Biggest Comedy Rip-off Page 2

Quote: Marc P @ February 24 2010, 11:33 AM GMT

It's the Marc of a man!

>_<

Have people become educated, or has no Lead Balloon opponent discovered this thread yet?

This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aucj0zfoEvM
was a lot like this https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/362#P3326

Dan

BBC's late 1990s sitcom Chalk was basically Fawlty Towers set in a school. The first episode even had a rat loose whilst a health inspector was visiting.

My Family was a poor mans 2point4 Children.

Same whacky situations and characters.

Game On was Friends set in England.

Big Top was a direct copy of The Tweenies.

Quote: Dusty Substance @ February 24 2010, 2:45 PM GMT

BBC's late 1990s sitcom Chalk was basically Fawlty Towers set in a school. The first episode even had a rat loose whilst a health inspector was visiting.

I've never agreed with that analysis.

In any case, my notes show that the rat(s) were dead, and I don't recall a health inspector?

https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/chalk/episodes/1/1/

I remember a school inspector episode when they all ended up in a mental hospital

I don't recall that ending, but there were definitely school inspectors - episode 5, apparently. https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/chalk/episodes/1/5/

Yep they got carted off in a white van, due to the fact that Eric had driven them insane.

At the end he asks "must this happen every year"

Love it.

Quote: David Carmon @ February 24 2010, 7:09 PM GMT

Game On was Friends set in England.

Samantha Janus's character Mandy might have been a combination of the three girls of Friends, but Martin the wuss and Matthew the agoraphobe weren't very Friends-like. I thought Coupling was supposed to be the British Friends, but I never watched enough of it to make a valid comparison.

Didn't Game On come before Friends?

Friends was first, but only by 5 months.

Ah, apparently the first episode was broadcast 5 months after the first Friends episode. Surely not long enough for it to have been a copy?

*edit*

Er, what he said.

'How I met Your Mother' is rip-off of 'Friends' with one less friend and set in a bar instead of a coffee shop (the father telling the story to his kids is different than friends, but no more original).

Am I the only one who thinks ripping off another series can be a really good thing? Writers constantly rip off themselves and we don't complain about quality. Why complain when they rip off each other? Artistically it's meaningless, but economically it does, of course, have significance. The whole notion of the rip off is inextricably bound up with the capitalist form of artistic industrial production. Nowadays the schools of Rembrandt, for instance, would be called "those hacks who ripped off Rembrandt" and hipsters would accuse Rembrandt of ripping off Lievens.