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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spells &amp; Karma" data-source="post: 351285" data-attributes="member: 23">It's back in time to 1977 for a series I'm watching for the very first time... <img src="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sanity.com.au%2Fmedia%2FImages%2Ffullimage%2F274083%2FTSA_2190672_2015-17-4--00-51-55.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=e1c09c5498895a98e1b34307e34f66e8cb30f3f4d3ddf14fbbf3c3144166ab0a&ipo=images" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 405px" />Confession: I took the plunge with Mind Your Language mainly because I'd convinced myself that Joan Sanderson was in it. Turns out she's nowhere to be found. The school principal is played by Zara Nutley (who, ironically, I essentially described as a poor man's Joan Sanderson back on page 22 upon her arrival in Never The Twain). The only other familiar face present is Dino Shafeek, who did the musical interludes in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. Besides these two, all the other faces are unknown to me. Lead actor Barry Evans seems vaguely familiar but, looking at his IMDb I haven't seen him in anything. Looking at actors who played the students, almost all of them seem best-known for this very series, which is a little worrying.On paper, the series seems an interesting one. There's the Please Sir! thing with the familiar hierarchy of the educational establishment and its various challenges. And since this is a night class with international students learning English as Foreign Language there's the added comedic potential of culture clashes.Now, it was plain that this series was never going to be politically correct and would fall back on stereotyping of the era. But with the context of the era I was also prepared to overlook these more dated aspects (as expected, the East Asian characters say "Ah so" and transpose their "L" and "R" sounds, while German woman transposes her "V"s and "W"s). The main problem I'm having with the series is that there's little else to it. Each student is a one-dimensional caricature of their ethnic or cultural background: there's the cold, über-efficient German woman; the Japanese man with the camera round his neck; the over-sexed Italians; the Chinese woman obsessed with communism... and so on. On first glance the caricatures are so broad and the humour so dependent upon this it feels rather like a US sitcom of the era. The initial entrance of the sexy French student in particular felt like the sort of thing you'd see on the likes of Happy Days where the audience whoops simply because Henry Winkler enters a scene, despite there being nothing funny or witty about it.I'm only three episodes in, and already the Spanish character responding to every question with "por favor", or the Japanese guy walking up the aisle and bowing before answering any question is feeling rather stale.After the wit of Bob Larbey, Vince Powell's "clobber them round the head" approach to humour comes off wanting. Since a sitcom's primary function is to make the audience laugh, this is far more bothersome than any political incorrectness. The lack of any real "names" in the cast doesn't help since it makes the series feel a little cheap. Looking at IMDb, I don't think there's going to be much in the way of familiar actors to stimulate interest.Giving me some hope is how much I grew to enjoy Please Sir! despite initially struggling with what seemed a homogenous crew of unfamiliar faces among the students. It's my hope that as the series settles in and I become more familiar it will become something I look forward to enjoying. After all, it ran for three series during its initial run, so it must have something going for it.</blockquote>

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