British Television Quotes

The trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, What! Another talking head? ~ John Cleese

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Astonishing times. Who would have imagined that the Crazy Gang would yield a Hollywood film star (Vinny Jones), a British television ever-present (John Fashanu) and now a televised African dance champion? ~ Giles Smith

It's a funny thing, 'The Office,' because millions and millions and millions and millions of people didn't watch it. But culturally, it is more of a phenomenon than almost anything else I can remember as far as British television is concerned. ~ Martin Freeman

I've always been conscious of the fact that there aren't enough Irish voices on British television compared to the amount of Irish people who live there. ~ Chris O'Dowd

To this day it cracks me up to think that my debut on national British television as a reporter ends with me turning a trick. ~ RuPaul

Clara Oswald: This is just a dream, but very clever people can hear dreams. So please, just listen. I know you're afraid, but being afraid is all right, because didn't anybody ever tell you fear is a superpower? Fear can make you faster and cleverer and stronger.
And one day, you'll come back to this barn and on that day you're going to be very afraid indeed. But that's ok because if you're very wise and very strong, fear doesn't have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind.
It doesn't matter if there's nothing under the bed or in the dark, so long as you know it's ok to be afraid of it. You're always going to be afraid, even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion, a constant companion, always there. But that's ok, because fear can bring us together.
Fear can bring you home.
I'm going to leave you with something just so you always remember: Fear makes companions of us all. -Listen, Doctor Who, episode 8.4 ~ Steven Moffat

She spent the entire day at the house, debating the issue with herself. First, she watched TV. British television seemed to consist mostly of makeover shows. Garden makeovers. Fashion makeovers. House makeovers. Everything relating to change. It seemed like a hint. Change something. Make a move. She ~ Maureen Johnson

After college, I funded my short films with acting roles in film and TV. I learned my craft through the great opportunities British television gave me as a director. ~ Justin Chadwick

I came to Los Angeles and did auditions for television. I made a terrible mess of most of them and I was quite intimidated. I felt very embarrassed and went back to London. I got British television jobs intermittently between the ages of 23 and 27, but it was very patchy. ~ Michael Fassbender

We have to take risks in British television. It has to stop playing to the lowest common denominator and patronising people. ~ Charles Dance

I think the amazing thing about 'Twin Peaks' was that it completely changed television from that point forward. ~ Madchen Amick

I'm the age where we didn't have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad. ~ Jack Nicholson

During the run up to the Iraq War, Mike Farrell and I did get on television kind of frequently, but then they saw that that didn't work. They really couldn't bait us into being stupid, so they stopped. You know the mainstream media, corporate media, avoids ever giving anyone who has anything to say a platform, if they can possibly help it. ~ James Cromwell

First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother. ~ William S. Burroughs

Shonda Rhimes is at the top of television. ~ Wes Brown

I mean that you and I know that in this universe, God is a hack," he said. "He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that? ~ John Scalzi

I don't think people have fully processed how deeply television has changed the political process in our own world. Political parties have become vestiges of what they were and individuals with large amounts of money can leapfrog over that process, which can have a positive mediating effect. And so I think there are things to worry about. ~ Alexander Stille

Yet in the 1950s and '60s, a wide range of historians quickly and uncritically...[sought to] rule out of serious discussion of the American founding any suggestion that important, even defining, conflicts prevailed between rich, well-connected founders--those men of a variety of opinions of how government should work, who signed the Declaration of Independence and framed the U.S. Constitution--and the huge majority of unrich, ordinary Americans who--though we know so little about it--spent the founding era protesting, rioting, petitioning, occupying, and making demands on government in hopes of achieving access to economic development and restraining the power of wealth.

That economic conflict wasn't between revolutionary Americans and British authorities. It was between Americans and other Americans. I've come to see it--not its resolution but the conflict itself--as defining our emergence as a people. ~ William Hogeland

People say I owe a lot to television. The fact is I was a star long before television. What TV made me is unemployed. ~ Milton Berle

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers. ~ Kenneth Koch

It's easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry's vision of the techscape of the future was. By today's standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of "touchtone" dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different. ~ Marc Cushman

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between. ~ Chiwetel Ejiofor

I really wouldn't want to live in America. I found New York claustrophobic and dirty. I missed England when I was there, simple things like smells and the British sense of humor. ~ Jonny Lee Miller

My favourite men's clothes are like Victorian British clothing. ~ Sean Lennon

The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive our autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by the incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the winds roar, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed. ~ Paul Shepheard

There are a few Chinese smuggled in over the borders of British Columbia on the north and Mexico on the south. ~ Denis Kearney

