Yes, this is how it’s done.

Dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” on the legendary Detroit cable TV program The New Dance Show.

The only problem with this video is it’s too short. I could have watched this for hours.
 

 
Steve Love does some pretty good impressions of Game of Thrones characters.

Khaleesi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

 
Via Cynical-C

 
Marc has already posted some of this here on DM, but for those who would like to see more, here is the entire Question Time show featuring John Lydon (among others) which went out on BBC1 last Thursday.

We all gathered round the computer monitor to watch this broadcast last week, and I have to admit it felt like real event television. Having someone with the wit and stature (not to mention televisual infamy) of John Lydon sitting as part of a panel on a mainstream political show simply does not happen very often.

It was a mixed blessing. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the pro-drug decriminalisation discussion, which Marc linked to before, and I thought he could have handled that part better. I also found some of his showboating grating, but hey, the guy is a rock legend, so I guess a bit of attention grabbing narcissism is to be expected.

But where Lydon really shone was in the opening few minutes of the show, when the panel were asked about the current banking crisis, and how the UK government intends to investigate the LIBOR scandal. Perfectly cutting through the blame-throwing merry-go-round the politicians were spinning in an attempt to avoid giving any real answers, Lydon was loud and direct, and did what he does best - namely, a physical representation of righteous fury. Below is the entire episode, but the beginning of Question Time is worth watching just to see Lydon put Louise Mensch and her ilk firmly in their place, by reminding them that this is not some abstract argument or phiopsphical discussion. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake:
 

 
Best birthday wishes to Peter Serafinowicz, co-creator (with Robert Popper) of the all-time genius comedy classic Look Around You and the voice of Sith Lord Darth Maul.

He’s also in a class of his own on Twitter, using the 140 character social media tool like a laughter-spitting machine gun. Peter Serafinowicz turns 40 today.

(Peter, they’ll tell you that 40 is a “good age for a man” but they’re lying: It is pretty much a mathematical certainty that it’s all downhill from here and you get to carry that thought around with you from here on out. Aging. I don’t recommend it.—Richard, 46)

Below, the “Germs” episode of Look Around You, one of the smartest TV comedies ever produced.
 

 
I think we can all agree that Chris Morris is a comedic genius, right?

His work, from BBC Radio’s On The Hour and The Chris Morris Music Show in the early 90s, through The Day Today, Brass Eye and Nathan Barley on TV, and all the way up to his most recent work, Four Lions, is both howlingly funny and the pinnacle of biting satire.

One of the reasons his work is so powerful is the attention to detail, from the small linguistic tics to the perfectly-framed, over-the-top computer graphics. But in particular, for me, it’s his use music that is most impressive. Morris can simultaneously rip the piss out of a tune or a band while lodging a brand new melody in the style of that act permanently into your brain. That’s no mean feat.

While Chris Morris’ musical works are never really foregrounded in his films and shows, they are definitely worthy of attention in their own right. (Heads up WARP - why not put out a compilation of Morris’ musical satires?) So, after a discussion with a friend that was sparked by the discovery of an American band non-ironically named “Blouse”, I decided to compile the best of Morris’ musical parodies for DM.

A major tip of the hat is due to the YouTube uploader FourJamLions, who has uploaded quite a bit of Morris’ music, though some of it is not embeddable on other sites. Here is FourJamLions’ compiled clip of the best musical moments from the classic series Brass Eye. This clip includes the priceless Pulp parody “Blouse” (with Morris playing the lead singer “Purves”) singing an ode to serial child killer Myra Hindley. After the jump there’s more of Morris’ musical monstrosities, but if you need some bizarre-but-familiar aural refreshment this Friday, here’s a great introduction:

BRASS EYE Music (inc Pulp parody BLOUSE “Me Oh Myra”)
 

 
After the jump, music from The Day Today, Brass Eye, Nathan Barley, and The Chris Morris Music Show…
 

“Jesus, darling—when do you reckon they’ll learn?”

As good as the BBC is at making authoritative and expertly styled documentaries on virtually everything, it seems bizarrely in denial of the YouTube age.

As with its programs on punk, reggae, synthesizers, and krautrock, the Beeb’s rights department seems strangely bent on keeping its pop history lessons imprisoned in its UK-only iPlayer nick, even while kind YouTube uploaders like LisbonExpress and Syden2 hook up the colonies with the good-good.

Ah well. Here’s the BBC’s doc on David Bowie’s creation of his Ziggy Stardust persona…
 

 
After the jump, the Beeb doc on how Pete Townshend & the Who made Quadrophenia…

 
German TV program Durch die Nacht mit (into the night with) puts together a couple of artists/celebrities and lets the cameras roll as they hang out together and shoot the shit. It’s all rather loosey goosey.

In this show, Asia Argento visits Joe Coleman’s home in New York City and together they take a trip to Coney Island, visit magician David Blaine and eat at Keen’s Steakhouse. The show includes a clip of Coleman in Scarlet Diva which starred and was directed by Argento.

This episode was directed by Berlin’s infamous Jörg Buttgereit, known for his early experimental films and splatter fests like Necromantik. Argento, Coleman and Buttgereit constitute a triad of some the art world’s most fascinating provocateurs.
 

 
From 1959 to 1961, John Newland directed and narrated the TV show One Step Beyond, which explored the “world of the unknown.”

