TV/International

Bean, Bean, maniacal nut / The more you watch, you bust a gut! First unleashed in 1989, this sketch series was embraced by PBS viewers in the United States. In the tradition of the great silent clowns, Rowan Atkinson created a character with universal and multi-generational appeal (the sketches have little dialogue and are driven by often ingenious physical comedy). Like Bart Simpson, the resourceful, mischievous, and sometimes malevolent Bean is the inner child incarnate who acts on the impulses polite society normally represses.

They wore napkins on their heads, put things on top of other things, and made the Spanish Inquisition hip. They came from a small island off the coast of Europe and took the world by storm. They set a standard for dementia that will never be matched. They were Monty Python. Now, every single moment of the legendary Flying Circus is together in this comprehensive DVD set.

Tireless social climber Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "Bouquet," of course) returns with more hilarious high-class hi-jinks. The set, 'Hyacinth in Full Bloom', includes 4 discs sold individually: 'My Way or the Hyacinth Way', 'Hints from Hyacinth', 'Home Is Where the Hyacinth Is', and the Holiday disc, 'Deck the Halls with Hyacinth'. The set includes the complete first and second seasons as well as all of the Hoilday specials.

American sitcoms usually have a bland, likable central character who has to cope with obnoxious acquaintances--who usually provide most of the actual comedy. The British smartly put the comic personalities front and center, and Keeping Up Appearances has one of the best: The petty, pretentious, tyrannical Hyacinth Bucket (played by the impressive Patricia Routledge), a dowdy middle-class social climber with a piercing voice and an unshakable faith in herself.

Here are the final seven episodes of the 1970s British comedy series, Good Neighbors (entitled The Good Life in England), a show that brilliantly captures the Zeitgeist of the '70s. The Goods, who quit the rat race for a life of subsistence farming, are next-door neighbors to the Ledbetters, some of the fastest rat-race runners around. At first, Margot and Jerry Ledbetter are horrified to see Tom and Barbara Good turn their tiny yard into a series of animal pens and vegetable gardens.

Originally telecast in the 1970s, Good Neighbors is the wonderful 1970s Britcom about an upper-middle-class couple who relinquish consumerism and turn their cozy suburban London home into a self-sufficient farm. Tom (Richard Briers) and Barbara (Felicity Kendal) Good trade in one version of the good life for an impoverished other--an old tractor instead of a car, a goat instead of a purebred pup--to the continuing consternation of their best friends and executive-salaried neighbors, Jerry (Paul Eddington) and Margot (Penelope Keith) Ledbetter.

Basil Fawlty, as created and performed by John Cleese, is the rudest, most boorish, most hilariously obnoxious man on the face of the planet. What a natural for a TV sitcom!

Father Ted is one of those rare sitcoms that defies categorization--it owes as much to Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett as it does to Monty Python--and its blend of satire, character comedy, and anarchic surrealism has made it a cult favorite around the world. Exiled to remote Craggy Island, Father Ted Crilley shares a house with the breathtakingly stupid Father Dougal and the constantly inebriated Father Jack, who has a small vocabulary and a taste for furniture polish. Their housekeeper, Mrs.

As four young American women find their way through the labyrinthine social world of 1870s England, their fortunes rise--and sometimes, with brutal abruptness, fall. Based on Edith Wharton's unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, this lavish BBC production follows Nan and Virginia St.

Witness the comic misadventures of the terminally treacherous villain, Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh, otherwise known as the Black Adder (Rowan Atkinson). Includes Blackadder I, Blackadder II, Blackadder III, Blackadder Goes Forth, Blackadder Back & Forth. One of the best comedy series ever to emerge from England, Black Adder traces the deeply cynical and self-serving lineage of various Edmund Blackadders from the muck of the Middle Ages to the frontline of World War I.