The Chart Show: BBC Two Comedy Zone Episodes Six

We love Thursday night Comedy Zone on BBC Two. Basically because, as you’ll have grasped by now us chucking the overnight viewing figures into Excel gives us a really easy update each Saturday*. So, instead of us wittering on or providing any kind of insight, on with the numbers. Figures from the Digital Spy forum ratings thread

(*Well, each Friday evening. We love Blogger’s ‘queue post’ function even more than we love the Thursday night Comedy Zone on BBC Two.)

A surge in figures for all three shows this week, due to… circumstances we’re too lazy to research. A huge boost for REV this week (and with good reason, another hugely enjoyable episode), seeing the ratings rise back up to episode two levels. THIS IS TWENTY-EIGHT MINUTES TOO LONG made a recovery too, with an additional 260,000 viewers able to have their intelligence insulted by the scene with the washing machines. Meanwhile, Lord FRANK SKINNER of Sealand’S OPINIONATED increased in popularity for the fourth consecutive week, the final episode of the series saw numbers rise up to 1.4 million.

Series closers for REV and LIFE’S TOO SHORT switch to Tuesday night, so it’ll be interesting to see how each fares. Will the lack of a primetime same-week repeat for SHORT see the first airing of the finale gain even more viewers? Time – more specifically next Wednesday’s MediaGuardian and/or Digital Spy Ratings Thread – will tell.

Read More

The League Of Funnymen 10: Lee & Herring’s Fist of Fun Series One DVD

TODAY: “It makes me maaaad with power!”

LEE & HERRING’S FIST OF FUN: COMPLETE SERIES ONE

£25 (Go Faster Stripe)

It’s remit-tweaking time here at BrokenTV towers, as our list of stand-up DVDs from 2011 makes room for a sketch comedy from the mid-1990s. Ah, d’you remember the mid-90s, viewers? Trance Europe Express compilations in Our Price, Roy Evans’ swashbuckling Liverpool side never quite winning anything apart from the League Cup, the 3DO being resolutely ignored on the shop shelves of electronic goods retailers, and BBC Two playing host to all manner of excitingly offkilter comedy. Shows like the The Glam Metal Detectives, Is It Bill Bailey?, The Ghostbusters of East Finchley, The High Life, Pulp Video, Fantasy Football League, The All-New Alexei Sayle Show, The Fast Show, In The Red, Does China Exist?, The Saturday/Friday Night Armistice, London Shouting… some good, some bad, some even strangled at the pilot stage, but you have to feel that they’re all precisely the kinds of comedy that wouldn’t be allowed to happen on the BBC in 2011.

Arguably the most popular of all cultish mid-1990s comedy shows – at least if you polled a certain type of comedy fan who has spent way too much time on the internet since about 1997 – featured a tall-but-not-that-tall man called Stewart and a shorter-and-fatter-but-not-really-that-much-shorter-or-fatter man called Richard.

And it’s now out on DVD.

Finally.

And it is good.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.”

Read More

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!

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

-

So, what does that do to our table?

Tune in for another update tomorrow!

Read More

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.

-

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

-

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.

Read More

British TV Comedy Spin-Offs We’d Love To Have Seen

With an Alan Partridge film in the works, the character has come a long way from presenting the sports on Radio 4's On The Hour. It seems that with this, In The Loop and the output of Sasha Baron Cohen (Reader's voice: "But those films are years apart!"), it seems like the concept of British comedy spin-off movies is back. After grinding to a halt after mid-80s movies like Morons From Outer Space, Whoops Apocalypse, Bloodbath At The House of Death and The Boys in Blue all proved to be commercial flops, the concept went into near hibernation for a couple of decades, twitching a leg occasionally to let out celluloid farts such as Guest House Paradiso. We can't help but feel that's a bit of a shame, as it deprived cinemagoers of the following potential comedy offshoots we've just thought up. (Reader's voice: "Hang on, what about Stella Street, Kevin & Perry Go Large, The League of Gentleman Apocalypse...")

1) Tony & Control in Never Say Never Again, Please

Unerringly polite undercover capers as British spy Tony Murchison (Hugh Laurie) is captured while deep behind enemy lines after asking for a cup of tea in a Stalingrad vodka bar. The head of the British Secret Service, known only as "Control" (Stephen Fry) must return to active duty to rescue his colleague.

