Americans just can’t seem to get enough British TV at the moment. Sherlock, Life on Mars, Antiques Roadshow, Outnumbered, Footballers’ Wives, Celebrity Fit Club, Richard Blackwood’s Renaissance Showdown – they’ll remake practically anything it seems, even British programmes that they’ve already remade.

First Britain created Pop Idol. Then America snapped it up. Then Britain created The X Factor (essentially the same show as Pop Idol – but with red). Now America has their very own X Factor (American Idol – but with red).

The Yanks love bad British TV so much that they’ve even snapped up Jeremy Kyle to present exactly the same show as the one that he presents here – but in the US! He might have lost the intense neon blue lighting that made his programme seem like it was being presented from within an ultraviolet fly killer and gained a really small washed-out picture of the New York skyline, but essentially it’s the same – the same types of people, the same completely-unqualified-to-comment-on-anything advice being dished out, etc. Oh, how things were different way back when.

Once there was a time when the boot was on the other foot.

British TV used to be full of trashy American rip-offs and remakes. We’d help ourselves to anything.

“Card-based game show?” a TV executive might have said during this time. “Sure, we’ll take that, attach a minor British celebrity host and put their name in title, as if the card-based game show was actually their brainchild.”

Gone are those golden days of television, but as a reminder, for no reason whatsoever, here ten British programmes that have been heavily inspired by American television.

Feel free to add your own in the comments or generally hurl abuse at us.

Strange But True? (Unsolved Mysteries)

Strange But True? was a ‘90s documentary series that explored supernatural phenomena. It was essentially just a British version of the popular American series Unsolved Mysteries, but whereas Unsolved Mysteries was, at times, genuinely quite creepy, Strange But True? mostly consisted of Michael Aspel sporting a polo neck and speculating on the UFO activity of small Yorkshire villages.

In the first episode of Strange But True? Michael attempts to get to the bottom of a jaw-dropping mystery in which a dead body has been discovered on top of a pile of coal. “If there was no disturbance to the coal,” asks an interviewed policeman, who’s worryingly in charge of the case, “then how’d he get up there?”

So, yeah, coal disturbance. Coal disturbance is the best mystery this country could produce. Unfortunately, Strange But True? the mood and atmosphere or the show isn’t helped by its jolly little musical sting either. Rather than sounding eerie or unusual in anyway, it sounds as if it’s been lifted from a particularly awful ITV family drama.
There’s also just something about that title as well – Strange But True? Why is there a question mark at the end? And what does that mean? What is that short for?

“How very strange…but true, I wonder?”

Brighton Belles (The Golden Girls)

Brighton Belles was Britain’s long awaited, completely 100% necessary answer to US sitcom The Golden Girls. But whereas the title “The Golden Girls” had a warm, slightly cornball sound to it, Brighton Belles sounded like the kind of series you’d expect to find sandwiched between a couple of X-rated UK dogging DVDs in the scum section of CEX. This, coupled with the fact that it was awful, is probably why there’s very little mention of its existence online.

Only 6 episodes of the series aired during the Brighton Belles’ original run, with the final four episodes airing over a year later.

Fun House (Fun House)

It’s hard to imagine wacky, ‘90s game show Fun House without the programme’s beloved host Pat Sharp, unashamedly parading around a brightly coloured studio with his trademark lame jokes, good looks and well-cultivated mullet. Essentially, the games were always simply filler next to Pat’s segments. Each week he’d burst into the studio, often with the aid of a vehicle, wearing something like a turquoise tracksuit with the word “SASSY” written on it, before performing some of his latest material and introducing his two seductive co-hosts, Melanie and Martina (who we’ve interviewed no less).

But despite its lack of Pat the original Fun House isn’t all that bad. Hosted by all-American dreamboat J.D. Roth, who unfortunately takes a much less ridiculous approach than Pat, contestants, much like in the UK version, use their bodies and their brains as they compete to try and win the game. It’s wacky, fun, crazy, it’s outrageous; it’s still Fun House essentially.

