The Chart Show: BBC Two Comedy Zone (again)

The new Thursday night overnight rating figures are in! And you know what that means? That’s right - an incredibly easy update for us. Phew.

So, Life’s Too Short continues to struggle, though the rate at which it’s losing viewers is slowing. Maybe that million viewers realised it’d be the strongest episode of the series so far, with it managing to last an entire 28 minutes without Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant popping up on screen, and without there even being any famous Americans on screen. When we say ‘strongest’ it’s all relative, obvs – it still had woeful LOLRAPISTS and LOLPEADO jokes in there, but it wasn’t quite as bad as the previous episodes of the series. And hey, no dwarves in toilets this week, so that was a thing.

Meanwhile, Rev is getting more and more enjoyable – the latest episode was a delight, with Mick being treated to a homecooked meal by Rev Adam and Alex being a wonderful little scene (“Thank you… do I eat a potato next? Thank you… do I eat a vegetable next?”). Not only that, but Richard E Grant turning up, effectively playing Banker Withnail. That’s how you ‘do’ celebrity cameos. It certainly looks like the televiewers of Britain are in agreement with us on Rev, with it holding steady on 1.24 million viewers.

Slightly surprisingly, Frank Skinner’s Opinionated is now the most popular of the three shows, not least because we don’t think the BBC have promoted the series at all. It’s still a perfectly amiable programme, though hardly Skinner at his best. Even so, it’s interesting to see the series improve its viewership for the second week running, and even more interesting to note that dip in the ratings between the three shows – about a fifth of the audience for Rev switch over at 9.30pm, then switch back at 10pm to watch Frank Skinner. (Well, it could be an entirely different 240,000 people, admittedly. We haven’t conducted a poll.)

PREDICTION: The controller of BBC Two moves Life’s Too Short to 10pm at the last minute, to try and get a return on the big expensive programme it ended up paying half of. After all, the only reason it’s not popular is because it must be in the wrong timeslot.

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The League of Funnymen Part 8: Angelos Epithemiou

Him off Shooting Stars.

ANGELOS EPITHEMIOU & FRIENDS: LIVE

£12.97 (Amazon)

The first thing we wondered when seeing the cover of this was whether the “& Friends” part of the title suggested Renton Skinner would be spending much of the runtime showing off other, less interesting comic creations of his. Luckily for those who have enjoyed his turns alongside Vic and Bob, it’s Angelos all the way on this disc. The ‘friends’ in question tend to be the acquaintances of Epithemiou’s from his supposed everyday life, pictures of whom occasionally flash up on the screen at the back of the stage as we’re told about their antics.

It has been said that Angelos is another example of a comedian lazily mocking disability (cf. The Morgana Show, Gervais circa monggate), but we wouldn’t really go with that. If anything, he plays a slightly naive eccentric who lives in his own version of the world, and the version of the world he’s created for himself is one where he’s the winner at everything. Much like Frank Sidebottom only without the songs or head, and a tad more world-weariness.

Aside from all that, you might be wondering just how a full gig compares to the short bursts of Angelos Epithemiou in Shooting Stars. Pretty well, in fact. If you’re looking to us for a half-baked comparison, it’s not a million miles away from the live shows of Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out. Angelos’ DJ rig is decorated in much the same curious manner as the desk in Big Night Out (there’s even a horsebrass on it), and there’s even a great bit of That’s Justice-ish audience member participation in his ‘game show’ Epithemiou or Bust. While it doesn’t quite hit the heights of that slice of early 90s gold, it’s as close as you’re likely to get to such demented whimsy nowadays, and it’ll be interesting to see how this DVD performs against other more traditional stand-ups.

It’s commendable how Renton Skinner manages to keep in character throughout, even during parts of the audience Q&A where people ask funny questions that get a huge response from the rest of the crowd. He even remains in character at that most annoying occurrence at a DVD-record gig, a couple of selfish oafs in the front row walking out with about three minutes of the gig left.

