Follow Me!

Follow Me! was an offbeat and sometimes vaudeville British series and English course produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk, Deutscher Hochschulverband, Council of Europe Experts, and the BBC in the late 1970s to provide a crash course in the English language. It became popular in many overseas countries as a first introduction to English. The series lasted for two seasons from 1978 to 1981.

Starring Francis Matthew as the host and the narrator of the series, he introduced the British culture to the international audience while teaching the English course.

The Intro
Each episode had an intro of England; they showed a British Airways plane landed on Heathrow airport, and the audience entered a tunnel that had a sign said "Welcome To Britain", and then Francis Matthew got out from The Underground with the 'FOLLOW ME' title over the Tower Bridge of London.

The English Course
The course consisted of sixty lessons. Each lesson lasted from 12 to 15 minutes and covered a specific lexis. The lessons followed a consistent group of actors, with the relationships between their characters developing during the course. Distributed in 4 modules of 15 lessons each, it included staged situations, brief sketches, songs, short clips of real daily life in Britain and a mini-series at the end of the last five lessons of each module.

The series was very theater-like and looked under budget, although it distributed to dozens of European and Asian countries. The English course segments usually filmed in a studio with limited decorations and viewers had to use their imaginations. The mini movies were filmed on locations and have simple storylines and dialogues with outrages plots.

Actors
Other actors included: David Savile, Diane Mercer, Keith Alexander, Diana King, Veronica Leigh, Ian Bamforth, Elaine Wells, and Raymond Mason. They were very well-known actors in Britain, usually worked on television and theater. They performed many characters and skits for the show while emphasizing the English language lessons.

There were actors for the mini movies as well, but hardly credited.

Skits and Clips
Many of the skits were based on British culture, English popular culture, Hollywood films, Europe historical figures, and UK history such as William Shakespeare, British Royalties, The Marx Brothers, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Napoleon. There was a singing section that explained the lesson they learned, and the actors are wearing costumes like the popular singers ABBA.

The skits included the situation and the daily days in a workplace, the relationship between the characters, how to greet people, the weather, travel around, using the British money currency, and every common theme while having conversations in English.

Usually in the middle of a lesson, there were clips of everyday people do in United Kingdom such as what they do in the office, post office, hotel, family home, restaurant, airport, train, and shop. The clips had real people acted out their regular normal days and they usually lasted for a few seconds or a minute.

Season one:
Beginner Level and Elementary Level

Season two:
Intermediate Level and Advanced Level

Trivia
The series became popular in many overseas countries as a first introduction to English; in 1983, one hundred million people watched the show in China alone.