Read More

New US Small Cable Channel Sitcom Of The Weeeeek

 

 

“Remember when people were content to be unambitious and sleep ‘til 11, and just hang out with their friends, and no occupations whatsoever, and content to just work a couple hours a week at a coffee shop?” “Huh, I thought that died out a long time ago.” “Not in Portland. Portland is a city where young people go to retire.” THE DREAM OF THE 90s IS ALIVE IN PORTLAND.

We’ve just watched the first episode of PORTLANDIA, the new sitcom from US cable network IFC, and know what? We think we’ll be sticking with it. Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s a series where it never really stopped being the 1990s. Where flannel shirts never lost their allure, where independently owned coffee shops remained just about viable, where Al Gore might as well (have) be(en) President Of The USA. And, from a minute in on the clip just below, it’s got a brilliant theme tune (that isn’t actually the theme tune, it’s a song that opens the series, but shush).

Pleasingly, the ninetiesness of the show isn’t reflected by merely throwing in a load of references to pop culture of the age (the only direct ref in the entire opening episode was about The Jim Rose Sideshow Circus, which is easily obscure enough to be permitted), but more about the overall ‘feel’ of the age. Idealistic slackers spend a lot of time ‘inventing’ new pasttimes like ‘Adult Hide And Seek’ or fret so much over the organic nature of the chicken on the menu in a diner they insist on visiting the farm that reared it before ordering their meal. There’s even a role in the opening episode played by Steve Buscemi, the most 1990s actor there is.

Going by the opening episode, it’s not yet mindblowingly hilarious, but then, we have only seen the opening episode, and how many opening episodes of anything are that good? V few. Larry Sanders, yes, but we’re part way through a big update on how wonderful the DVD box set of that is.

Certainly a series to stick with, in essence. If you put a gun to our heads and demanded we make a lazy comparison with two other off-kilter comedy series, we’d run out of the room screaming for the police, but if you asked up the same question more politely, we’d say “a bit like The League Of Gentleman meets Mr Show”. Yes, it’s exec produced by Lorne Michaels, but we really do think it’s more likely to lean towards the comedic standard of 30 Rock than Saturday Bloody Night Bloody Live.

Read More

Yule (B)log: Stand-Up Round-Up (2)

From FIFA’s website:

The 2018 World Cup is to be held in a country where spectators regularly boo black footballers, and the 2022 World Cup is to be held in a country where homosexuality is outlawed. Hmm. Maybe FIFA are going by George W Bush’s definition of ‘mission accomplished’?

Anyway, comedy!

Rhod Gilbert and The Cat That Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst

Channel 4 DVD

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 63

This year’s offering from Rhod Gilbert, and if you’re keen to hear someone from Wales unconvincingly pretending to be really angry about minor things for 83 minutes, but you don’t know our phone number, this is the DVD for you. Personally, we’ve always felt that Rhod Gilbert is about 78.6% of the way there to being a really entertaining stand-up, and can’t help but be a little surprised at how he manages to bag sold-out tours and his own BBC One series without filling in the gaps in his act. To our minds, the show would be much more enjoyable if the material written by Gilbert remained the same, but was somehow performed by Windsor Davies circa 1981.

A lot of the material, of the “have you noticed [x]? What’s all THAT about, eh?” variety, really could be stronger (even we don’t get confused by washing machines, and we’re idiots), and even when the stronger material kicks in, it’s as if the show had been written using Microsoft Comedy Routine Live 2011. Maybe we’re being needlessly cynical, but we can really imagine that towards writing the end of his set, there are several parts where a cartoon paper clip popped up to proclaim “It looks like you’re trying to squeeze in a callback! How about… making a reference to your earlier routine on vacuum cleaners?”

So, a bit of a let down, but slightly better than his previous live DVD ‘The Award Winning Mince Pie’. At this rate, we’re expecting his live DVD in 2017, called ‘The Toaster That Won Eurovision’ or something, will be pretty good, though.

RATING: C-

Sean Lock – Lockipedia

Universal Pictures UK

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 86

The most naturally funny comedian in the UK? We’d say so. In a performance that performers like Rhod Gilbert should take a lot of inspiration from, Lock manages to take similar everyday topics – bags for life, RyanAir, laser eye surgery – but riffs on them with seemingly effortless majesty. Where Rhod Gilbert slides uneasily into his character of “Angry Welsh Guy”, Sean Lock prowls the stage in the guise of a misanthrope who’s long seen recognised the pointlessness of being furious about stuff, and who now delights in warm and cheery malevolence. And it works brilliantly. Most stand-ups can’t help but deliver their lines in a kind of showy “Hey, everyone! I’m on stage! Look at meeeee!” kind of way, while Lock prefers a much more natural style of delivery, which really draws you into his set, letting the funny bits hit the targets of their own accord.

