100 days of enemy recs: 93. UK Panel Shows RPF

[melannen]

Honestly, the reason I drifted out of this RPF fandom isn't that the main people involved betrayed me horribly; they just fell in love with wonderful people that they got on well with, and after that I didn't want to ship them with anyone else, but also shipping the real relationships felt not fictional enough? So I wandered out, and quit RPF altogether for awhile. So there's your other lesson: if you do start RPF shipping people who are genuinely ok people, they will go on to have nicer lives than you managed to imagine for them and all your fic is outshone. (Possibly the real enemyship these past two days is me/rpf.)

If you aren't familiar with comedy panel shows, they're basically if you mix game shows with improv comedy. Theoretically there are contestants competing in some kind of contest of skill; in practice everything's made up, the points don't matter, and everybody's playing to have the most fun, not to win. There are usually a few regular contestants and then a general pool of comedians/celebrities/entertainers who work the panel show circuit, and a lot of the appeal of the show is the sort of half-acting, half-real ongoing relationships between the regulars. For some reason they haven't really existed in the US since the 1970s, the closest we've got is right now is Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. And the British ones mostly don't even syndicate or legally stream here, mostly iirc because of copyright issues that make the format hard to license internationally. But you can usually watch a lot of them from several different Commonwealth countries on Youtube at any given time.

Because of the format with regular contestants theoretically competing against each other on teams, there are a lot of those onscreen relationships that are set up as comically adversarial. I give you recs for Paul and Ian, the long-time opposing team captains on Hignfy; Alan and Stephen, the long-time permanent panelist and host on QI; and Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell, who were on the circuit of all the shows together for a long time and always ended up hate-flirting across the desk.

• Revelations (895 words) by paranoidkitten
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Have I Got News For You RPF
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Ian Hislop/Paul Merton
  Characters: Ian Hislop, Paul Merton
  Additional Tags: Coming Out, Newspapers
  Summary:

  A series of newspaper clippings.




• F Series (2379 words) by marginaliana
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: QI RPF
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Alan Davies/Stephen Fry
  Characters: Alan Davies, Stephen Fry
  Series: Part 1 of letter series
  Summary:

  Alan has a cunning plan. Alan/Stephen.




• A Case of Unintentional Flirting (3151 words) by Irmelin
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: British Comedian RPF
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell
  Characters: Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell
  Summary:

  For the anonymeme prompt: Mitchell becomes uncomfortable with Brooker's escalating flirtation in public (over Twitter, on panel shows) and tells him so. Brooker's been thinking of it as a joke; it's not until Mitchell confronts him about it that he realises that, shit, maybe he actually does...?

Comments

[china_shop]

Hi, you linked F Series twice and didn't link the Mitchell/Brooker one. Jsyk. :-)

[melannen]

Oh, shoot, thanks! I was dithering about which one to use for so long I seem to have failed to link one entirely.

[rionaleonhart]

Oh, wow, I think I was the one who prompted that Mitchell/Brooker fic, all those years ago! Thank you for the link; it's been a lot of fun to remind myself of it.

[melannen]

That was such a great kinkmeme and going back over it yesterday, I realized it was because a whold bunch of the best people were on it!

[marginaliana]

<3

I need to reread A Case of Unintentional Flirting, for sure.

[melannen]

I had to rec you for QI because otherwise I would not have been able to choose only one of your Brooker/Mitchell ones. :D

[blueswan]

I found British panel shows were my best comedy fix, and a select few were temporary abodes for Richard Ayoade who made any one of them funnier. Through my obsession with RA I also encountered David Mitchell, and Sean Locke (never going to forget Claudia W. begging "make him stop" when Sean was on a roll one time).

[melannen]

They were a great anxiety-free sanctuary for me for awhile. (Then there was that phase where anything with even a whiff of currents was not anxiety-free; I wonder if I can go back and watch again.)

So much good stuff! Taskmaster is getting a lot of good attention lately, I've been meaning to at least check that out.

[blueswan]

I just started Taskmaster and it is fun to watch. It's more of a visual kind of funny rather than the verbal humour that I got from the other Brit quiz shows. Completely different humour, but still fun to watch.

[msilverstar]

if you do start RPF shipping people who are genuinely ok people, they will go on to have nicer lives than you managed to imagine for them and all your fic is outshone.

This is fantastic! It's true for Lotrips, they are almost all gently happily ever after, and even the ones who aren't are OK (Dom is clearly lonely but probably a terrible partner). but there are lots of long relationships and professional successes.

May I metaquote you?

[melannen]

Sure! Thank you.

[lannamichaels]

Another great thing about panel shows is not knowing any of the A-list comedy stars from that country, but I can name you a whole ton of comedians who do nothing but rotate around each other's shows. :D

[melannen]

Are you trying to tell me that the panel show regulars aren't the A-list?? I don't believe you. :P

[lannamichaels]

It turns out that Britain has churned out many stars and I don't have a clue who any of them are, but watching Sue Perkins in QI got me into GBBO way before the US bandwagon, so who really needs to know who A listers are ;)

Hand to god, a few weeks ago IRL I was chatting about British panel shows with a couple people and not only did I know one of them was going to reference They Say Of The Acropolis before she remembered the line, someone else remembered Jimmy Carr's name when all I could remember was "he's, you know, the tax cheat who looks like a puppet and knows it and hosts the end of year quizzes". Truly, panel show knowledge is key to successful social interaction.