Anarchy from the U.K.

By James Poniewozik

Everybody hates an Anglophile. Or at least everybody should. By this I mean the kind of buttered-scone Anglophiles who have supported middlebrow imports like Ballykissangel and Masterpiece Theatre through pledge drive after pledge drive: those self-hating televisual Tories who cling to genteel dramas and dotty, dated comedies as a Union Jacked bulwark against American TV's tendency to be so crude, so commercial...so American.

This is no knock on our overseas cousins. Indeed, the people who should hate this type of Anglophile the most are the British. For with some exceptions (Absolutely Fabulous, The Young Ones), the original British shows that Americans have most dearly embraced have reinforced a safe, neutered image of Britons, all Anglo veneer, no Saxon bile. (Let's not count the decades-old Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, which, however brilliant, are as representative of today's Britain as a suet pudding.)

Someone, however, is doing something to counter this starchy BBC stereotype--the BBC. Through its American cable channel, BBC America, founded two years ago and now in about 12 million homes, the Beeb is recolonizing American tellies with a slate heavy on newer dramas and "Britcoms." These raw, rude, thoroughly unpolite shows open a window on a brand new England, from the gritty Bosnian-war drama Peacekeepers to the Lynchian small-town comic horrors of The League of Gentlemen.

The motivation behind the channel is not cultural rehabilitation but the chance to grab a piece of the lucrative American market. The BBC has long sold reruns to the likes of PBS and licensed programs for adaptations (All in the Family, for instance, was based on Till Death Us Do Part). "The BBC was very proud of its success on [American TV]," says Paul Lee, BBC America's chief operating officer. "But it had no equity stake." So the broadcaster--a public entity in Britain--negotiated an alliance with Discovery Communications, parent of Discovery and other channels, which helped launch and market the new network.

It would have been easy to fill 24 hours with proven favorites. "People told me, 'The only things you can do are what you've already made a success of,'" Lee says. "Mysteries, classic dramas, maybe the more conservative sitcoms from PBS." Instead BBC America opted to distinguish itself with shows "closer to the new Beetle than to the Jaguar: vibrant, contemporary, different." While the network is not yet rated by Nielsen, it's the edgier programming--running in blocks called Cool Britannia and the Britcom Zone--that has inspired a dedicated audience following and critical praise. But the channel also hedges its bets with BBC news and more traditional reruns like Dr. Who and, yes, Ballykissangel. "If you liked that kind of programming, now you can get a lot more of it," says Judith A. McHale, president and chief operating officer of Discovery Communications. (And the BBC will still sell shows to PBS and cable.)

Given American producers' continuing taste for adapting Brit hits like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (from ITV, not the BBC), you might think that watching BBC America is watching the future of domestic network television. But in the Pax Nike era of American cultural tyranny, is there still any difference between TV and telly?

Not always. The BBC film Sex 'n' Death, an acerbic, sharp if unsubtle send-up of shock TV recently shown on BBC America, owes not a little to the American Hollywood-spoof genre, from The Larry Sanders Show to Action and back to the movie Network. And some Britcoms, like the wacky-priests' caper Father Ted, prove the Brits can make implausible, laugh-track-saturated work just as well as we, but with poorer production values. The best of the offerings, though, are not just rougher and often saltier than U.S. broadcast-network standards permit; they're genuinely surprising.

The most ingenious is The League of Gentlemen, a genre-defying black comedy that combines the sketch humor of Python with the small-town horror of Twin Peaks. Set in the fictional English hamlet Royston Vasey, it intertwines the stories of more than 60 characters, male and female--all played by three men--from the abusive counselor at the town unemployment center ("I know they've put monkeys in space, but do you really think they'll have one driving a fire engine?") to the reactionary proprietor couple of a local shop (named the Local Shop), who plot to stop a planned road that would expose Royston Vasey to change ("We don't even give change!"). Unlike traditional sketch comedies, League richly develops its characters and wrings out uncomfortable laughs from scenes that can veer close to drama. "We find these moments as funny as the gags," says writer Jeremy Dyson. "They're like the things in Glengarry Glen Ross that you find yourself laughing at because they're so awful." (BBC America is currently running the second season; for latecomers, Comedy Central starts carrying the series from the beginning on June 19.)

On the court-show spoof All Rise for Julian Clary, Clary--a proudly queeny gay man in dandyish paisleys and an ascot--dispenses arch, arbitrary justice to aggrieved parties: it's like the Judge Oscar Wilde Show. And Goodness Gracious Me offers postcolonialist sketch comedy from a British-Indian troupe.

The channel's biggest splash, though, may be Gormenghast, a four-part, $10 million adaptation of Mervyn Peake's lyrical fantasy trilogy (Saturdays, various times, beginning June 10). The lavish mini-series follows Steerpike (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a charismatic kitchen boy who insinuates and murders his way to power within the tired, decaying House of Groan. Unlike many American fantasy minis, it's neither a ponderous classics lesson nor a sugarcoated trifle, but a grotesquely funny, vulgar and penetrating tale of class and demagogy with pointed meaning for Britons. "In Gormenghast, you have this rusty royal family--well, I don't need to say more about that, do I?" says producer Estelle Daniel.

But like all good metaphors, Gormenghast's works on other levels. To the tired bloodline of PBS-endorsed British programming, BBC America's appealing, often lacerating new-wave series are a Steerpike-like intruder. And for the delicate, powdered neck of proper Anglophile telly, the long knives are out.