Queue Tips: A bit of Jeeves and Wooster

For a while after Christmastime, my younger son and I had been watching "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" before bedtime.  I'm not sure how I ended up selecting that show.  It might have been after watching "Blackadder's Christmas Carol", which has both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in it.  We watch that special a lot during the holidays.  I might have also been reading about how good Hugh Laurie's American accent was in "House", and went into a rabbit hole of all the shows he's been in.

Or, it could have been after watching "The Young Ones", in which Hugh Laurie had been a guest.  I think I ended up watching specials on Ben Elton and the Cambridge Footlights.  I think Hugh was also in an episode of "Filthy Rich & Catflap", and I think it made me want to see more of their comedy.

Anyways, my older one reminds me that apparently I had played the first episode of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" while we were doing the Christmas tree.  I don't think this was when we were putting it up.  We immediately took down the lights right after Three Kings Day, so this must have been early January.

I admit I let Dusty stay up past his bedtime to watch the show.  I told him it was all right as long as he was able to wake up on time and eat breakfast in the morning.  And for the most part, he did.  It was also a nice bonding moment for us.  We ended up with a lot of inside jokes and references, like "Soupy Twist!"

Once we got through the entire series, around February I put on "Jeeves and Wooster".  I didn't know anything about it, except that both Fry and Laurie were in it.  I was a bit disappointed at first because I had expected another hilarious over-the-top laugh out loud show, but it turned out to be a more subtle situational comedy.  Surprisingly, little Dusty was into it.  He was mostly quiet, but he never wanted to miss a moment.

The dialogue can be verbose, with kind of a complex vocabulary from time to time.  But he still seemed to get it.  He would ask sometimes what a word or phrase means.  He liked the theme song and would sometimes do a little dance to it.  When the end credits came on with the song, he would want to watch it all the way through the end.  Sometimes, we would say "What ho!" to each other, and at some point he kept singing "Sonny Boy".

There were some nights when I was so tired that I would doze off and miss it but he still stayed up with full attention.  During the day when he is off to school, I would try to catch up and rewatch the episode.  Not that I necessarily remembered.  And some days are so busy that I could barely retain what was going on.  There were times when I would have to rewind multiple times to understand the plot.

It's funny though that in the last couple of seasons, the show was set in New York City.  One of the things I like about the British shows is their accents, but in these episodes, it seems to be British actors pretending to have American accents.  Maybe I'm just me, but it's kind of obvious.  They're doing their best, of course, but it sounds a bit amusing to me.  Also, some of the word usage is not how an American would speak, I think.  They would be a bit more of a plain English.

Anyways, we got to the end of "Jeeves and Wooster" recently, and it kind of makes me sad.  A lot of things make me sad.  Now he is asking to watch "Malcolm in the Middle" next.  Totally unrelated, but he likes that show, too, and has seen some of the later season episodes.  I'm considering it.  But maybe I'll just let him sleep earlier instead.