// Category Archive for: Culture Shock

There’s No Actual Evidence For It, But It’s Scientific Fact: The Work Of Chris Morris

By Matt Keeley

Perhaps the oddest thing about comedian and writer/director Chris Morris’s lack of popularity outside of the UK is that he’s peripherally involved in things that ended up being quite huge in the States.
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This Charming Man: Peter Cook in The Rise And Rise Of Michael Rimmer

By Emily Carney

Before alcoholism, various drugs, loose women, and cigarettes took their toll, Peter Cook was perhaps one of the most gorgeous, sought-after men of his generation (oh yeah, he was also exceedingly witty).
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Cockney Rhyming Slang Is À La Mode

By Margaret Cross

Being a huge fan of Brit flicks, the BBC, Brit writing, and of course, Brit gangsters, I have been in the thrall of so-called “Cockney Rhyming Slang” for close to two decades now. I’ve been an avid student, doing my best to understand the riddle that is rhyming slang. Here, for you Popshifters, I break it down in the easiest way I am able. These are some clever Brits!
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1,000 Umbrellas Open to Spoil the View: XTC’s English Legacy

By James Thurston Davis

I first encountered XTC around 1982, probably their English Settlement album, probably in my friend Marc’s tiny bedroom with the Roger Dean posters on the wall and the cedar chest stuffed with vinyl. I like to think the first thing I remember about that album was Andy Partridge’s snarling vocals on “No Thugs in Our House,” or the aural explosion of “Jason and the Argonauts,” but what really struck me immediately was the overwhelming sense of Englishness that came over me the moment the needle dropped on “Runaways.”
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A Bit On The Bits From A Bit Of Fry & Laurie

By Jimmy Ether

To misappropriate one of my favorite quotes, writing about comedy is like dancing about architecture. It’s difficult to articulate what it is about something that really makes us laugh. Like music, humor touches us deep down at the core. It reaches into our baser instincts where fear, sexual desire, and the cravings for candy reside. On paper, a skit appears to be trite silliness. The analysis obscures the subversive nature of great comedy in which it fights to acknowledge the world and our lives as a ridiculous, nonsensical mess—and then laugh at it.
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It’s a Mod Mod World

By Noreen Sobczyk

I’ve always had a tradition of becoming obsessed with something. Not obsessed in the peeping-around-in-someone’s-bushes way, nor by writing famous people letters, or boiling some guy’s bunny, but becoming deeply engrossed in one particular thing. Be it music, film, or a book, there’s always something that strikes me and becomes my most prized form of entertainment.

When VCRs were first released I would rent the same videos over and over, never tiring of them. One of the first movies I watched ad nauseum was The Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright. Something about the movie had me hooked, and I particularly enjoyed the early clips, fast forwarding through the fringed Woodstock period.

One word kept getting tossed about: Mods.
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These Freaks We’re Talking About: Pulp

By Less Lee Moore

While many music fans were taking sides in the media-fabricated battle of the bands between Blur and Oasis in the early ’90s, there was one band who would eventually turn that war into a stalemate: Pulp.
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Not M-Miss M-M-Mitford: Brideshead Revisited, Revisited

By Hanna

When it came out in 1981, the Brideshead Revisited TV series starring Jeremy Irons was an event, and something remembered like a significant date in history by a lot of people who were alive then. Its greater cultural importance lay in the fact that it set the standard for all eccentric and twee undergraduate behavior, eventually becoming a staple for undergrad language students in the UK.

The TV series’ cult status arose from a situation that sounds like an urban legend, because it seems strange that people took it seriously at any point, and even stranger that they would try to copy a lifestyle that is presented as, at best, ambiguous in both the book and the series. But it’s true, and especially in the ’80s and ’90s, students took the TV series as a model for their lifestyles, co-opting with enthusiasm a philosophy of life that would most likely have excluded them from it on the basis of their origins, had it been real.
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An Introduction To: Reeves and Mortimer

By Aila Slisco

The best kind of laugh is the kind which seemingly comes from nowhere. It’s the product of an inexplicable kind of humor, which no amount of analyzing can explain adequately, and something, which from a comedy performer’s point of view, is just as likely to confuse an audience as it is to make them break down with laughter. Preferably it will do both. This is exactly the kind of comedy the UK comedy duo Reeves and Mortimer have made their specialty.
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Cosgrove Hall Animation: Danger Mouse And Count Duckula

By Lisa Anderson

My love for things British goes way back. Like many people my age, I grew up with Nickelodeon, the cable children’s programming network. One of my favorite shows was Danger Mouse, the first British cartoon to break into the American market, and its later spin-off, Count Duckula. Both were from the animation studio Cosgrove Hall.
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