My best Christmas gift this year was the DVD of this short-lived and under-appreciated sit com set around a low-cost airline working out of Prestwick Airport in the west of Scotland. Of course, it helps if, like me, you're from that self-same part of the world, where it can be seen as a trailblazer for popular shows in later years like "Chewin' The Fat" and "Still Game" - in fact I'm still at a loss as to why Alan Cummings and Forbes Masson's Sebastian and Steve didn't enter the national psyche like the latter's Jack and Victor. There's even Mark Ryecourt as an eccentric pilot who may also have been in the minds of Father Ted's writing team when they created the "out-there-where-the-buses-don't-run" Father Jack character, as well as a Eurovision Song contest themed episode, also aped by Ted and his cronies on Craggy Island.
As almost every reviewer has said, it boasts a terrific theme tune which will stay in your head forever, while the device of employing great Scottish slang words as episode titles (for example "Choob" and "Feart" meaning idiot and scared, respectively) was certainly copied by Messrs Hemphill and Kiernan in "Still Game".
There's a high gag-count in each show and if many of them rely on a familiarity with the Scottish vernacular, not to mention slang, profanity and of course good old-fashioned innuendo then that's just hard cheese for any outsiders looking in. Although Cumming's Sebastian Flyte takes centre-stage with his combination of neurosis, narcissism, cheekiness and camp-ness, Forbes Masson might consider himself unlucky not to have seen his career take off too, so good is he as Cumming's frustrated, self-deluding side-kick. Siobhan Redmond is also great as their battle-axe supervisor, the never-ending butt of their acerbic humour.
My wife and I watched all six episodes over a few days and laughed out loud and often. It was just a pity that somehow it wasn't picked up for further series, an irony all the more pointed given the undeserved hoop-la over Little Britain's Walliams and Lucas's new BBC sketch- show, "Come Fly With Me" set, you guessed it, at a national airport.
As almost every reviewer has said, it boasts a terrific theme tune which will stay in your head forever, while the device of employing great Scottish slang words as episode titles (for example "Choob" and "Feart" meaning idiot and scared, respectively) was certainly copied by Messrs Hemphill and Kiernan in "Still Game".
There's a high gag-count in each show and if many of them rely on a familiarity with the Scottish vernacular, not to mention slang, profanity and of course good old-fashioned innuendo then that's just hard cheese for any outsiders looking in. Although Cumming's Sebastian Flyte takes centre-stage with his combination of neurosis, narcissism, cheekiness and camp-ness, Forbes Masson might consider himself unlucky not to have seen his career take off too, so good is he as Cumming's frustrated, self-deluding side-kick. Siobhan Redmond is also great as their battle-axe supervisor, the never-ending butt of their acerbic humour.
My wife and I watched all six episodes over a few days and laughed out loud and often. It was just a pity that somehow it wasn't picked up for further series, an irony all the more pointed given the undeserved hoop-la over Little Britain's Walliams and Lucas's new BBC sketch- show, "Come Fly With Me" set, you guessed it, at a national airport.