club.
 

Above, Harlan Ellison in 1977

Last November, Cinefamily held an event called “The Glass Teat” with writer/raconteur Harlan Ellison. The evening was such a success that they’re doing a second installment this Thursday:

One of America’s most prolific and dangerous writers, Harlan Ellison radicalized science fiction from the 1960s onwards with swirling, shouting, freaky, psychedelic and sexual visions realized across over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays and essays. That would be enough for most — but Ellison is also one of the great TV writers, responsible for iconic episodes of The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to penning the most popular episode of the original Star Trek, and much, much more. And, somewhere in there, he even found the time to write “The Glass Teat”, a seminal work still considered one of the most important and scathing books ever written on the nature of television. Join guest moderator Josh Olson (Oscar-nominated screenwriter of A History of Violence) for a very special evening, as Harlan makes a very rare and highly spirited personal appearance at Cinefamily to discuss his love/hate relationship with TV, followed by a screening of several of his best episodes!

Get tickets here.

Cinefamily, 611 N Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, 90036

If you aren’t in Los Angeles, fret not, for you can tune it to a live webscast of the entire event on the Cinefamily blog at 8PM (PST) on Thursday, January 19th.

Below, Harlan Ellison talks revolution, reality and “speculative fiction” in the late 60s/early 70s:
 

Bruce White “Dr. Steve Brule” acrylic on velvet, 11 x 14 inches
 
Gallery1988 Melrose in Los Angeles is paying homage to all the wonderfulness on Adult Swim by featuring different artists interpretations of the TV shows. Great job!

It opened on January 13 and goes on through February 4, 2011.

Kiersten Essenpreis “Brock Samson & The Neighborhood Stray Cats”

(via Nerdcore )