The thing with Milligan is that he was far more socially aware than Davidson ever was. His birth and upbringing in India as an army child meant he was always surrounded by the image of subservient charwallahs along the lines of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. Whilst not being excuseable, it was done at a time when most other comedians were doing wobbly-headed Indian routines, and it was at least done, through his childhood influence, with a certain amount of affection, which is not something Peter Sellars could offer. Davidson, on the other hand, is just a hateful cunt.

It Ain't Half Hot Mum I also watched at work a few years ago, & it's bloody hilarious. I'm not going to argue that it's not a product of its time, but I think it's subtler than it's given credit for.

The most shocking scene on TV ever for me was Lisa Faulkner getting her faced put in the boiling chip fat in that first Spooks show.

Having seen her on Masterchef I almost hoped someone would do the same every time she blubbed.*

The racism points are wrong and annoying but unfortunately most of those were from a time when that didn't shock.

*(not really, but she was a blubbering cry baby)

If you've seen the Willem Defoe film Antichrist, that whole thing is shocking.

The sex, the mutiliation, something like Saw with its gross out moments I can cope with, but the female mutilation I couldn't watch in particular in this.

Feel quite uncomfortable vaguely referring to it here.

If we are moving into films then I'd just like to mention La Pianiste directed by Michael Haneke, its just one long shocking experience.

If we are going onto films then "The Nutty Professor" was the most shocking thing I had ever seen.

In fact it was so shocking I couldn't watch more than about 20 minutes of it. Apparently the rest, according to others who managed to see out the whole film, is exactly as shocking as the part that I saw.

Truly shocking.

Purves, didn't realise how close together these great episodes were. One of them has an even better joke in where Rodney wakes up and asks where Del is. Albert says something about how the New York stock exchange closes and Tokyo opens.

"He's gone to Tokyo?"
"No, Pettycoat Lane Market"

Tubby Isaacs wrote:
Maybe too strong a word, but remember in Auf Wiedersehen Pet when they all go into town drinking? I think most of them go off with prostitutes and it doesn't seem to be regarded as "an issue" at all.

I think only two (Bomber & Oz) of the seven main characters partook. Dennis went along but decided to wait outside and have a fag.
Neville was pretty shocked when Oz mentioned Dusseldorf had the best brothel when the three Geordies were travelling to Germany.
Barry had seen it all before and disapproved but was more concerned with saving his money and creating a democracy in the hut.
Don't think Moxey turned up to the 2nd episode but I doubt he'd have had any moral problem.

Apologies. I thought Dennis went in.

I'm muddling it up with the scene in America, I reckon.

If we are moving into films then I'd just like to mention La Pianiste directed by Michael Haneke, its just one long shocking experience.

Also, (spoiler) the suicide in Hidden. Unexpected, sudden and shocking.

The bit where Guy Crayford takes off his eyepatch. It felt like the sky had fallen in on me.

I was shocked to hear Michael Crawford say "jockstrap" in ITV's short-lived comedy Chalk & Cheese. Not only was it the first time I'd ever heard the word "jockstrap" on television (I was ten at the time), but because I'd been used to Michael Crawford talking primarily about his wife and daughter and about cats defecating in places they shouldn't.

The bit where Mary Poppins actually got her tits out in "SOB".

A mate of mine wasn’t allowed to watch “It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum” & “Are You Being Served” as there were homosexuals in it. I always found that pretty shocking.

“Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” had its other dodgy moments, what with Oz referring to Neville as Clive of India in the moonlighting in the restaurant scene etc., but it’s worth mentioning how huge this programme was in my house when I was a kid.

The creator, Franc Roddam, is a Teessider, and I believe that he originally wrote the show about Teessiders as a response to the then fairly phenomenon of the diasboro caused by the early 80s recession (which we’re still waiting for an end to), but they couldn’t find enough Teesside actors so changed the characters into cuddly Geordies. So the legend goes. Our dad was one of those who retrained after redundancy and started working away and our mam would tape the show and they’d watch it when he came home. I was sometimes allowed to watch it too…

But the point is, this show really meant something to them, it detailed a lifestyle that they understood – no doubt the scene with the men visiting prostitutes caused a few rows in my neck of the woods. As our dad tells it, the booze & birds lifestyle was popular with a lot of the chaps working away. I’m sure the wives & girlfriends at home responded in a variety of ways.

It was odd, but yet totally obvious, from the way my father tells it, how many smogs, and north-easterners in general, were in effect forced into the working-away lifestyle. Here, we had three massive employers – the docks, the steelwworks and the chemical works. They all started to shed jobs around the same time. Those who could found work elsewhere, even if it meant being away from their families for months, even a year, at a time. But almost every job our dad went to, the Westerners were from Middlesbrough, Stockton, Redcar, etc. with the odd one a Geordie or Mackem or the occasional American.

Ramble, ramble, ramble…

That Clive of India joke sounds all right to me. He's dressed up in comic traditional Indian costume (that no India ever wears, I thought).

More dodgy I think is the treatment of the Turks. One of them steals, one of them wields a knife and abuses a white girl, the others don't seem to register. Contrast that with the treatment of Germans where the joke's on Oz. Great speech by Dennis where he says "you're the big mouth nationalist for a country that can't even give you a bloody job".

I was quite shocked one evening in late-1976 when I sat down with my parents to watch Today and an item about something called punk rock came on.


There was a bit of a hush in the Dangleberry household after the TV was turned off, I can tell you.

When I was a kid I remember being really shocked at the scene in Jason and the Argonauts where the teeth are scattered on the floor and then the skeletons rise from the soil weilding swords ,in fact it freaked me a fair bit.

In The Road, the Viggo Mortensen post-apocalypse film, when he ventures into the cellar of the isolated house and finds all the people imprisoned in the cellar that the cannibals are harvesting the limbs from. It wasn't the shock value from the image on screen, but the dawning realisation that this along with the insane paranoia that envelops every character throughout the whole film,is how the human race will most likely descend in such a situation, and all that dramatic silliness in The Book Of Eli, Mad Max (which got sillier with each sequel) and Kevin Costner's fucking Postman is just a load of old tosh. Reality is just far more terrifying.

I haven't seen The Road, but that part in the book was fucking intense. I mainly wanted to see the movie to see how that scene was done...the quiet looking through the house through supplies and to see if anyone is there, then going down into the basement and then OHFUCKOHGODGETOUTOFHERE. It made me queasy and sent my heart racing like nothing I've read before.

Once upon a time it was felt that British schoolchildren would only learn how to be careful if you scared the living shit out of them on a regular basis. Much of this is pretty nasty, especially when you consider it was designed to be shown to primary school kids.