Overall impressions, then – if you enjoyed his performance in Shooting Stars (or on Never Mind The Buzzcocks the other night), you’ll almost definitely find this DVD an enjoyable way to spend 85 minutes of your winter (or summer if you’re reading this while wondering if you should be buying it from a sale seven months from now). If you’re unconvinced about him, try to give it a watch anyway – being drawn into the world of Angelos properly will let you make up your mind about him properly. Only a few of his gags (such as they are) appeared in Shooting Stars, and they’re pretty much the weaker ones. And he doesn’t do any of the rubbish stuff about Ulrika, because, well, she’s not there. CAVEAT: If you hate comedy where there aren’t any proper jokes or anything, you’ll hate this. If anyone you know has bought you this for Christmas, it’s probably their way of telling you they hate you. You misery.

Us? We really enjoyed it. We certainly found ourselves laughing out loud more often than with most of the DVDs we’ve looked at so far, which puts it pretty high up in our SPECIAL REVAMPED LEAGUE TABLE WHICH ACCOUNTS FOR OVERALL QUALITY RATHER THAN JUST SIMPLE ORDERING.

SAMPLE GAG: “If you find yourself in France, don’t panic. Just lie down on the floor, curl up in a ball, and wait for rescue.”

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The Six Most Unsettling Moments In That BBC One “Consider Yourself” Promo

6. DAVID JASON LURKS

What’s he planning? And why has he got that disturbing grin on his face? Oh, we can’t see it at this resolution, but we can tell. We can just tell. Brr.

5. GRAHAM NORTON WILL EAT YOUR SOUL

Is this Christmas, or a very, very late Halloween promo? Right now, we aren’t sure.

4. LENNY HENRY KISSES BY FALLING ON TOP OF THE PERSON HE IS TRYING TO KISS

What other possible reason could there be for him falling over after Ms Cotton steps aside at the last moment, eh? He’s a big bloke, too.

3. THE TWO OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE COMEDY QUALITY SPECTRUM CLASH

Isn’t Frank Skinner only on BBC Two, anyway? Also: it is too much to hope that despite the above image, there actually isn’t a Christmas special lined up for Mrs Brown’s Boys? Or, as Michael Legge excellently summed up the show, “FUCK FUCK FUCK POTATO FUCK FUCK”.

2. DOT COTTON DROPS ONE

Well, it snapped Norton out of that demonic possession, anyway.

1. DAVID JASON WINKS AT YOU

This is just outright creepy. We know Del Boy is Britain’s favourite sitcom character and everything, and this Christmas marks David Jason’s return to sitcom, but… well, basically, WAH. We actually had to make an animated version of this, just to prove how disturbing it is.

As if the wink isn’t bad enough, the way he looks both ways with a mischievous grin on his face beforehand… why is he checking the coast is clear? What doesn’t he want anyone but us to see? The more we think about it, the more scared we are. In summary: WE WANT TO GO HOME THIS ISN’T FUN ANY MORE.

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The League of Funnymen: Jason Manford Live

 

JASON MANFORD LIVE

£12.93 (Amazon)

A quick addition to our scoreboard of stand-up today, and it’s Salford scamp Jason Manford. With his schtick being “cosy observation”, you can pretty much guess what’ll be coming up here, and there aren’t any surprises on offer. Topics touch on being a parent, obsolete names (“you never see a baby called Geoff any more, do you?”), how the penis adds context to the testicles, lady shampoo, and his dad.

Time for one of our theories about stand-up: while it’s expected that every American comic has to have a routine on airports because they spend so much time flitting between east and west coasts (if they don’t perform such a routine once per gig they probably get kicked out of American stand-up equivalent of The Magic Circle or something), with British comedians it’s ‘driving’. Is this why the British public seem more likely to take stand-up comedians to their collective hearts? Our more compact landmass affording our millionaire mirthmeisters that extra shared experience of motorway service stations while touring the country, while their stateside cousins have to try and remember what it was like the last time they flew coach in 1987 if they want to connect with their audience like that?

Yeah, probably not, it’s only a theory we’ve held for about seventeen minutes. It does mean that when Manford does his bit about driving, including the difficulty of putting petrol in your car to the nearest tenner when filling up, we couldn’t help but lament he’d missed the much better punchline that we thought of. Which is this: “and then, after finally managing to somehow squeeze that final pennyworth of petrol into your car, you go in and pay for it… by card”. See, shared experiences between comedian and audience.

