Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The Fog of War and Sitcoms

2026-Jun-14

Today we have a blog specialty. On today’s program we are talking about another forgotten sitcom. One of the topics we do often here on the blog. Sitcoms that are forgotten enough that no one among the writing staff can find anybody who has heard the TV series in question. Despite being classified as ‘forgotten’ by our anecdotal research, the show we are talking about today is one that should be remembered. And I mean statistically, not just the personal feelings we have for it.

This show won awards during its lifespan in the 1980s. Got multiple seasons year after year, among a media environment with few peer shows that have as many seasons. This show was popular enough to warrant them, and revivals of sorts years after the last season. All those accolades and accomplishments yet this series is still forgotten years after its last fan-requested gasps.

So is life. All sitcoms, even the greatest ones, eventually only get remembered by bored people writing barely read blog posts about their impact on the writer’s life. Not just sitcoms. All things. The most acclaimed movies, books, paintings, songs, fart jokes will only go as far as the people enjoying them. Shows that make a small impact are just forgotten quicker. I think I talked about this with that blog post about Judd Hirsch’s lost sitcom (see blog post #119).

If this TV show had any impact on the life of the progenitor of this blog, the majority of that impact would be very recent, relative to the writing of this blog post. Most of what I know and enjoy about this series happened well into my adulthood. Award winning British sitcoms from the 1980s are a dime a dozen. The reason this show had an impact on me after my childhood was from it making a brief appearance on my childhood bedroom TV.

I first saw this show in the very very formative years of my early childhood. Those same years from my childhood I had mentioned when talking about The Golden Girls (see blog post #107). Almost any snippet of something I wanted to watch from that era condenses into a rare nostalgia earth. With the passing year between impressions and adult re-encounter increases the refinement of this nostalgia.

During those formative years was when I first found ‘Allo ‘Allo. At the time I had no idea what I was seeing. The parts where the laugh track kicked in did mostly coincide with things I found funny. There were several obvious funny parts that were easy to grasp. Everybody on the show’s cast had outrageous accents. They all wore costumes that gave you a good idea about what their characters were all about. That was enough to make a six year old me laugh! To be honest, what I was really looking for was Benny Hill. The most obvious British TV humor to be had on the airwaves in Houston in the 1990s.

When I was 6 I didn’t know who Benny Hill actually was. What I did know was that sometimes on the channel put out by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS ) there was an old British comedy that used a lot of gross slapstick humor. Normally at that age I skipped right over PBS when flipping through the channels. The normal programming on their channels was fancy stuff like foreign movies, symphonies, documentaries. Adult content that did not mean dirty stuff, but adult meaning boring.

On occasions, they had foreign sitcoms. Ones with a laugh-track, so my young mind knew enough to expect something funny. I distinctly remember watching this show on the tiny TV I had in my bedroom because that would be the only reason I would have given PBS a chance. There was no cable outlet in my room so the public airwaves were all I had to choose from.

From my bedroom, I caught one or two episodes but never caught the name. (Hell, I might have watched the show before I could read! Or too new to reading to grasp what ‘Allo ‘Allo meant.) I hunted PBS every now and then looking for that patina that British TV shows had that distinguished it from American shows. Not once did I again see those Benny Hill chase scenes with the sped up frame rate and the Yackety Sax theme song. Instead I found so many boring British TV shows. ‘Allo ‘Allo was among them. It did not have the satisfying heft that I had got from those few Benny Hill sketches I saw, but it did leave something lingering in my memory. Had I been a few years older, I think I would have found Benny Hill infantile and the bawdiness of ‘Allo ‘Allo’s dialogue to be exciting.

