'The Tube' was the first time the plebs had gone on the television. The lunatics taking over the asylum.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There were some television sets back in the '50s, but they were expensive. People would gather at the rich guy's apartment down the hall to watch Milton Berle on his 10-inch black-and-white screen.
When television came out, there was concern it would kill radio.
The one I remember is going into London, as it was for us in Essex, on New Year's Eve in 1981. There were four of us and we'd had a few lagers on the way. One of my mates threw up in the Tube and then stood up and fell over in it. We thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen.
If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.
Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.
A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station.
It appalls me that the people who decide what Americans will be watching on the tube have never been to the United States. Not the real United States.
In London, I take the Tube everywhere.
I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.