All About Finding Things on Youtube

Back in the mid-1980s, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones had a TV show called 'Alas Smith and Jones'. Along with Blackadder II, it was the first grown-up comedy show we were allowed to stay up and watch. Needless to say, it was aces.

One of the highlights of Smith and Jones was a series of sketches called 'Home-Made Video'. Conceived around the time that the camcorder became a status symbol, the sketches followed the lives of a family (and their dubious mate Mel Smith) as recorded for posterity on an awkwardly-formatted cassette. They were shoddily-made, they revealed the grottier side of suburban England, and we cried with constant laughter from the opening shot of a title scrawled on a torn piece of cardboard, right through to the closing credits scrawled on a torn piece of cardboard. This was laughter which hurt, dammit.

This is going somewhere, honest. On a late-night Coke-n-supermarket-vodka Youtube trawl this evening, what should turn up but the Smith and Jones Home Made Video Christmas Special? This was the holy grail of 1980s comedy, a feature-length Home-made Video screened once over Christmas 1987 and, as far as we know, never repeated. Within 5 minutes, we were in tears all over again (the wreath did it for us). Please, get yourself a drink and spend 30 minutes watching something very funny indeed.

Oh, and look who plays the son.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

PS We realise we should probably wait 'til the Christmas Period before blogging this. However, since the first adverts for Christmas stuff now seem to pop up in late August, we thought it was close enough.