"Britain, Britain, Britain." Are the characters in Little Britain representative of the people of Britain or are they just designed to entertain?

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Danni Roe                                                                                                 24th March 2006

“Britain, Britain, Britain.” Are the characters in Little Britain representative of the people of Britain or are they just designed to entertain?

Little Britain is an increasingly popular comedy TV series. It addresses many issues in today’s society with a playful and joking attitude. It was mainly aimed at an older audience who could understand the humour without being too influenced by the fake views expressed by the characters in the show. This was supposed to be reinforced as it was shown after the watershed but despite its 15 certificate more and more parents are permitting there children to watch the show; if not this children are going to bed later and later nowadays and this means they are watching TV later. So Little Britain’s viewing audience is becoming larger everyday. This is helped by the fact that the show is shown on BBC 1 which is the main channel, the bench mark for British TV so people are bound to flick to this channel first.

One of the shows manly crude but highly popular characters is the fat teen Vicky Pollard, she is supposedly representative teenager. The lighting in the picture connotes that Vicky’s good is behind her possibly in her younger years she was better behaved and innocent before she became an “evil” teenager. The character standing next to Vicky seems to be looking down on her therefore connoting that he thinks he is above her and her and possibly teens in general but the blank face expressed by Vicky connotes teens don’t really care what other think of them. Also this 2looking down” connotes adult’s disgust at the teenagers valued dress codes. Vicky’s clothing connotes that she likes to be noticed what with bright colours and but allows us to see that she would just like to fit in with her friends as she follows a trend. Her tracksuit make is Kappa this brings to mind the saying “kappa slappa” which connotes that teenage girls have very little respect for themselves and put it around a bit these days. Her dyed hair connotes trying to keep up with fashion or possibly trying to hide something, trying to hide behind her rough and furious image. Her aggressive stance connotes she is ready for anything society can throw at her in the future. The fact that she is not wearing school uniform in school connotes she will not conform to the rules of and she shows very little interest towards the book being held by the teacher connoting that she doesn’t think she needs school, does not want to be there, does not feel she needs to learn more and that she already knows everything. All though Vicky may have some elements of being a representative teen I believe she is just an exaggerated version of today’s teens. Compared to some of the show other characters Vicky is very politically correct although some of her comments verge on not being. Other examples of using teenagers to create humour are in the Catherine Tate show, fly girl however is a lot more representative of today’s teens as her catchphrase “am I bovvered?” when she clearly is connotes trying to protect herself from the people who are trying to hurt her and trying not to let people see how fragile she really is and teens can relate to this more than some of Vicky pollards antics. Matt Lucas and David Walliams may have created this character to help teens laugh at older peoples views of them or to help show adults how laughable and stupid there stereotypical views of teens are and how unlikely these things are to happen in real life.

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Another example is Dafydd “the only gay in the village”; He is not a representative gay as in general gay people do not dress shocking pink PVC outfits and make reference to gay sex every 5 minutes in real life. Dafydd uses his gayness to put himself into a box. But gay people in the real world are in a constant struggle to get taken out of this box and not be stereotyped. He is a much exaggerated form of gay for TV and is nothing like the majority of real gays. If we compare Dafydd to Matt Lucas ...

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