In this rather amazing episode, Newland travels to Mexico to eat magic mushrooms. This show aired less than a year after Timothy Leary had traveled to Cuernavaca and had his first experiences with psilocybin, making Newland, along with Leary, one of the handful of high profile pioneers of psychedelia and one of the first public figures to praise psilocybin’s mind expanding properties.

That this open-minded episode of One Step Beyond ever entered the homes of unsuspecting Americans is certainly some kind of landmark in the history of psychedelia.

Journalist and book author John Kenneth Muir interviewed John Newland in 1999 (shortly before Newland took a step into the beyond) and discussed the infamous mushroom eating episode of One Step Beyond .

MUIR: Okay, you know I’ve got to question you about the episode called “The Sacred Mushroom.”  This remains one of the most notorious episodes in network TV history, because you are seen on camera literally sampling mushrooms with hallucinogenic properties in a California laboratory.  In your own words from the beginning of the show, “the story featured no actors, no script.”  Basically, it was a travelogue to Mexico to experiment with these mushrooms. What was going on with that story?

NEWLAND: That was our most popular episode.  It was a spooky trip.  We landed in a tiny airstrip in Mexico near a mission.  From there, it was a donkey trip of four days to reach the village [Oaxaca]. It was a dangerous journey, but we got phenomenal footage.

MUIR: That portion of the episode involved Dr. Barbara Brown (a neuro-pharmacologist), David Grey (A Hawaiin spiritual leader), Dr. Jeffrey Smith (a philosophy professor from Stanford) and Dr. Andrija Puharch sampling a mushroom called “X,” given to them by a local with doctor called a brujo.  The peyote was supposed to enhance psychic abilities, and it was pretty damn unusual to see people getting high on TV in 1961, wasn’t it?

NEWLAND: Alcoa told us that the show was so bizarre, that we don’t dare put it on the air.

MUIR: So how did you salvage the episode?

NEWLAND: Well, Puharich asked me to take the mushroom, and I was game, so we took a camera crew and drove to Palo Alto and Puharich’s laboratory.  Once there, I had three cameras rolling the whole time, and I told the cameramen to just keep shooting until we ran out of film.  We decided to shoot and shoot and shoot and see what happened.

MUIR: Did you feel anything strange when you sampled the mushroom?

NEWLAND: I felt light-headed…and a sense of well being…the stuff was distilled.  It was very powerful, but not poisonous, so I didn’t have any trepidations.

MUIR: Were there after-effects?”

NEWLAND: I had flashbacks and hallucinatory moments for about a month.

MUIR: But nothing psychic or paranormal happened?

NEWLAND: No. Not a grain.

MUIR: I guess I should ask you then, have you ever had a psychic or paranormal experience?

NEWLAND: I’ve not had a single experience.  I’d like to have one, and if I were offered one, I’d certainly jump at it instantly.

MUIR: Going back to “The Sacred Mushroom,” your involvement with Puharich in the lab saved the show for broadcast.

NEWLAND: Alcoa saw it and considered my testimony “proof enough,” to air the show.  As I said, it became our most popular episode.”

Here is the “The Sacred Mushroom” episode in its entirety. Sadly, Newland’s enthusiasm for ‘shrooms are not shared by the FDA.
 

 
Thank god for laugh tracks for without them I wouldn’t have been able to tell where the funny bits were in this totally unnecessary attempt at re-making the British comedy series The IT Crowd for the American market.

Despite the involvement of original IT Crowd alumni Richard Ayoade and the talented Joel McHale (Community), one can see why NBC passed on this 2007 pilot. It just ain’t funny and lacks the spark that made the Brit show so smart, so hilarious and so addictive.
 

 
Andy Griffith will mostly be remembered for his weekly TV series where many of us who were growing up in the 1960s found refuge from the harsh realities of a decade in turmoil. Mayberry was a safe haven from the Vietnam war footage we watched on the Six O’Clock News and the yammering of parents whose tongues were attracting lies like flypaper, the result of licking too many S&H Green Stamps and the asshole of unquestioned authority.

Griffith’s show was hopelessly square but it served its function as a kind of cathode-ray Valium, a chill-out tent for the young and restless, a detour into normalcy for budding freaks suffering from the weight of our personal suburban apocalypse. We cooled our heels in Mayberry until we could get the fuck out of there, leaving the hopelessly clueless Opie, hapless Barney Fife and brain-addled Floyd The Barber eating our hippie dust. We’d stay in touch with Aunt Bee for dope money.

Yes, Andy was the dad we all wanted, a hayseed Buddhist with a southern drawl, dressed in Peace Officer drag, tending a drunk tank that had the serene vibe of a Zen monastery. But there was another side of Andy Griffith, the actor, that presented itself in the darkly prophetic character of Lonesome Rhodes (dig that Kerouacian name) in Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd. Rhodes was a bum and a loser hurled into the role of evangelical huckster and pop star - a deviant Johnny Cash hopped up on some kind of fucked-up moonshine pumped out of backwoods stills, yielding a devil’s brew of fallacious firewater, jugged and labelled with the mugs of L. Ron Hubbard, Mitt Romney and Scott Walker. 

Kazan’s film foresees a future, much like the one we have today, in which heroes are villains and shit-kicking rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh rule the media roost as a clueless populace feeds at the trough of religion, political propaganda and celebrity worship with the blind allegiance of dumbstruck teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert.

Here are two clips from A Face In The Crowd in which we encounter the shadow side of the patriarch of Mayberry.
 

 
The rest after the jump…