The set does falter a little once it reaches the USP of the tour, namely the Lockipedia segment which sees Lock improvise a routine based on a word from a random audience member. Coming from the man who always puts in a brilliant shift on 8 Out Of 10 Cats no matter how many JackWhitehallalikes are on it that week, the material isn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn’t come close to matching the deftly written and repeatedly finessed gags that make up the remainder of Lock’s show. Happily, he seems to recognise this, and the last part of the show returns to prepared material.

In short: our favourite stand-up comedy DVD of the year so far.

RATING: A

Read More

Yule (B)log 2010: Comedy DVD Round-Up (1)

Yes, yes, we’re aware that updates have been sporadic recently. We even missed the 5th anniversary of the site going live. Rest assured, when BrokenTV’s tenth birthday rolls around, we’ll probably Photoshop a party hat onto the logo or something. But anyway, it’s December, and that means we pledge to do a blog update EVERY! SINGLE! DAY! until the 25th. Could 2010 be the year we make it beyond the 12th before breaking that promise? We’ve got a positive feeling about it, put it that way.

DAY ONE: STAND-UP DVD ROUND-UP

It seems that each year, there’s one type of DVD-based gift that dominates the last-minute-stocking-filler market. A few years ago, it was the football blooper compilation fronted by an annoying  celebrity craze. More recently, we had the Interactive DVD Quiz Game fad, which seemingly lasted until the manufacturers realised they could just shove their half-arsed licenced quizzes onto the Wii instead, and sell them at double the price.

This year, it seems to be stand-up comedy DVDs receiving their very own shelf in your local Tesco Ultrastore, which is, in theory, a marked improvement over, ooh, “Danny Dyer’s Funniest Football Foul-Ups” or something. Ha! Can you imagine if someone was still bringing out rubbish like tha… oh. Oh dear. (“Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,147 in DVD”)

Where were we? Ah yes. Stand-up comedy has always been around in a variety of recorded formats, both audio and visual, ever since the wax cylinder of Thomas Edison’s “Quadruplex Teleg-laughs!!!” first hit Manhattan stores in 1884, but this year has seen a non-literal explosion of them, with more stand-up comedy DVDs released in the run up to Christmas 2010 than at any previous point in recorded history. Citation needed.

In our first Yule (B)log of 2010, we take a look at a few of them, and tell you which ones you should consider. JOIN US.

 

Frankie Boyle Live: If I Could Reach Out Through Your TV and Strangle You I Would

Channel 4 DVD

Amazon Sales Rank (DVD): 21

 

We used to like Frankie Boyle. There aren’t many reasons to go anywhere near BBC Two when Mock The Week is being broadcast on it, but Boyle made it worth occasionally sitting through the lobe-molesting delivery of Andy Parsons’ topical observations. Yes, a lot of his jokes were expressly written with the intent of shocking the kind of people who write letters to mid-market tabloids, but they were interspersed with standard panel show fare like “anyone who’s been to Middlesbrough will know that living to 53 is maybe a bit long. Sort of like Blade Runner without the special effects.”

Sadly, at some point, Boyle realised that he could make just as much money by making the majority of his jokes about rape, paedophilia, Susan Boyle and Josef Fritzl, pausing only to charmlessly insult audience members. By the time of his “I Would Happily Punch Every One Of You In The Face” tour, a performance from which makes up this DVD, he does little else.

The end result, well, you know the two scenes with the little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List? Imagine that, only repeated over and over and over as if it were a Holocaust-themed version of Wario Ware, the soundtrack being nought but increasingly heavy use of a swannee whistle, and you’ve pretty much got Frankie Boyle’s new DVD summed up right there. When something shocking proves to be unexpected, even in an already brazenly impolite context, it needs to sneak up on you for it to have any real impact. When you’re left with what is effectively a Scotsman shouting the word ‘cunt’ at a photo of a kitten for eighty minutes, no matter how good a few of the jokes are, it’s hard to summon up the energy to keep caring.

Oh, and if you’re watching his new Channel Four series and are hoping to get this DVD for Christmas – there’s a good chance you’ll have heard all the material on it used in the series by that point. Though we suspect not many people will bother reaching the end of Tramadol Nights, what with it being utterly woeful.

