Sunday, January 04, 2015

The Hungry Games

For some reason an upcoming Channel 4 comedy about the Irish Potato Famine is attracting criticism:
After creating uproar with its coverage of the unemployed in Benefits Street, Channel 4 is generating new outrage after commissioning a comedy series on the Irish potato famine, a tragedy thought to have cost a million lives.
The sitcom, called Hungry, has been revealed by Dublin-based writer Hugh Travers, who told the Irish Times that “we’re kind of thinking of it as Shameless in famine Ireland.”
 I say that it has attracted criticism but it may just be a couple of rent a quote busybodies but obviously it is delicate. It isn't that comedies set in bleak circumstances cannot work, Blackadder Goes Forth was hilariously scathing about the First World War and though I haven't seen it the film Life is Beautiful is a very well regarded comedy-drama set in a Nazi concentration camp. However when stepping on sensitive ground there is somewhat less room for error than elsewhere and if it goes wrong it could end up being the new Heil Honey I'm Home!:
a British sitcom, written by Geoff Atkinson and produced in 1990, that was cancelled after one episode aired. It centres on fictionalised versions of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who live next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein.

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