Product Description

Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 01/10/2006

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37692 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2006-01-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 171 minutes

Amazon.com
Some turn to scary movies for squirms, others to comedy. For the latter, the BBC's Nighty Night packs more squirms into a single episode than an entire season of The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Combined. In other words, this blacker-than-black Britcom is so dark it could almost qualify as horror. Simply put, Jill Tyrell (writer/creator Julia Davis, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself) is the hairdresser from hell. She may lack the horns and the forked tail, but her approach to life couldn’t be more demonic. The vicious fun begins when preternaturally passive hubbie Terry (Kevin Eldon) is diagnosed with cancer--a malignant brain tumor, no less. After he's hustled off to the hospital for treatment, Jill tells everyone in town, including compassionate vicar Gordon Forks (Michael Fenton Stevens), that Terry has died and drops by the local dating agency to find a suitable replacement. Meanwhile, the ever-optimistic Cath Cole (Rebecca Front), who has MS, moves in next door. Upon meeting Cath's selfish spouse, Don (Angus Deayton, One Foot in the Grave), Jill decides he's the one. Her seduction plan begins by using Cath to get to him. When Don, who favors more pneumatic types--like the vicar's wife, Sue (Felicity Montagu)--proves resistant to her charms, Jill sets her sights on their teenaged son. Produced by Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People), Nighty Night premiered in the US on the Oxygen Channel. Although there are only six episodes in the first series, the terrifying Mrs. Tyrell wreaks an admirable amount of havoc in each, culminating in one of the most hilariously squirm-inducing season finales in the Beeb's storied history. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Biography of Julia Davis
Julia has worked with some of the biggest names in comedy from Steve Coogan to Chris Morris. She won the 2001 Royal Television Society Award for Best Television Actress and a BANFF award for co-writing and starring in the critically acclaimed comedy series Human Remains with Rob Brydon. Julia started out doing improvised comedy in Bath and Bristol with actors such as Rob Brydon and Ruth Jones and then began writing and performing sketches for Radio 4 with Arabella Weir and Meera Syal. After sending a tape of her characters to Steve Coogan, she worked with him and Simon Pegg, touring with Steve's live show for eight months. She then went on to do Big Train, Chris Morris's Blue Jam radio series and Jam. Her other credits include People Like Us and Annie Griffin's Coming Soon.

Julia was nominated for the 2003 Bodil Award for Best Supporting Actress in Lone Scherfig's dogma-based film Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself. Her other film work includes Shaun of the Dead, The Sex Lives of the Potato Men (with Mark Gatiss) and Richard Curtis's Love Actually. Julia found working and improvising with Rob Brydon on Human Remains much more fun than writing Nighty Night alone. She prefers acting to writing but found on Nighty Night she was so obsessed with all aspects of the production it was hard to focus on her own performance.

CREDITS:

Film
Love Actually
Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

Television
Alan Clark Diaries
I'm Alan Partridge
Trombone
Dr Terrible's House of Horrible
Human Remains
Jam
People Like Us
Big Train
Comedy Nation

Theatre
Steve Coogan – The Man Who Thinks He's It
Jackpot
Me Me Me
Sisters
More Fool Us
Instant Wit
The Sister of Percy

Radio
The Very World of Milton Jones
Blue Jam Series 1-3
Five Squeezy Pieces

Customer Reviews

Incredible Comedy, truly original and very dark.
Every so often a sitcom comes along that stays with you for a very long time after you've watched it, and "Nighty Night", the BBC's most recent sitcom-to-DVD conversion, is just such a thing.

Jill Tyrell (Julia Davis, the show's writer and creator, and a fabulous comedy actress, to boot), a beautician in a nondescript Northern town, is devastated to learn that her husband Terry (Kevin Eldon) has cancer. This happens to be the first scene of the first episode, and it's the last rational reaction you'll see for the next three hours. Jill, not one to rest on her laurels, decides a new man is the order of the day, and, before Terry is even ill, much less dead, deposits him in the hospital and heads off to find a man. Enter the unlucky Don (Angus Deayton), and his multiple sclerosis-afflicted wife Cathy (Rebecca Front), as Jill's new neighbours. Deciding that he's the man for her, and blindly ignoring the fact that Terry doesn't seem to be getting any sicker, Jill goes about driving a wedge between Don and Cathy, and keeping Terry's presence a secret from all and sundry.

As with "The League of Gentlemen", "Nighty Night" is a comedy that gets laughs from its situational absurdity. The main characters, with the exception of Jill, are portrayed beautifully as normal, rational people cast headlong into an unreasonable situation, but, thanks to the machinations of the ensemble of secondary characters (such as the gloriously funny Ruth Jones as Jill's long-suffering employee and friend Linda, and the wickedly irreverent Mark Gatiss as her erstwhile paramour Glenn Bulb), they soon find themselves descending to a level of abnormality that they're clearly not comfortable with. Happily, this makes for the best viewing, and "Nighty Night" is one of the best comedies to come out of Britain in recent years.

Julia Davis as Jill is monstrously cruel, totally self-centred and completely sociopathic, but, as with all good anti-heroes, she manages to generate such sympathy for the character that we are rooting for her to win, in the end. It's a brilliant portrayal of a character, that, in the hands of a lesser actress or with less care taken over the finer points of the script, could easily have sunk into one-dimensional nastiness. Happily, Davis has created in Jill Tyrell a sitcom heroine to rival - and beat - the likes of Basil Fawlty, Patsy Stone and Vicki Pollard at their own game.

I'm not going to give anything away, so I'm going to end my review here, suffice it so say that here are three of the best and funniest hours you could ever own on DVD. Extras - outtakes and almost twenty minutes of deleted scenes - are wonderful, and the audio/video quality is, as one would expect from the BBC, top-drawer.

Wholeheartedly recommended as an essential purchase.

Deliciously Funny
This is too good to be true. After purchasing this based on reviews alone my partner and I sat down to watch it not knowing what was about to take place. For the next three hours, we were absolutely shocked and entertained. This has got to be one of the most original shows ever to be created. Its got it all; comedy, drama and twisted minds. I have to admit I've taken a few lessons from Jill and her methods do work. Seriously though it was just plain amazing and I hope series two will be out soon. It is not for the easily offended but for those there is always the Brady bunch; the lamest thing ever to grace television. For the rest of us, well...Nighty Night. Highly recommended.

one of the best Beeb shows in years
NIGHTY NIGHT is one of the most accomplished and subtle comedies to emerge from the BBC in recent years. Julia Davis wrote and starred in the series, playing monstrous Jill Tyrell, a self-centered egomaniac who discovers her long-suffering husband Terry (Kevin Eldon) has cancer. Despite Terry's quite hopeful prognosis, the first thing Jill does is sign up with a dating agency, then places Terry in a nursing home and tells everyone he has died...before setting her sights on her handsome new doctor neighbour Don (Angus Deayton). Jill's only obstacle lies with Cathy (Rebecca Front), Don's wheelchair-bound wife. Using every cunning trick and insult at her disposal, Jill will stop at nothing to claim Don for herself.

Julia Davis is fabulous playing Jill, a character with absolutely NO redeeming qualities. Patsy from "AbFab" looks like Mary Poppins pruning the rosebushes compared to Jill! The DVD contains all 6 episodes from the first series.

This isn't your usual "vanilla slice-Sunday afternoon" comedy from the Beeb...