Luckily for Jason Manford, that’s the only bit where we thought of a much better punchline than him (no, it IS a much better punchline, shut up). It certainly helps that he maintains a steady air of The Funniest Bloke At Work, the kind of bloke who you’d be a bit disappointed if you go out on a work ‘do’ and he’s not turned up. (Look, our version of that petrol joke works better because, you know, the guy doing the till isn’t even going to be giving you any change! You might as well just have got £22.43 of petrol! That’s why it’s funny! IT IS!) Unless, of course, you always get annoyed by people like that, in which case this DVD isn’t really going to realign your liking-Jason-Manford-or-not-sensors. But, if you’re a fan of faintly undemanding comedy about things like supermarket self-scan tills, you’re in luck. (Yes, we know there’s pay-at-pump, but then the joke doesn’t work. Look, it’s a valid joke. Leave us alone.)

File under: safe bet Christmas present for brother-in-law.

SAMPLE GAG: “The most commonly searched for term on Google is ‘sex’. That’s too broad a term, surely? It’s like going into Tesco and asking ‘where’d you keep your food?’”

UPDATED TABLE!

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Our Favourite Review of Black Mirror Episode One

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The League of Funnymen: Part Three (Chris Addison Live)

Our ranking of ribaldry rumbles on.

CHRIS ADDISON LIVE

£11.88 (Amazon)

“Star of BAFTA Winning Comedy THE THICK OF IT” screams the cover. Not quite sure why it didn’t mention the Oscar-nommed spinoff In The Loop as well, in which Addison plays a more central role, but there you go. Mind you, if we’d been in charge of designing that cover we’d have gone with “Star of That Sunday Morning Music Programme On UK Play When It Started In 1998, You Know, That One With Lauren Laverne On It As Well, At Least We Think It Was Chris Addison. Oh, And He Did Dotcomedy As Well, But No-One Ever Mentions That Nowadays”. All in the Papyrus font. Mainly because we just hate humanity.

ANYWAY. After several days of diminishing returns on our list (five stand-up DVDs rated so far, each has been ranked lower than the last. More through accident than design, though we do admit we were keener to see the Tim Vine and Milton Jones DVDs than Jimmy Carr’s. From hereon in, we’re looking at DVDs we have no real preconceptions, so these could be placed anywhere in the list. ANYWHERE.

So, Chris Addison, then. Best known for The Thick Of It, in which he didn’t have a hand writing. When he did share penmanship duties on a sitcom, it was the roundly derided Labrats (which we’d personally put down as a gallant effort that just needed a couple more drafts at scripting stage, but we seem to be in the minority there). He has been a bit disappointing when cropping up on Have I Got News For You, but one of the best guests on the current series of QI. (Shush, that’s how comedians are judged nowadays.) He made Channel 4’s list of 100 Greatest Stand-Up, but trying to put on a show that can be put on DVD and sold in supermarkets can do terrible things to a stand-up’s act. WILL IT BE GOOD OR WHAT, THEN?

Topics include the boringness of British roads, the Pope not being able to stand up in the Popemobile any more because of The Taylor Report, the BNP, golf clubs. the cultural identity of the modern Briton, ITV’s current affairs output, and what it’s like being married (as is the law for all stand-up comedians who’ve been performing for more than ten years). All delivered by a 40 year old man seemingly trapped in the body of a sweaty, giggly 27-year-old from the year 1999. And happily, well, it’s enjoyable and many of the things that he says while talking are funny. (“Dear BrokenTV, thank you for applying for the position of chief comedy critic of Newsnight Review. Sadly, that vacancy is no longer available, and you work sadly didn’t quite reach the critical standard required for the position, and seriously, “it’s enjoyable”? God, you’re rubbish. Yours, J Hadlow, Controller, BBC Two.”)

In amongst all the cavorting, picking on nicely unthreatening subjects, material about having to cope with being a slightly ineffectual excuse for a male by any traditional standards (“I’m so non-sexist, I even married a woman. And in many regards, so did she”), there are a few moments of slightly annoying punching down (“imagine if you did crash on an Easyjet flight, eh? On a snowy mountain… would you want to eat those people?” being an especially grating line), but he pretty much makes up for those moments with the remainder of his act revolving around gentle middle-class self-loathing (a huge chunk of this act is even delivered in a self-scarhingly twee Guardian-reader whine).