The X Factor (The O’Reilly Factor)

Sure, one’s a really awful political show and the other’s a really awful TV talent contest, but the influence is there.
The X Factor was one of the first of a whole wave of programmes to adopt Bill O’Reilly’s notion that televised bullying is not only acceptable, but also completely justified, advocating it with ridiculously hammy editing techniques and reaction shots to remind confused viewers what they should be thinking. Both shows have become inexplicably popular over the years, mostly due to the fact that they contain non-stop caterwauling, shouting and impressive sounding swoosh noises.

But to be fair, these two shows do have their fair share of differences as well. Having the “X Factor” obviously refers to that indescribable quality, that certain something, that makes a mediocre pop singer seem marginally more talented than other mediocre pop singers. Whereas having “The O’Reilly Factor” quite clearly refers to that indescribable quality that makes somebody an obnoxious, unprofessional bigot who resorts to raising his voice at the drop of a hat.
Incidentally, The O’Reilly Factor has also provided the inspiration for Richard Littlejohn’s Batshit Insane Lunatic Hour, which currently airs every Wednesday at 7pm on Sky News.

Dale’s Supermarket Sweep (Supermarket Sweep)

The fundamental flaw with both of these shows lies with the fact supermarkets are actually quite depressing places. Admittedly, in the British version, Dale Winton’s trademark euphemisms and unapologetically orange charm help make the programme seem marginally less sad, but essentially it still feels like watching drunks in Tesco manically pack their trollies full of cider and peanuts.

The American version isn’t much better. The studio audience is a mixed blessing; on the one hand, it makes the show feel less like it’s being shot at 3am in an abandoned warehouse, but on the other, it makes the show seem like a 30 minute infomercial that’s forgot what its supposed to be advertising.

Sean’s Show (It’s Garry Shandling’s Show)

In It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, future creator of the fantastic Larry Sanders Show, Garry Shandling, stars as himself: a neurotic stand-up comedian, who just so happens to be aware that he’s a character in a sitcom. The other members of the cast are also aware that they’re on TV and sometimes show up to Garry’s house with the sole purpose of appearing on camera.

The British sitcom Sean’s Show, which stars comedian Sean Hughes, follows largely the same premise, but with a more surreal twist.

Coupling (Friends)

During the early part of the ‘00s, somebody decided that it was about time that Britain had its very own version of Friends. Then, bizarrely, the Americans decided that they wanted their very own version of Coupling (see here), seemingly unaware that it was very similar to one of their own shows. Then Britain decided that if America was allowed to have an American version of Coupling, then Britain should be allowed to have their very own American version of Coupling. And so on. And so on. And so on.

The Apprentice (The Apprentice)

The original American Apprentice stars Republican nutsack lookalike and business tycoon Donald Trump. It’s difficult to say which series is best; on the one hand, the American show features Donald Trump and gaudy, overly flashy graphics, whereas the British version simply able to fill us all with a great sense of national shame. It really is too difficult to call.

Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right (Card Sharks)

“Okay, so we’ve got this American programme, right? It’s called Card Sharks, but naturally, I’m assuming that we’ll want to get either Beadle or Forsyth in on the action. I really can’t see the name ‘Card Sharks’ working in the UK. Brits don’t care for sharks. But they do love Forsyth, Beadle and lamo titles that don’t really mean anything. I’m thinking something like ‘Beadle’s Wonder Cards’ or ‘Bruce Forsyth’s Cards Ahoy!’. Something like that.”

Lead Balloon (Curb Your Enthusiasm)

It’s difficult to write about Lead Balloon without drawing comparisons to Curb Your Enthusiasm. The situations, the humour, the characters and the basic premise of both shows are undeniably similar – often to the point where Lead Balloon ends up covering ground that Curb Your Enthusiasm has already covered multiple times before. Both are grossly overrated.

This was a guest post by Jack Sharp who loves his television set much more than any human.

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Larry David, the man who’s brought us partially ad-libbed cringe comedy for the last THREE HUNDRED YEARS has told ESPN New York that he is still having fun filming Curb Your Enthusiasm. This statement flies in the face of criticism from some corners of the press which suggest that the show has lost its way.