The memory lingered in my mind. An errant idea about a French cafe that had all sorts of kooky WW2 characters passing through, having to live through such abhorrent situations, accompanied by roaring laughter. This lingering bloomed into full-blown appreciation some time in my early adulthood when I rediscovered the show. I do not recall exactly when. Perhaps when I downloaded torrents indiscriminately of any music, movie, or TV show. Maybe when I found a cache of licensed media on YouTube when I was bored while on duty during my Navy days. However I rediscovered it, I did. Somehow in my memory the characters are more than just the costumes and outrageous accents that made a sensational impression on my childish brain.

After this inchoate reacquaintance with ‘Allo ‘Allo, I rediscovered the show once more. Recently, by watching it on the video channels that come with Amazon Prime. Which I was delighted to learn can be seen without ads when watched through my PC browser. Given this medium, I would say that this review is not one made while I am still in the middle of the series, at the start of season 4. Another caveat to mention is that I have yet to give one whole thirty minute episode my devoted attention. Almost all of my recent watching is done over my shoulder, while I sit at my work-from-home desk. I eventually catch all of each episode in a patched together viewing pattern with much overlap.

A thing of tragedy: I often have to give my full attention to what I am working on rather than watch TV shows. When that does happen, I rewind the runtime on the playback brusquely, even if it places me back in a scene I had clearly already watched. I likely did not catch all the jokes the first time, so this overlapping method of rewinding gives me chances to fill in the gaps. Yeah, it can be aggravating to see the same joke two or three times in a short span. Once this happened enough, the repeated jokes sorta became funnier. Sometimes you can really appreciate a cheap joke the third time around. To see all the buildup on the show that props up each cheap joke.

This show is so chock full of comedy material and has so many running gags that I feel there is something to be had from this piecemeal approach to watching the entire series. The semi non-linear approach feels like the Catch-22 method of enjoying this show. There is so much going on in the story with not much changing by the end of most ‘resolutions’ to the problems the characters face. Jumping around in the timespan does not change the viewing results that much.

It could be a complaint to say that a show is stale when it repeats itself. I find that the World War 2 setting of this show makes the repetition of everything instead makes it dense with truthful comedy. Much like Catch-22, this show’s charm comes from the madness of rational characters witnessing the same madness happen over and over again, year after year. Instead of bomber pilots asked to perform dangerous missions that accomplish mass destruction that they can only guess was accurate over and over again in Catch-22, in ‘Allo ‘Allo we have desperate French civilians dealing with inept resistance leadership or corrupt German occupiers, who are then asked to be brave for the ideal of ‘France’.

Using a semi non-linear approach to watching this show is something I am confident the creators of the show had no intent in creating. How could they? I just looked it up. They could have, if they were very forward thinking. Alan Moore might have been close to the idea at the time. He has a character in Watchmen that relishes the possibilities of watching one event non-linearly, or one event on several different channels to get a larger grasp of a situation. By the mid 1980s, these ‘Allo ‘Allo writers knew of home media. I do not think they were considering the writing considerations of rewatching. Instead the profits to be had from selling their work on consumable media rather than broadcast over the air or on cable.

Had I not this multi-dimensional way to watch ‘Allo ‘Allo and instead had to watch each episode on a scheduled basis on one particular channel, I feel I would have lost so much of what was going on in the show. The actors play their characters broad enough that most anybody can see the more obvious jokes, which are not that rare. Watching on that basis, I could consume what is an enjoyable stage play of miscommunications, even if I knew I did not fully understand how layered the lies were in the dialogue.

There is so much layered duplicity happening all the time on this show. How did British people in the 1980s enjoy this show as anything more than a clever stage play when they only had a few chances a year to understand all the lies, subterfuge, and inside jokes happening in ‘Allo ‘Allo? This show is a convoluted mess of repetition. The protagonist is in a WW2 hamster wheel that occasionally has field trips where he accomplishes dangerous tasks he had hoped he would never have to do again.

I have the feeling the second half that I will soon get around to of this series will not depart much from what I have seen in the first half. Until it suddenly does, if the show writes itself all the way to the end of the Nazi occupation. Découvrons-le!