S02E08

But I need some new things! My boots… zey have so many holes in zem I… I don’t feel like I am vearing any!
Well, ah… you are not vearing any.
Huh? Oh… well, zat vould explain it.

Solidly reliable laughs abound, as the revolution finally settles into ongoing reality…

In this episode:

Song: Learn Your Hieroglyphics — Mat as the Teacher

Recurring sketches:

HHTV Sport — Tudor Football

Dodgy War Inventions — No.28: Russian WWII Anti-Tank Bomb (“Woof!”)

Shouty (Wo)man — New! Georgian Fan (“The latest in mobile communications technology! Everyone should have one!… Except you, ‘cos you’re a bloke.” “Right, terribly sorry.”)

Fashion Fix — Georgian Peasant Becomes a Nobleman (“Well, at least I can’t look any more ridiculous!” ” “…I stand corrected.”)

Stupid Deaths — Sir Arthur Aston, Stuart army officer (Beaten to death with his own wooden leg… “Oooh, hey — I bet you were hopping mad!”)

Scary Stories — The Terror of Tedworth (“What is this, Scooby-Doo?”)

News of the Empire — Caesar Assassination Special (“A cracking good read!… Although it is all in Latin.”)

One-offs:

Vicious Vikings

Made-Up Marauders — An ancient raiding party discovers there’s more than one way of using face paint to terrify…

Attack on Lindisfarne — Vikings -vs- monks, round oh-gosh-an-awful-lot: in which a moment of clarity is achieved… for a moment. (“No, wait! I’ve just remembered… killing is really fun, and taking stuff from monks is very easy!”)

Terrible Tudors

Polite Mugging — Setting a monetary limit on which has predictably unpredictable consequences.

Woeful Second World War

Winter at Stalingrad — “Well… I sink you are in luck. I got zese boots in zis morning — good quality too, zey are Russian!” “How do you know zey are Russian?” “Zere was a Russian in zem.”

Gorgeous Georgians

The Eternal (Fan) Dance — The ‘latest in mobile communications technology’: apparently, propelling sitcom romance hijinks since 1785.

Rotten Romans

Crimewatch BC: Caesar’s Assassination — “No, really we want to kill them and burn down their houses, but I don’t want to say that in public, just in case they run away…” “See ya!” “…me and my big mouth.”

Field Notes:

• So, here we are in the phase of reviewer’s nostalgia I like to call Holy Crap, That Song is Totally Schoolhouse Rock… followed closely by Wait, They Have Schoolhouse Rock in the UK?!
• Sadly, no. However you lot were learning basic educational concepts in my childhood, it clearly didn’t involve adorable animated characters cavorting to catchy, clever contemporary tunes. But damned if this isn’t exactly how Bob Dorough et al. would’ve approached hieroglyphics had they been on the curriculum… and, y’know, Mat’s entire onscreen persona is more-or-less a cartoon character… so it all never fails to totally bemuse me every time.
• Once I do get around to appreciating it on its own merits, I’m captivated all over again. The song is impressively tight lyrically, and the kids are professionally adorable without once sliding into obnoxiously precious — I cannot emphasise this enough, as a rare luxury for an adult watching a kid’s show.
• Also… well, yes, Mat performs the authentic living daylights out of an entire rock/R&B number dressed only in a towel and some fake eyebrows, and I’m honestly not sure if the first or last part of that sentence is more impressive.
• As a general rule though I’ve never really seen the appeal of HH au naturel, regardless of who’s currently going topless. They’re all, y’know, people I’ve spent months writing a blog about, but if they’re going to act as spurs to the… imagination, I generally need a bit of costuming to get well started. Will say, though, I find Mat’s physique a lot more aesthetically interesting than your standard six-pack. Really.
• It also enables him to be an absolutely hilarious parody of your typical fashion guru, which, given the self-satire already inherent in the genre, is no mean trick let me tell you. Gok Wan isn’t really a thing over here, but my leftover neuroses from a brief stop in a fashion buying office are responding appreciatively regardless. They especially like the rhinestones.
• It helps that not only is Mat cute but he can write funny, too. So can Ben (who is also of course fairly cute). Their collaboration on the Lindisfarne sketch is an intriguing experiment; being simoultaneously more sophisticated creatively than your standard HH outing and less adept at merging the facts into same. You’re really not going to learn much here, other than that as performers both men are remarkably unselfish; the punchlines go where they’re funny, not automatically to the stars. I like that attitude a lot.
• Ben is less successful as a full-on cosplay-at-the-Comicon-style Badass Viking Warrior, just because, well, Ben. It’s going to be a few more episodes at least before the image of him threatening to ‘spread’ the enemy clears my brain. S’okay, though, it’s not like it was a wildly innovative sketch to begin with or anything. Except that Lawry appears still to be stuck in psycho berserker mode…
• …which really doesn’t have to conflict with his clown act at all, I suppose. Makeup and balloons and little squirty buttonhole and just possibly a bloodstained knife… oh boy. Can’t sleep, Viking clown will maraud me.
• But enough of all this chipper playfulness. It’s been nearly a season-and-a-half since anyone — in this case meaning ‘Jim’ — froze to death in the unforgiving wastes, so time to visit everyone’s favourite award-winning wuss in Stalingrad!
• If he’s really freezing, why the hell is he making such a fuss? Especially over a fur coat? They don’t have thrift shops in Germany? I’m willing to excuse a lot when Ben and Jim are together onscreen (the little ‘vacation’ thing sounds like another Willbond improv bit, and if so, all the points) but in this case the funny’s so obviously out of sync with the reality it undermines both aspects of the sketch.
• Still, you’ve gotta give the producers credit for sticking to their commitment to more character-based comedy this series, even when going for the noir jugular. That Horrible doesn’t just mean gross is as important a lesson as any for the kiddies to learn — that, and of course the sheer fabulousness of a German accent, thank you Benjamin.
• We are witnessing an HH linguistic milestone on the order of Mat’s Gallic stylings, here, and it will be just as rewarding, if not even more so. Because boy howdy, does this man love his his Teutonic vowels, and all the gloriously unctuous implications inherent therein. You can practically see it glowing off him through the snow and everything. (It’s not the first time he’s broken it out, of course, but the full effect got a little obscured previously on account of NAZIS! and so on.)
• Oh, and speaking of uncompromising bleakness… Animated or no, I notice they didn’t make-believe the dog survived that Russian bomb project.
• I do not wish to go all PETA about it, but geez, show, it might once in awhile be worth remembering that you’re aimed at a segment of the population who probably haven’t yet dealt with the death of a hamster, let alone adorably oblivious Old Yeller here. Come to that, their parents likely aren’t gonna be too happy with you adding to the therapy bills either.
• Meanwhile, Jim totally redeems himself in the Tudor Football bit — later remade of course for Sport Relief, but I must confess to much preferring the original, because Jim’s determined-athlete face is just that hysterically realistic. If I hadn’t already known he was a football fan in real life, I’d so be able to tell, especially as played off Larry’s equally well-judged Member of the Media.
• Overall — just as a suggestion, you understand — great stuff to have on YouTube next time your ‘Merican pals get especially boring re: how sissy European football is compared to the NFL. I know I was very nearly impressed enough to stop snickering every time a European player starts feigning ULTIMATE VIOLATION at a feather touch… kidding! I swear!
• Not exactly devastated, I must admit, that the Shouty Woman concept wasn’t repeated. Martha does her level best — and so, bless him and his solemn silliness once again, does Larry — but this bit works mostly as proof that the concept owes its success as much or more to what Jim brings to it, as the idea itself. Mind, it also works nicely as an audition tape should Martha ever decide she wants to star in a Georgette Heyer adaptation. That is some pro fan-fluttering, right there.
• You can tell it’s a talent, because Katy doesn’t pull it off quite as naturally in the followup bit. All concerned do however fully pull the sketch itself off, in a manner that indicates a firm grounding in ancient ‘Britcoms,’ as still being rerun over here on PBS. Well done, chaps!
• Where Katy really excels, costuming-wise, is in wearing that gorgeous steel-blue velvet Tudor ensemble. I have no idea how authentic it is, but it’s my favourite female outfit of the entire series. Of course, I have a soft spot for the Tudor costuming generally. Those flat soft tam-y things the men wear: DO WANT.
• Stupid Death sidekick watch: we’ve gotten as far as the X-Factor idea, but not the actual skeletons. We’ve also gotten to the point at which the corpses are freely allowed to talk back, argue, and just generally comment along the lines of actual audition hopefuls. Which means we’re basically just having lots of totally random Simon and friends interacting every few episodes or so. I approve.
• Lots of love also for the Crimewatch BC sketch; obvious enough, but with some real cleverness tucked in around the edges of the execution. “Kirsty the Younger” — nice touch that, as is the ‘forensic’ bust. Also, yep, absolutely gonna be checking under my bed for rampaging Lawrys tonight…