RATING: D+

Ricky Gervais Live IV – Science

Universal Pictures UK

Amazon Bestsellers Rank (DVD): 39

As we all saw in “Ricky Gervais Meets Garry Shandling”, Gervais can’t take a joke when it’s made at his own expense, but can he still make them?

After the two most recent live DVDs from the 11 O’Clock Show star proved to be a little on the disappointing side – especially after ‘Animals’ showed how good a stand-up he can be – we weren’t expecting too much from this. Pleasingly, ‘Science’ is a bit of a return to form for the star of BBC Two reality show ‘Celebrity Boxing’. It isn’t quite up to the level of ‘Animals’, and the parts where he refers to how rich and successful he is (in that “aah, I’m being ironic though, even though I’m not” manner of his) still grate as much as ever, but this performance will generate more laughs than “Politics” and “Fame” combined.

RATING: B-

 

Tim Vine - Punslinger Live

Spirit Entertainment Limited

Amazon Bestsellers Rank (DVD): 340

“I don’t like Lion Bars. They’re such unwelcoming places.”

In a year where at least 95% of stand-up comedy DVDs seem bound by law to make the same jokes about Michael Jackson’s death (most common joke: that everyone has been making jokes about it since it happened), we possibly need Tim Vine more than ever. Now that Harry Hill seems to have given up live performances in favour of phoning it in on TV Burp (hasn’t the latest series been rubbish?), there’s only one real choice for a comedy DVD that the whole family really can enjoy while waiting for this year’s Christmas pudding to cool. Provided you’re suitably persuasive in arguing that Tim Vine really is much, much funnier than Michael McIntyre, of course. Because Tim Vine isn’t as popular as he really deserves to be.

Sure, in isolation, many of his one-liners might not seem to be that great (“The Archbishop of Canterbury came up to me, he said ‘you’re excommunicated!’ I thought an old girlfriend had sent me an email”), but thrown at you like relentless handfuls of comedy gravel, you can’t help but find a daft grin form beneath your nose. Very often, you’ll find that grin developing into a chuckle, if only with incredulity at the occasions where he’ll try to pull off an especially clattery pun while on stage in front of people who’ve paid to be there. Even throughout the weaker gags, you’ll still find yourself smiling, mainly because as performers go, Tim Vine is pretty much impossible to hate. He even has the good grace to seem genuinely surprised when the crowd call for an encore at the end.

The only downside to the disc is that the main performance is a bit on the short side, at a tadge over an hour. Of course, with it being Tim Vine set, this does mean you’ve got a few hundred jokes crammed tightly into that hour, but we’d really like him to pad things out by including some of his older gems. Going by the reaction of the crowd in this performance, you can’t help but feel they’d feel the same. After all, if it’s good enough for Ken Dodd...

Petty griping aside, Punslinger is a hugely enjoyable way to spend an hour of your festive break. The rapidfire delivery of unrelated gags mean that even if you’ve been momentarily distracted by a hunt for that elusive After Eight envelope still containing a wafer-thin treat, you can rejoin the fun without having to ask whoever’s nearest the remote to hit the rewind button. Splendid.

RATING: A-

Read More

The Michael McIntyre Appeal 2009

"Hey! Y'know when you're not wearing a watch, and someone asks you the time, and you look where your watch would be!!!? Eh!!!? Don't we all just do that!!!?" NO, WE HAVE NEVER AND WILL NEVER DO THAT. WE KNOW WHEN WE ARE AND WHEN WE ARE NOT WEARING A WATCH, AND NO-ONE EVER ASKS US WHAT THE TIME IS, THEY CAN JUST LOOK AT THEIR MOBILE PHONE IF THEY DON'T HAVE A WATCH THEMSELVES. Interestingly however, when we aren’t wearing a watch, we can see where we've had the words "Michael McIntyre is an exceptionally unfunny human being" tattooed on our wrists .

Michael McIntyre is currently the 'darling' of BBC One's comedy output. While he may be an unexceptional stand-up comedian, he's doing very well for himself, what with his prime-time Saturday night comedy vehicle, and him appearing on Top Gear earlier tonight. While Channel Four have got their own pet comedian – Jimmy Carr – BBC One have adopted McIntyre as their own Official Jester to the Nation. You might snicker at the concept, but this time next year we’ll all be sat in front of Michael McIntyre’s House Party, and who’ll be laughing then?

No-one. No-one will be laughing. No, we don’t care that we’ve borrowed that gag from Bob Monkhouse.

