English humour about English manners

Here is a wonderful piece of recently-rediscovered pre-Monty Python footage that illustrates тонкий английский юмор as well as old-fashioned English etiquette in public places. It is also very funny!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIACqpidRM

AT LAST THE 1948 SHOW - Cleese, Feldman - Annoying Train-Passenger

John Cleese & Marty Feldman in a sketch from the pre-Python show "At Last The 1948 Show"....

Dylan Thomas, Richard Burton and the surpises of which the English language is capable

I still do not understand why my good Welsh friend Gentleman Gethin Gunworthy does not like Dylan Thomas, but I think this programme below is absolutely wonderful. The other night I was discussing with some Russian friends the sound of English. I think this is an extraordinary example of it, which I recommend to anyone interested in the Celtic contribution to the language of the Saxons - the two strands alongside each other being part of what has made English so varied, flexible, surprising and so often, to me, poetic:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076htk

English humour part 2 - wonderful!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0288353

The destructive effects on literary creativity of "creative writing" courses

This man is TOTALLY right. His thoughts were even better put by Philip Larkin in his essay: "Subsidising Poetry", which had the theme: No Shakespeare Prize for Shakespeare. Everyone in the arts industry (which is as destructive of real creativity as the semi-fraudulent conservation industry is for human contact with real nature) should read that and ponder. Horace Engdahl clearly has done so...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/07/creative-writing-killing-western-literature-nobel-judge-horace-engdahl

Creative writing courses are killing western literature, claims Nobel judge

Grants cut off writers from society, whereas past greats worked as ‘taxi drivers and waiters’ to feed their imaginations, says Horace Engdahl. Alison Flood reports

THEGUARDIAN.COM|BY ALISON FLOOD

English humour at its best... a lesson for all culture-vultures!

Any Russian who wants to understand what тонкий английский юмор is all about has TOTALLY, TOTALLY, TOTALLY got to listen to this program, possibly the funniest I have ever heard, about the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which was known in the 1970s as "the word's worst orchestra"....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013fj17