Seeya Spiers
2008 has been a ghastly year, death-wise. Sydney Pollack, Geoffrey Perkins, George Carlin, Anthony Minghella, Stan Winston…to name but a few. And now Bob Spiers’s name has been added to that rotten list of wonderful talents.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7763437.s…
Everyone’s going to have their preferences from his impressive body of work, but by any standard he had one of the most enviable CVs of any TV comedy director. And, put simply, he did what he did extremely well – he got every laugh on the page onto the screen, and did it with a definite (but always appropriate) style. It’s rarer than you think – so this evening I’ll be tipping a glass to an episode of Press Gang.
Bye Bob.
About this entry
- By Andrew Ellard
- Posted on Monday, December 08 2008 @ 5:33 pm
- Categorised in TV
- Tagged with Bob Spiers
- 2 comments
I was only watching Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques for the umpteenth time the other day. That and Strike are the personal favourites for me.
By Seb Patrick
December 08, 2008 @ 8:25 pm
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Sorry, a bit late, but: gahfucks. He directed some of my favourite comedy ever.
I rather like his commentaries on Series 2 of Fawlty Towers. They’re slagged off, and there are too many stretches of silence, but there’s still some interesting insights. (Such as: there’s a great big pillar in the upstairs section of the set that’s there for the first episode… and then entirely disappears for the rest of the run because it got in the way of the cameras!)
By John Hoare
December 12, 2008 @ 5:27 pm
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