Harder to take are the routines based on topics pretty much every British stand-up of the last decade has done endless times before (ooh, we’re no good when there’s a bit of snow, are we? Aah, don’t we buy rubbish when drunkenly in charge of the internet? The Daily Mail – bit right wing, innit?), but we just assume those are all based on rants he thought up on the spot while on Mock The Week (#SARCASM. Oh, wait, we’re not on Twitter now). Either way, Addison’s breathless energy, charm, use of the ‘hard a’ when saying the word ‘bastard’ (always wins us over, that), is more likely to mean you’ve got a smile on your face for much of it.

SAMPLE GAG [When talking about universities with vague names like “University of Central England” being substandard compared to other universities]: “U.C.E… so called because those are the grades it takes to get in!”

So, where does this fall on our Top Gear-style table? (If any Chris Addison fans are reading this, Top Gear is that programme about cars. You’re probably watching a box set of The Wire when it’s on.)

Man, we’re going to get annoyed with having to renumber all the entries after we’ve done about twelve of these, aren’t we?

NEXT TIME ON THE COMEDY DVD REVIEW ROUNDUP THAT WE WRITE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND DON’T EVEN BOTHER TO PROOF READ OR REDRAFT: Um, not sure. Possibly Jason Manford Live.

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The Chart Show: BBC Two’s Comedy Zone

"People are straight away thinking it's going to be a cruel comedy – why? Why do they assume that? It's their prejudice.” – Ricky Gervais promoting Life’s Too Short, The Guardian, 4th November 2011.

Yeah, no huge surprise that we’re not a fan of LIFE’S TOO SHORT, though we really didn’t think the first episode was markedly worse than the debut episode of EXTRAS, and the first series of Extras turned out to be ‘quite good’. Sadly though, Life’s Too Short only got worse and worse from the opener onwards. Meanwhile REV, the lead-in for Gervais latest vehicle is remaining hugely enjoyable, while FRANK SKINNER’S OPINIONATED continues to be a fun if undemanding half-hour.

“But, how are they all doing in the ratings?”, you’ll be asking. Welp, us being us, we’ve looked up the overnight figures for every episode of each, and bunged them into a lovely chart.

And here it is:

So, all three shows have declined from a strong set of opening figures, but while viewing figures for Rev seem to be levelling out, and those for Opinionated are pretty solid, Life’s Too Short is in freefall. If you want a comparison, when BBC Two showed the first series of STEWART LEE’S COMEDY VEHICLE, it attracted a fairly solid million or so viewers, despite being a cult comedian telling long routines about books and stuff, and didn’t even have any Hollywood A-list stars or dwarves vomiting onto their own genitalia or anything.

Still, this does give a reason to keep looking out for Life’s Too Short. Why not have your own office How Low Will The Ratings Get For Life’s Too Short By Episode Seven Sweepstake? We’ve done one, and have plucked out the ticket containing ‘700,000 to 720,000 viewers’. Fingers crossed!

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YuleTube.

Did you see what we did there?

Stepping aside from our League Of Funnymen for a day, how about one of our December mainstays? Namely, a ramble through some ephemera of Chrimbles past. (READER’S VOICE: “Oh, good. A YouTube roundup. You’re really pushing the boat out this year, aren’t you?”)

Pfft.

First up, thanks to YouTube (seemingly) relaxing their maximum video length, we have the entirety of groundbreaking BBCvt Christmas Tape WHITE POWDER CHRISTMAS. All in one go, all 35 minutes of it. Lovely.

“And now, let’s change the mood with a few musical numbers.” “Er, excuse me Mr Bendall…” All that. Assuming if the video hasn’t since been removed because of it containing so much of Kentucky Fried Movie, anyway. We’re actually writing all this three days ago.

Hey, remember last Christmas? More markedly, the highlight of the entire Christmas schedule – repeats of The Goodies on late night BBC Two? Brilliant, wasn’t it? And pleasingly, several of the episodes attracted viewing figures more or less on a par with recent episodes of Life’s Twenty-Seven Minutes Too Long Too Short. Lovely. To mark that event, here’s the opening titles to SATURDAY BANANA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL 1978. No dwarves were put in toilets during the making of this introduction.