David, responsible for being part of the team that brought us the equally diabolical Seinfeld, in which unlikeable cockhorse Jerry Seinfeld jogged through life in (admittedly wonderful) trainers while making bland observations about everyday occurrences.

This was all while his equally neurotic friends jogged their way miserably through their own lives, somehow finding them enriched by Jerry’s incessant bland observations.

Okay, so we know that Seinfeld wasn’t actually that bad but it’s what you get with hindsight. Angry.

On the subject of ‘Curb’ its creator told ESPN Radio New York host Mike Lupica that he can barely keep a straight face while filming scenes for the show. It must be really hard to see the obvious “bite moment” coming after eight years making a show.

“Well, I’ve always had fun doing the show, and I guess that’s why I keep doing it after eight years… It’s hard for me to do a take without laughing really.”

Yeah. Laughing all the way to the bank! (Sorry)

Curb Your Enthusiasm has previously examined Larry’s adoption plans and a (hopefully fictional) Seinfeld reunion, but David insists that the success of the show’s eighth run may be due to a lack of a story arc. That’s how all successful television works, of  course. By tearing out the story in favour of self-indulgent nonsense from a man who believes you should care about his life. After all, he did Seinfeld.

Not to paint Larry David as a bit of a cock but in a previous interview, he opened up about his personal life, revealing that he went off marriage following his 2007 divorce.

“It would be a silly thing [to marry again]… Why would I do it? Why would I want that contract? I already have kids. The best situation is being a single parent.

“The best part about it is that you get time off too, because the kids are with their mum, so it’s the best of both worlds. There’s a lot to be said for it.”

After all, it’s no father’s prerogative to want to spend as much time as he possibly can with his children. Who wouldn’t want to keep a woman around to win custody and act like an expensive babysitter. After all, Larry needs time off in his busy schedule to remind everyone that he was responsible for Seinfeld!

He had something to do with Seinfeld. Just in case you came close to forgetting. If you forget, Larry David will cut you while you sleep.

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Despite being kinda overrated, it is universally agreed that Curb Your Enthusiasm is quite good. Once it aired in Britain and got something of a cult following from people Who Don’t Normally Watch Much TV, people who worked in telly decided that we needed our own equivalent.

Of course, we already had our own equivalent in The Office, Extras and years back, Alan Partridge. Not all the same freewheeling ad-libbery, but all exercises in laughing through your fingers. Extras, most notably, was the show that went about pull apart the notion of what we had about participating sleb-plebs.

Which brings us to Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust (Channel 4, Thursday, 30 September, 9pm).

Trinny & Susannah’s latest venture is a spoof mockumentary thing, designed to poke fun at their own downfall and desperate clambering back up the greased pole of celebritydom. It’s all very knowing and nudge-nudgey, suggesting that, underneath the veneer of poking women in the ribs and slapping tits about whilst chiding innocent bullets of lipstick, we actually have two half-decent humans who are aware of their own caricature.

And while it is vaguely brave and post-modern to deconstruct yourself on television, it helps if you tell everyone something they didn’t already know.

See, this is the problem with this new Trinny & Susannah show – they leaned heavily on the things everyone has been saying about them for years anyway. The joke wasn’t new and, as a result, left us with a show that was car-crash, but not necessarily in the manner in which they clearly hope.

The whole thing is so pitifully knowing that the tone of the show is the playground rebuttal of I Know You Are You Said You Are But What Am I? repeated, mantra-style, over and over and over.

It seemed like the whole thing was based on some existing comedic characters, played out by two people who, if you peered beneath the surface, seemed to be winking and saying “It’s not bad for our first attempt at something new is it?” Sadly, this doesn’t wash because, as well you know, just because they’re already famous, doesn’t mean that we should give them allowances. New comedy shows featuring new talented routinely get torn new arseholes without a care for the writers who may not be used to national criticism.

Besides, that set-up is under the assumption we cared enough about to pawing and cackling harridans in the first place.

