----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marty Rudnick" <mrudnick@marturo.com>
To: <audities@smoe.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 7:01 AM
Subject: Re: Little Britain (League of Gentlemen)


>I cannot recommend highly enough, the BBC original series "The 
>Office".   The American version is not bad, but pales in comparison.

There's a much lesser-known show that I think beats the crap out of 
The Office (which I truly think is the single most overrated TV show 
of all time), called The Smoking Room.  It's been running on BBC 
America recently, but since they've run the first series at least 
twice already, showings can be somewhat sporadic.  They haven't yet 
run the second series, which ran in the UK last summer.

Every episode of The Smoking Room takes place in real time, in the 
smoking lounge of an office that's deliberately left entirely vague. 
(The first rule of the smoking room is "no shop talk," so we never 
have any idea what kind of company this is, or what these people 
actually do.)  Basically, every episode consists of the various 
characters drifting in and out of one long, on-going conversation, so 
the comedy is entirely verbal and totally character-based.  This does 
mean that you have to watch a couple of full episodes before you 
really get a sense of who these people are, but as you watch the whole 
series, the characters get surprisingly fleshed out.  (There's one in 
particular, Janet the middle manager, who slowly becomes one of the 
most sympathetic characters in the entire show, even though she starts 
off really unlikeable.)  But most importantly, the whole thing is just 
hilariously funny, for those who like this sort of thing.  The Smoking 
Room lacks the deliberately cringe-inducing qualities of The Office, 
and for all of that show's supposed "documentary" qualities, this show 
feels much more fundamentally "real."  I'd offer some choice quotes, 
but not many of them would make sense out of context.  Well, there was 
one I liked in the Christmas special they ran a couple weeks ago 
(paraphrased):

ROBIN: I was doing my holiday shopping on Saturday, and there was this 
guy dressed in sort of Dickensian gear in front of HMV singing "I'm 
dreaming of a White Christmas."  And every person who went past him 
dropped some money in his bucket.

(general "awwww")

JANET: Well, just goes to show that there's some hope for people, 
then.

ROBIN: No, he was collecting for the BNP.*

(* British Nationalist Party -- the party for ultra-rightist racist 
dolts)

So basically, if you like your humor dry, low-key and on the cynical 
side, The Smoking Room is definitely worth looking into.

S