Tonight a friend and I waxed nostalgic about TV shows. He would talk about British shows I'd never heard of; I'd talk about American shows he never heard of. Such is the ocean that divided us in the 70s and 80s, before internet, DVDs, and You Tube made everything so wonderfully accessible. So we compared notes. It seems every thing we mentioned has its appropriate counterpart. Schoolhouse Rock had its Look and Read. Grange Hill is maybe similar to Degrassi Junior High (although Degrassi never had Anthony Minghella as a writer I'm sure). As I've mentioned earlier, Lassie was akin to The Littlest Hobo (although TLH never had Leonardo DiCaprio I'm sure). And so forth. It's an interesting game actually, I bet if you left something in the comments, someone from another country could try to match it.

One funny thing that occurs was when I heard the Grange Hill theme song, I thought it sounded like Sanford & Son!

Observe:




Ok, maybe not. But if you haven't heard Sanford & Son in years then maybe you could see how my brain led me astray. At this point of course I had to explain what Sanford & Son was, as he'd never heard of it (think of all the other jokes on Scrubs that English people don't get!!). I explained it and the reaction was, "Oh, you mean Steptoe and Son. Clearly your show comes from my show."

"Yea, right," I scoffed. "Playa please."



But I looked it up on Wikipedia and lo and behold, it's true. Not exactly the kind of material and trivia I came 3,000 miles to learn, but I am learning just the same!