In T&S’s manager/nanny, we clearly have a carbon copy of Lynn, Alan Partridge’s manager, while Susannah wants to pass herself of as Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. The variety of agents have all been purloined from Flight of the Concords, Extras and Spinal Tap, leaving Trinny Woodall stood in the middle of the ghosts of comedy past with her frankly terrifying couch of a face.

The misery of the show wasn’t just confined to Trinny and Susannah themselves thanks to Channel 4 who, for some reason, decided to show a sequence of cod-investigative mockumentary commercials starring Anna Richardson with her Lego haircut and gumshield teeth. While she cooed at the paid-for science in the breaks, Trinny and Susannah played the same cardboard cut-out versions of themselves, which incidentally, they’d become long before they decided to debunk their own myth, in a show that ultimately failed to give us an insight that we didn’t already own.

The result was that we were faced with an overly long show that, with any luck, will see T&S so fraught with worry post-transmission that they actually do become their comedic creations, leaving us to spot them in the street, talking to imaginary cameras whilst drunkenly getting a colonic irrigation with a rubber hose and a bucket of water on a fashionable West London street corner.

Trinny and Susannah have backed themselves into a corner. They’re no longer vile enough for the makeover shows that TV desperately clings to and, unsurprisingly, they’re not cut-out for the world of comedy either.

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The 90s were a decade in which hecklerspray spent most of its time picking food off of dead cats under parental supervision.

The things we were picking off them were typically ice cream, maraschino cherries and large dollops of whipped cream. Our father was a dinnerware-themed taxidermist, you see, and our mother’s passion was frozen dairy – the rarest of combinations.

Half the time we were eating milk products out of hollowed dead mice, we did so in front of Seinfeld, which was something we westerners like to call a ‘sitcom.’

Speaking of which – it’s coming back you know.

Kinda.

Larry David is half the brains behind Seinfeld – a show that historians will one day probably refer to as the nineties answer to Melrose Place. We know this because we are a historian.

Anyway, when Seinfeld went off the air, it was no doubt to rivers of tears flowing anywhere typically regarded as downhill. When the show ended it seemed like the entire cast went underground for a bit, surfacing only to berate black audience members, stick their thoraxes into things and YouTube around in McDonald’s commercials.

Since the end the world has been anxiously waiting to see which new show would claim their soupy crown – and you know what we got? We got that Two Half Men program – which, although written terribly, has done wonders for the equal treatment of amputees.

But this is no time to worry and woe about the piss-poor state of most sitcoms today – not when the four major Seinfeld players are currently together filming a story arc set to appear on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

No really – look what Entertainment Weekly said about it:

“EW has learned exclusively that the four stars of NBC’s long-running comedy [Seinfeld] — Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards — will be featured in a multiple-episode story arc on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm this fall. The cameos will mark the first time that all four actors have appeared together in a scripted TV show since Seinfeld went off the air nearly 11 years ago.”

Plot points are being tightly guarded but we have a suspicion there’ll be a tie in to Seinfeld’s Bee Movie II, the sequel in which Barry has to go to ‘Nam to violently save all of his captured war buddies.

We think we speak for the entire free world when we say that is something we’d definitely pay to see.

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We love Curb Your Enthusiasm. of course we do. It’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, for god’s sake. People who don’t love it are weird.

And with the back-to-its-best sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hitting these shores on June 9, we thought it might be time to give you the chance to win a Curb Your Enthusiasm prize so incredible that it’s all we can do not to fake a new identity and give the prize to ourselves. Courtesy of HBO video, you can win a kickass Curb Your Enthusiasm goody bag containing:

• 

  A Curb Your Enthusiasm season six boxset,

• A CYE book,

• Two CYE mugs,

• A CYE T-shirt

And if you don’t win that, there’s a runner-up prize of a season six boxset as well. And all you have to do to win these prizes is to answer the following question:

Larry David’s filming a movie right now. Who’s the director?

Email your answers – with the subject line ‘Woody Allen competition’ – to hello@hecklerspray.com as soon as you can along with your name and address, and we’ll pick winners at random by the end of the week. UK readers only, please. Good luck.