| The 10 Essential British Television Series
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By
Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
Until 1982, when Channel Four started, British television
had just three channels, BBC 1 and 2, and ITV. Yet despite the
relatively limited choice, British broadcasting has managed to
produce great programming that has often shamed its American
rivals despite the comparative difference in the number of
outlets. The BBC first began broadcasting in 1936, shut down
during World War II, and resumed in 1946. It was joined by ITV
in 1955 and BBC 2 in 1964. While British television may have
dedicated quite a number of snooze-inducing hours to snooker
tournaments and esoteric documentaries, as well as its share
of silly sitcoms, it has also managed to produce a staggering
amount of classic programming. Luckily, for Americans, we only
get to see the best in British TV over here. For a list of the
best American exports, see The
10 Essential American TV Series.
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| 1. I, Claudius |
 Prostitution, cannibalism, patricide, incest,
orgiastic sex, disembowelment -- life in ancient Rome was no
tea party. While most Americans may think of classy literary
adaptations as Great Britain's main television export, this
literary adaptation, while certainly classy, would make the
average soap opera fan blush. Starring Derek Jacobi as the
stuttering Emperor Claudius, who manages to outlive most of
his family by pretending to be an imbecile, this look at the
reigns of the first Roman emperors is the most entertaining
history lesson you'll ever see.
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| 2. Singing Detective |
 Dennis Potter's masterful miniseries is not only a
great television show but also one of the great works of its
time on the small or large screen. The story of a writer
confined to the hospital by crippling psoriasis (which Potter
suffered from himself), it is part memoir, part detective
novel, and even at times a musical. As he lies in his hospital
bed Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon), thinks over his past life,
rewrites a Raymond Chandler novel with himself as the
protagonist, and hallucinates, as characters every so often
suddenly burst into song.
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| 3. Upstairs Downstairs |
 As
enjoyable as it was, Robert Altman's Gosford
Park doesn't hold a candle to this sprawling in-depth
look at the nuances and ironies of the British class system.
Set in one British household from 1903 to 1930, this
68-episode series followed the lives of both the wealthy
family living upstairs, headed by member of Parliament Richard
Bellamy (David Langton), and the servants downstairs,
including the butler Hudson (Gordon Jackson), the cook Mrs.
Bridges (Angela Baddeley), and the housemaid Rose (Jean Marsh,
who also co-created the series). Incorporating historical
events, such as the sinking of the Titanic, into the
storyline, Upstairs
Downstairs is an epic look at a vanishing
epoch.
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| 4. World At War |
 This landmark 26-episode series is the best, most
comprehensive documentary ever made about World War II.
Narrated by Laurence Olivier, it represents the apotheosis of
great British documentary filmmaking. While accurate and
thorough this documentary is never dry. From the moment flames
consume the photographs under the opening credits as the
stirring theme music plays, you will be so moved and
captivated that you may forget you are also learning
something.
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| 5. Monty Python |
 Someone at the BBC must have been asleep at the switch
when they let the lunatics of Monty
Python have their own show. A good thing, too, because
they revolutionized comedy with their strange, surrealistic
brand of humor. Every episode was a loose collection of
bizarre skits, or even ideas for skits, that ended as soon as
they began to run out of steam whether they had reached a
proper conclusion or not. Then it was on to the next sketch
about silly walks and dead parrots and singing transvestite
lumberjacks.
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| 6. Fawlty Towers |
 This may be the funniest show to ever air on
television. Monty Python's John
Cleese stars as Basil Fawlty, the inept owner of a small
country inn. When he is not being rude to guests or trying to
communicate with the unilingual Spanish waiter, he can usually
be found trying to avoid the wrath of his exasperated wife who
"can kill a man at ten paces with one blow of her tongue."
Each of the 12 episodes is a perfectly constructed masterpiece
of comic mayhem that could be dangerous for those under
doctor's care.
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| 7. The Prisoner |
 "I
am not a number! I am a free man!" Patrick
McGoohan shouted at the beginning of each episode of this
17-episode series about a British spy trapped in a Kafkaesque
nightmare. Kidnapped after he resigns his commission and taken
to the Village, a mysterious prison that resembles a small
English country town where the citizens all have numbers
instead of names, Number 6, as he is called, struggles to
assert his individuality and escape his captors while they try
to pump him for information. A human chess game and a giant
balloon monster are just a couple of the wackily psychedelic
elements that graced this hallucinatory spy
series.
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| 8. Brideshead Revisited |
 When it comes to impeccably produced adaptations of
literary classics, this is the show that everyone thinks of.
Based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh, the story is told in
flashback as Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons), an officer in the
British Army boarded at an English country estate called
Brideshead, nostalgically recalls his friendship with the
charismatic but flighty young man who used to live there,
Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews), whom he first meets at
Oxford. An elegiac look at England between the wars, it gets a
bit preachy at the end but the early episodes about Charles'
and Sebastian's friendship are unforgettable.
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| 9. Absolutely Fabulous |
 With its pill-popping, sexually libertine heroines,
Absolutely Fabulous could never have aired on politically correct
American broadcast television. But as self-centered and
ridiculous as Patsy and Edina (Joanna Lumley and Jennifer
Saunders) were, it's impossible not to be amused as they send
up fashion and celebrity in the 1990s, as well as themselves
as they try to try to prolong their '60s adolescence just a
few decades more -- much to the chagrin of Edina's
stick-in-the-mud daughter.
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| 10. Queer as Folk |
 This show did not just break taboos it smashed them
into pieces. In the very first episode the drug-taking,
sexually promiscuous 29-year-old gay antihero has sex with a
15 year old boy on the day his son is born to the lesbian
couple to whom he donated his sperm. Explicit and
unapologetic, this series about the admittedly shallow antics
of Vincent and Stuart, two club-hopping gay Mancunians, and
their friends, was the most realistic portrait of gay life
ever broadcast on television, even if critics, both gay and
antigay, were offended by the warts-and-all
presentation.
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