Tuesday, November 28, 2006

what in Swansea am going on here?

Anyone who's of roughly similar age to me (say 4 or 5 years either way) will surely remember Absolutely. Sketch show, primarily Scottish cast, went out on Channel 4 at about 10pm at various points between 1989 and 1993. And it was very very good - the "Stoneybridge" sketch is the one everyone remembers, judging by how often it features in those "100 Greatest Comedy Sketches" shows, but there was lots of other great stuff as well, the best of which usually featured John Sparkes, one of the great unsung comedy geniuses of the 20th century. And, interestingly, or perhaps not, one of only two regular cast members who weren't Scottish (he's Welsh. Another candidate for Welshman of the Day, perhaps. The other non-Scot, Morwenna Banks, is, as far as I know, English).

So why am I telling you this, assuming you don't know it all already? Well....I decided, several months ago now, that I'd quite like to own the whole thing on DVD. And since every half-baked unfunny sitcom you can think of is out on DVD these days, I fully expected just to log on to Amazon, click the "Buy Now" button and that would be it. But....no. It turns out that Absolutely has never been released on DVD, much to the chagrin of the large fan community. So much so, in fact, that one particularly rabid fan has set up a website specifically dedicated to getting it released. There is an online petition which can be found here: I strongly urge you to leave a comment (this counts as signing it, I guess). Then once it's been released you can buy it for me for Christmas! Perfect.

2 comments:

Andy said...

Morwenna Banks was born in Cornwall, so depending on her personal views on the issue, she might claim to be Cornish rather than English. But who knows, she might hate the Cornish.

electrichalibut said...

She also allowed David Baddiel to successfully impregnate her twice, so I'm not sure how trustworthy her opinions on anything are, really.