Last up, friend of the blog Applemask (hey, anyone who doesn’t scream at us down the phone about us owing them money is a friend of ours. We’ve as many as seven friends, you know), and his fifteen-minute gawp at how ITV did Christmas in the past. SPOILER: They didn’t just bung a load of films on and take the rest of the day off, like they do nowadays. Well, except when they did do just that.

Back tomorrow with another thing we probably wrote several days ago!

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The League Of Funnymen: Part Two

Our festive fumble through the firesale of funny continues, with another addition to our leaderboard of laughmongers. Today:

JIMMY CARR: BEING FUNNY

£11.99 (Amazon)

In a way, you have to hand it to Jimmy Carr. Despite dealing primarily in one-liners, and having to juggle his stand-up with hosting 8 OUT OF 10 CATS and 10 O’CLOCK LIVE, he has now managed to release seven completely different stand-up sets on DVD in the last eight years. He doesn’t skimp either. The main feature on this DVD manages to last for an entire hundred minutes. That’s 100 minutes of brand new material, put together, toned, previewed, toured and recorded, all within twelve months. Fair dues.

In another, more correct way: Jimmy Carr can jolly well get fucked. This is largely the same set of jokes as on all his other DVDs, the only difference being that the set-ups to each joke have changed slightly. There are still the same four punchlines: LOLRAPE, LOLGAYS, LOLPAEDOS and LOLMISOGYNY, all put on shuffle. But hey, this is a godless universe in which Sickipedia is more popular than Gun Show Comic, so go figure.

Okay, we’re being a little harsh here. In keeping with our long held suspicion that when Bob Monkhouse died his spirit possessed a marketing executive but then got really lazy with his material, Carr does come up with some quality gags during Being Funny, but the shame is that it’s all buried in amongst some exceptionally poor shock-factor stuff that would put a fourteen-year-old boy to shame. And when the amount of good material on an entire DVD could easily fit into a YouTube-friendly highlights package, it’s not really worth £12 of your hard-earned money.

SAMPLE GAG (GOOD): “If things carry on the way they are now, it’s predicted that in forty years time the average toddler will be… forty-three.”

SAMPLE GAG (BAD): “Childhood is now effectively over by eleven. ‘Cos that’s when the pubs close and Uncle Terry gets home. Oh, Uncle Terry!”

Oh Jimmy, you lazy hack.

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So, what does that do to our table?

Tune in for another update tomorrow!

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The League Of Funnymen. And Women. And Andy Parsons. (Part One)

It’s that time of year again! Where we try to update the blog at least once per day right up to Christmas, like a crazy kind of disappointment-themed advent calendar. First up: part one of a new thing that we’ll definitely see through to the end, no really, we will, honest.

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Once upon a time, the last-minute Christmas gift from an auntie who was trying to get as many presents bought in HMV as she could before her Pay & Display ticket expired was the out-take video. It being the VHS age, it really didn’t really matter that the likes of “Red Dwarf Smeg-Ups” or “Bottom: Fluff” comprised mostly of someone saying something a bit wrong, then maybe yelling ‘FUCK!’ before murmuring “okay, okay, let’s go again”, because hey! It was ‘hidden’ telly, and being allowed to hear Lister say the f-word felt really dangerous because we were twelve.

Later came the DVD age, and with it a deluge of Own Goals & Gaffes compilations, where anyone with any kind of public profile would pop up in between shoddily filmed clips of Uruguayan Segunda Division left-backs slicing backpasses over goalkeepers’ heads to mumble through sub-Rory McGrath gags about David Beckham. Pretty much anyone was allowed to front this production line tat, usually wearing a forced grin on the cover, and often an England shirt if they weren’t really very popular in the first place. Everyone brought one of these out, Piers Morgan, David Seaman, Gordon Ramsay, Tyrone off Corrie, everyone. You probably don’t remember the tabloid furore in late 2003, when a contracting mix-up at Vivendi led to the poorly-received ‘Dr Harold Shipman’s Injury Time”. Though that would be because we’ve just made that up.