The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt. ~ Ken Follett

Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room. ~ Alan Coren

I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don't know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us.
But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, "Oh, I used to have such a crush on him."
When she does this, our memory will be waiting.
Yes, yes, yes. It is love that we feel here.
This is the purpose of memory. ~ M.O. Walsh

A whole society imprints us. Language, television and culture imprints us Just living in a country is a vibratory imprint. All the collective attentions, of all the people who live there - imprint us. ~ Frederick Lenz

Macho in a different sense, the kind of things that we think makes us a man. It doesn't really exist right now. I really don't want it to seem that I think it's a problem that women are in development, I don't think it's as problem at all, I just think it's an interesting time that we're in. And maybe long overdue - maybe television for a long time was made for men and it's long overdue. ~ Edward Allen Bernero

One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with. ~ David Duchovny

In 1843, after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home a one word telegram, "Peccavi" implying "I have Sind..."

(Napier was under explicit instructions that:
1. He was not to attack Hyderabad.
2. If provoked to fighting, he was under no conditions take Hyderabad's
capital -- Sind.
He then (according to the story) send the one word message Peccavi to London and of course all the recipients understood that he had violated his order and taken the city - the old British boy school Latin training... ~ Charles Napier

The spirit of the South Atlantic was the spirit of Britain at her best. It has been said that we surprised the world, that British patriotism was rediscovered in those spring days. It was never really lost. But it would be no bad thing if the feeling that swept the country then were to continue to inspire us. For if there was any doubt about the determination of the British people it was removed by the men and women who, a few months ago, brought a renewed sense of pride and self-respect to our country. ~ Margaret Thatcher

I just don't want to come down to that level of society ... .the ones who sit by their televisions, drink their beer, their guts fat, vicariously living someone else's life, in a destructive way. I want a positive way. ~ Miki Dora

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust. ~ Salvador Dali

Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety. ~ Steve Aylett

If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won't hear an English accent. You'll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent. ~ Morrissey

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis. ~ Umberto Eco

I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered . rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill. ~ Assata Shakur

The Cayman Islands, a British Crown colony in the Caribbean, for instance, is the fifth largest banking center in the world, ~ Michel Chossudovsky

Charred bits of black silk swirl into the air, and pearls clatter to the stage ... I'm in a dress of the exact design of my wedding dress, only it's the color of coal and made of tiny feathers. Wonderingly, I lift my long, flowing sleeves into the air, and that's when I see myself on the television screen. Clothed in black except for the white patches on my sleeves. Or should I say my wings. Because Cinna had turned me into a mockingjay. ~ Suzanne Collins

I never weigh myself, but the brutal truth of television is that they don't employ old people or fat people. ~ Ruby Wax

I personally don't have a problem with naked bodies on television. ~ Lesley-Anne Down

I'm like John Wayne. I only play good guys. Describing his cameo role on a TV series. ~ Oliver North

Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-'70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap. ~ Adam Schlesinger

Recognising that an ostentatious cult of heroism and state service served an important propaganda function for the British elite does not mean, of course, that we should dismiss it as artificial or insincere. All aristocracies have a strong military tradition, and for many British patricians the protracted warfare of the period was a godsend. It gave them a job, and, more important, a purpose, an opportunity to carry out what they had been trained to do since childhood: ride horses, fire guns, exercise their undoubted physical courage and tell other people what to do. ~ Linda Colley

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

As time went by, matters improved; the armies, especially the British and French Armies, became better at staying alive while killing larger numbers of the enemy which, though hardly a matter for satisfaction in human terms, is what well-trained armies are supposed to do. ~ Robin Neillands

The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image. ~ Brian Greene

Crystal Lil, her door propped open, sits in front of the television with a pan in her lap, a brown bag at her feet. She ~ Katherine Dunn

When a liberal professor takes enormous intellectual liberties by openly promoting an ideological agenda to his students, the cry of academic freedom rings across the quads. But when a conservative professor is punished for publishing an article in a politically incorrect journal, there is no defense of intellectual diversity. What is billed as academic neutrality turns out to be a smoke screen for the relativistic liberal agenda.

Today's relativists could not have gotten away with their double standards in a culture that prized truth. But a gradual, sustained assault on truth has been carried out through the soft underbelly of Western culture: the arts. In film, music, and television, the themes of sensual pleasure and individual choice have drowned out the tried-and-true virtues of faith, family, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, patriotism, and fidelity in marriage. Cultural mechanics have wielded their tools to dull the public's sense of reasonable limits. In an Age of Consent, the silly and the profound are becoming indistinguishable. ~ Gary L. Bauer

The new normal is to have strong women and girls as typical a character for television, films, and books. There wouldn't be a need to have a category for "Strong Women". Strong by Kailin Gow ~ Kailin Gow