"A babe with a bob cut and a magnificent bosom"

I'm not exactly a pop culture Anglophile, though I do love Monty Python. However, I have recently stumbled on a couple of wonderful British imports. Today I'll write about "The Vicar of Dibley," a sitcom series with Dawn French as Geraldine Granger, a female vicar assigned to the rural village of Dibley. The parish council members don't all take to her at first, but soon they, and all the villagers, love her, except for the stodgy head of the council, David Horton (Gary Waldhorn), though by the end of the first series (a batch of six episodes), even Horton has reluctantly gotten used to her, and may even come to have a slight crush on her. The plots are not out of the ordinary, and you'll see the continuing influence of the physical comedy of "I Love Lucy" on occasion. What's special here are the characters and the ways they connect.

Geraldine is surprisingly bawdy for a woman of God (she has framed pictures of Jesus and Mel Gibson on her wall, a juxtaposition in place many years before Passion of the Christ), and some of the episodes center on her search for a man. She is often sharply sarcastic, but is also compassionate and gentle when called for. Still, she is definitely the "normal" one here, as this is basically a traditional "ordinary person surrounded by strange people" type of comedy. Her assistant Alice (Emma Chambers) is a complete childlike ditz, and one of the funniest continuing bits is the joke that Geraldine tells Alice after the credits of each show; no matter how simple the joke (even lame knock-knock jokes), Alice never gets it, and when she does laugh at it, it's for the wrong reasons. The other council members are equally odd but endearing, with my favorite being Owen (Roger Lloyd-Pack), the farmer who loves to talk about his various bowel problems (and those of his sheep as well). For a show with heavy dollops of sarcastic lines, naughty talk, bathroom humor, and unrealistic situations, I find the show heartwarming as well, maybe because all the disparate characters truly do have affection for each other. I also love the theme song, a gorgeous choral setting of the 23rd Psalm by Howard Goodall which I was pleased to be able to download from iTunes. I've watched all the episodes that have been made so far (3 DVDs worth) and keep coming back for repeats.