Then: someone deep within a DVD publishing company – possibly the same person who’d originally decided “interactive menus” counted as a special feature worth listing on the back of a DVD sleeve – came up with “Interactive DVD Quiz Games”. They’re like really disappointing tie-in videogames you don’t need a videogames console for! They led to a semi-revival of Telly Addicts! They were uniformly terrible! The nadir was probably the Newsnight Interactive DVD Quiz Game, mainly because it was actually just Jeremy Paxman calling you an idiot for two hours no matter which answers you selected.

Latterly things have sort-of improved, with the type of release most likely to be piled up into a fancy display in the entrance of Morrisons these days being stand-up comedy. And hey, that must be good, right? Comedy is a good thing, and it can’t be any worse than the kind of football DVDs that were shovelled into shops half a decade ago, right?

Right?

Ah, right.

This year must surely be the busiest winter ever for the stand-up genre, with at least twenty new offerings jostling for position amongst the Family Guy and Mrs fucking Brown’s fucking Boys Series fucking One boxsets in the TV DVD section of your local gigastore. But… how will we know which ones are best? And more importantly, which ones deserve to be sealed in concrete and dumped in the North Sea?

Well, that’s where we come in. We’re going to compile snappy little reviews of each stand-up DVD we encounter, and then place them onto a Top Gear Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car style leaderboard, only without implicitly proclaiming undying support for the Conservative Party. It’ll be a non-literal riot!

First up:

TIM VINE: THE JOKE-AMOTIVE

£11.99 (Amazon)

Ah, a wonderful start. There are two kinds of people in the world as far as we’re concerned – people who think Tim Vine is brilliant, and people who are wrong about Tim Vine. A quart of quickfire quips that are pretty amusing in their own right, but delivered in Vine’s breathless matter they have an effect not unlike having your skull fractured via relentlessly repeated raps with a teaspoon. In a good way.

Possibly the most likeable stand-up on the circuit right now, and it’s not just due to the quality of his act. Alongside it all, he seems disarmingly modest – his previous DVD (Punslinger) ended with the crowd calling for an encore, leading to Vine stepping back on stage to sheepishly admit he hadn’t anticipated such an event before bantering good naturedly with the crowd for a while. This time around, he’s a little more prepared for it, and we can confirm that there’s a pseudo-sequel to his infamous Pen Behind The Ear routine. Tim even gives a generous amount of screen time to support act John Archer, which is nice to see.

Admittedly, the runtime of the gig is just over an hour, but we promise that as long as you have a soul, you’ll spend at least 34 minutes and 27 second of that hour frantically suppressing giggles in order to hear the next joke properly. And hey, next time an elderly relative at a family gathering complains about how all the comedians, you’ve seen them all, on their Saturday Night Live At The Apollo, all the comedians, need to use bad language, you can show them this.

SAMPLE GAG: “I’ve got a job helping out a one-armed typist whenever she wants to do capital letters. It’s shift work.”

MILTON JONES: THE LION WHISPERER LIVE

£12.99 (Amazon)

There are two kinds of people in the world as far as we’re concerned – people who think Milton Jones is brilliant, and people who are wrong about Milton Jones. A hundredweight of hypersonic howlers… ah, you know the score. Another hugely funny comedian delivering a series of puns and one-liners. This time a little more surreal and in front of a slightly larger crowd and slightly more expensive-looking backdrop (we only really mention this in case Waddingtons ever bring out a “Quickfire Comedian Top Trumps” set and people are looking for strategic advice. Though whoever gets the Stephen Wright card will probably win anyway).

As might be expected from such an accomplished stand-up, it’s all of a very high quality, though it does lose pace a tad around the mid-point where Jones reappears as his own grandfather. Oh, and any time you remember that Milton Jones occasionally appears on Mock The Week. Still a very worthwhile purchase, mind.

FUN INTERACTIVE DVD GAME! Try and work out why Vine’s DVD is a PG, while Jones’ is a U.

SAMPLE GAG: “I’ve got a friend who’s into self-defence. He’s got a black belt… well, he’s got five black belts… okay, he’s a wasp.”