95% Accu-rat:

• Right, I have finally been inspired to check into this business with Julius Caesar and his supposedly huge honker once and for all. The consensus of a quick Google Image search appears to be that it was indeed as ‘Roman’ as all get-out — what today is more commonly described as ‘aquiline’ — but not hilariously massive or anything. Let’s face it, when attempting to get yourself nominated as Dictator-for-Life of the known Western Hemisphere, ordinary-looking might have passed, but ‘adenoidal goofball’ would’ve been a major handicap.
• And while we’re on the subject, it turns out ‘Et tu, Brute?’ was shamelessly fudged from the reported ‘Kai su, teknon?‘ [You too, my child?]. That is, if he said anything at all, which is doubtful…
• At any rate, for the really interested here’s an excellent scholarly summary of the reasons why Caesar had to die, and in the process describes the ancient version of a preventable tragedy: Later that night, his wife Calpurnia dreamed of his body streaming with blood and tried to prevent him from leaving the house. The priests (haruspices), too, found the omens to be unfavorable. Caesar hesitated [to go to the Senate] but was persuaded by one of the conspirators… Even as evidence of the plot became known, there were attempts to inform Caesar, but either they were too late or ignored.
• Things I love about the Internet, vol. 3214: you’re never more than a quick Yahoo Answer away from someone who not only has clearly researched the concept of Viking war paint, but tried a potential recipe out on himself. Sounds pretty much the equivalent of what’s shown here — a sort of eyeblack meant to throw the warrior’s gaze into deep, ominous shadow, thus anticipating the covers of death metal albums by several centuries.
• Mind you, it turns out the classic ‘whiteface’ clown dates away back to Ancient Greek comedy… I dunno, folks. I just don’t know.
• At least there are no Bozo derivatives in the full version of the Terror of Tedworth; unless of course you count the folks who fell for it at the time. Basically it appears to have been the seventeenth-century version of the Amityville Horror, glaring red-eyed apparations and all.
• You know the most humiliating lack of foresight in the Soviet anti-tank dog deployment? (Yes, of course Wiki has an entire indepth entry on the whole project.) Even more so than the story as given here, which specifically involves the wannabe four-footed ordnance picking up on the distinctive smell of the Soviet petrol, among several other obvious signs that this was a Really Bad Idea? They left themselves wide open not only to German sneers that the Russian soldiers were so afraid to fight they sent dogs in their place, but the accompanying propaganda photos of cute mutts the Germans claimed to have rescued from becoming squishy shrapnel.
• On the other hand, damned if it didn’t work, sort of: There are however documented claims of individual successes of the program, with the number of damaged tanks usually being within a dozen. For example, at the front of the 160th Infantry Division near Hlukhiv, six dogs had damaged five German tanks; near the airport of Stalingrad, anti-tank dogs destroyed 13 tanks. At the Battle of Kursk, 16 dogs disabled 12 German tanks which had broken through the Soviet lines of defense near Tamarovka, Bykovo… Apparently it really was a dog’s life, out there.