BBC version, 1985
Recommended: Yes.
Hi there’s this play that’s kind of like Monty Python but anarchist political satire and all the more funny therefore.
I honestly less want to review it and more want to say: here’s an embedded YouTube link. Watch it:
I want more things like this, yes please.
actual analysis
Okay, apparently I’m supposed to actually write about things and I’m not just supposed to link to YouTube, even if it’s a full damn movie. Or maybe it’s a play. Or televised version of a play. How do they even keep track of what’s a movie and what’s a TV show in England where they’ve got the BBC?
Is the BBC an argument for why if there’re going to be monopolies, public monopolies are better than private monopolies? American TV when I was growing up in the 90s was absolute shit. The BBC did better with 4 channels than America did with like 400 or whatever.
I mean, for fucks sake, the BBC ran The Young Ones in like 1982. Most of you motherfuckers weren’t even born yet and the state monopoly on TV in England was pumping out in-jokes about a punk, an anarchist, a hippie, and a yuppie living in a dilapidated house. And over here we had what, Cheers? No one watches Cheers. I’ve never even seen Cheers because people who are old enough to have seen Cheers are quiet about that and pretend like the whole thing never happened. There’s a reason people who grew up in the 80s don’t talk about TV. (Except M*A*S*H that shit was alright.)
Anyway, I mean, fucking smash the state and shit but let’s keep BBC, alright?
As for Accidental Death of an Anarchist, it’s about this anarchist guy in Italy who got hucked out the fucking window of a pig station while being interrogated, and it’s based on a true story. The basic idea, right, is that this guy’s “accidental” death probably wasn’t accidental, because he probably got hucked out the aforementioned window.
So how genius is this shit? This play is like if someone managed to make a fucking play about Freddie Gray (a young black man from Baltimore who died “accidentally” in police custody in April 2015 because the fucking pigs murdered him) and made it hilarious and full of zany hijinks and cold-blooded revenge.
Oh just watch the fucking video embedded above, it makes all its own points better than I was going to anyway.
Amateur Brit anarchist here, wanting to say thanks for bringing this wonderful fun to my attention, as well as for mashing up multiple of my primary interests into a single website.
As much as “Fucking smash the state and shit but let’s keep BBC” is the closest thing I’ve heard in a while to a rallying cry I’d want to wave on a placard, interestingly this adaptation wasn’t a BBC production. It aired in 1985 on Channel 4, a commercial station which had only been around a couple of years at the time. Maybe all TV’s pretty weird over here. The BBC’s certainly an odd duck as state monopolies go; the people and media organs who’ve just elected our right-wing government tend to be loudly critical of it for a perceived left-wing bias. Broadly speaking I’m glad it’s there.