JOHN CLEESE LIVE: THE ALIMONY TOUR 2011

£11.99 (Amazon)

An Audience With John Cleese, more like. As anyone who may have read reviews of his tour will know (er, or anyone who’d seen it), this isn’t so much John Cleese going out on stage and doing a load of jokes, but rather a fairly endearing wander through memory lane as he tells us all about his rise to stardom and too many wives. Seasoned Python fans really won’t be learning anything new here, and the whole affair has the air of an abridged audiobook on once comically-cranelike legs.

As the title suggests, Cleese makes no bones about why he’s on stage instead of sat at home watching BBC Four, and at the beginning we did begin to worry it might be largely about slagging off the ex-Mrs Cleese who necessitated the tour. Luckily, it all settles into a puffed-up Powerpoint presentation on The Life Of Cleese, and the audience’s fond regard for the man helps it all become a perfectly jolly way to spend eighty minutes of an evening. Much of the show is made from watching clips of 1948 Show, Python and Fawlty, but it’s nice to hear Cleese put his own honest take on all the events, and pointing out which of the especially disgusting bits of the undertaker sketch were Chapman’s doing.

As we say, the whole show is much more like an episode of ITV’s An Audience With…, only with John Cleese fans in the audience instead of Olly Murs and Interchangeable Only Way Is Essex Drone #34. It’s lovely to hear Cleese’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his work, even down to knowing how many years Wanda director Charlie Crichton had previously spent as a film editor (SPOILER: fourteen years). (FURTHER SPOILER: He mentions Wanda as his film writing debut, but that would be neglecting his co-writer gig on The Rise and Rise Of Michael Rimmer). Moments like this do help make up for hearing about Terry Gilliam eating steak in a manner that so annoyed the hotelier who inspired Fawlty Towers for the eleventeenth time, though this is maybe a DVD best left until it hits the sales.

Still, better than Monty Python: Almost The Truth.

SAMPLE GAG: Sorry guv, lengthy warm anecdotes are the order of the day here.

PETER KAY: THE TOUR THAT DIDN’T TOUR – TOUR

£11.99 (Amazon)

In an age where twatty PR blurb tells us “[X] Is The [Y]-iest Comedian On The Planet”, often attributed to bloody Chortle, kind of nice to see Kay’s strapline here being “one of Bolton’s funniest comedians”. That’s pretty much where the modesty ends, though – the emphasis is very much on LOOK HOW MASSIVELY POPULAR PETER KAY IS, with much of the intro being about it all being at the O2 for “fifteen bloody niiights”.

The gig itself seems to be set in a strange kind of comedic stasis, with Kay seemingly having fallen into an endlessly repeating time loop since just after his last actual live DVD was released. The routine on Sky+ isn’t especially poor or anything, but really – taking until 2011 to come up with a routine about Sky+? Or his dad remarking on the ‘novelty’ of plasma televisions? Or texting? Was his twelve-minute routine on the iPod Mini reluctantly dropped after the preview gigs or something?

Still, at least multimillionaire Kay strives to keep his material relatable, and that’s to be welcomed. Even if this does lead to the director cutting to endless shots of audience members pointing at each other and mouthing “yes! See? You totally do that like ALL the time!”. Instantly preferable to someone like R**** G****** banging on about the neverending angst of being massively famous on both sides of the Atlantic, and something that at least makes this a DVD worth watching, if not quite shelling out the full £12 for. Just wait until after Christmas Day and then visit any one of your seven relatives who will have inevitably been bought this as a present. (“You’re really not helping us clock up Amazon referral cash, you know.”  -Ed.)

Oh, and press ‘stop’ on the DVD before you get to the musical encore, unless you really want to undo all the goodwill Kay had just spent seventy minutes regaining from you.

SAMPLE GAG: “Mate of mine’s just been sacked from the dodgems. He’s suing them for funfair dismissal!” And lots of other gags that people had nicked and tried to claim as their own on Sickpedia since

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Ah, that’ll do for now. Here’s the ranking thus far:

We’ll update the table as the month goes on, in much the same way as that thing on Top Gear. Only without us calling for genocide on The One Show to try and promote a cash-in spin-off DVD of it, obvs.

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