If there’s anything positive to say about this, it’s probably that McIntyre is an inspiration to all the sub-par gagsmiths out there peddling routines about the fundamental differences between men and women, those infernal ‘mobile’ ‘phones’ and hey! What would it be like if Gordon Brown got stoned, eh? All those open mic night boo-magnets could actually make it big after all, and better yet, they won’t even have to improve their material. All they need to do is concentrate on not being threatening to Marie Clare readers, and pulling a smug face like a toddler who’d just made potty on their own for the first time after every punchline, and a spot next to Jason Manford on Eight Out Of Ten Cats is in the bag!

In reality though, McIntyre’s not going to go away. And, if he’s not going to bugger off of our screens any time soon, well, we’ll just have to try and make him funny. So, how do we propose to achieve this form of light-ent alchemy? Craig Ferguson may have the answer.

Throughout the 1980s, Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson was moderately well-known, but never really made it to Division One (it being the 1980s, and the Premiership not having been invented yet), despite there being many more TV opportunities for new comedians at the time. You could probably argue that performing under the stage name Bing Hitler probably had a lot to do with that, but hey, that’s what early-era Channel Four was for.

Instead, he made do with the occasional guest appearance, in shows like Red Dwarf (as Lister’s confidence made flesh), Chelmsford 123 and festive Meldrum epic One Foot In The Algarve. At one point, he landed a broadcast pilot for ITV, with a single episode of The Craig Ferguson Show going out in the Spitting Image/Hot Metal/Hale & Pace Sunday night pre-Bragg slot. Despite input from Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson and Helen Atkinson-Wood, the show wasn’t picked up for a series, which is fairly damning given Hale & Pace were given ten series (10!) in the same slot.

Ferguson did land a full series on BBC2 in 1993, called The Ferguson Theory. Despite imdb claiming two series existed, we’re fairly sure it only lasted for one, and that we only managed to catch the last episode of it. If it’s the show we’re thinking of, it ended with a musical montage of clips, followed by the exchange “That’s your party tape?” “Aye. The party’s crap.” We may be wrong, there.

In 1994, Ferguson moved to the USA, taking in a few small parts in sitcoms before landing a key role in what we’ll forever refer to as The Criminally Underrated Drew Carey Show. Despite putting on what he gleefully admits to being a terrible English accent throughout much of the shows eight seasons, he was a hit, and was soon a minor darling of the talk show circuit, occasionally standing in as guest host (for Craig Kilborn) on post-Letterman jabberfest The Late Late Show.

In December 2004, Ferguson became the full-time host of The Late Late Show, replacing a Hollywood bound Kilborn. And do you know what? He’s bloody good at it. The Late Late Show is (we think) the only one of the big US chatshows not to make it to air over here (with Leno and Carson appearing on CNBC, and Letterman on whichever channel’s turn it is to try and make him popular over here), so it’s not easy to see Ferguson at his best. However, thanks to YouTube we can check out how Craig Ferguson will happily open shows by miming to They Might Be Giants records, by calling non-voters morons, or (and this is an important bit) by performing one of the greatest opening monologues ever:

 

That embedded video right there is the reason we’ve got a huge amount of time for Craig Ferguson. That and the fact he still avoids pronouncing his first name as “Creg” to try and fit in with the US audience (seriously, we’d have expected it to be one of the conditions of his US citizenship). So, compare Michael McIntyre's stand-up to, say, Craig Ferguson's. Now, Ferguson has gone through a history of cocaine, heroine and alcohol abuse, followed by a planned suicide attempt and eventually rehabilitation. He dips into his past experiences when he goes into his routines, and it undoubtedly make a huge difference to the quality of his act.

So: here’s the plan. Turn Michael McIntyre into an addict. And, of course, then into rehab, and then back onto our screens. With him being able to dip into his own harrowing experiences, he’ll have a lot more source material to put through his “unique” comedic filter. No more three minute bits about how you can never find a biro that works when you need to write down a phone number, because he’s too busy telling the story of the time he shared a needle with an ex-lapdancer from Swansea.

Reckon it’ll work? We’re saying: it’s worth a try. Here’s our totaliser:

As you can see, we’re already off to a cracking start, with enough raised to get him a packet of Lemsip. Keep an eye out for our special BrokenTV Bring & Buy sales, where you can bring in your old Jim Davidson’s Snooker Balls-Ups and Chubby Brown videos for us to sell. With luck on our side, we could be up to Wkd Blue by the end of the month!

POSTSCRIPT.

When Graham Norton dies and arrives at the pearly gates, St Peter will look him up (in his Big Book O'Lifetimes) and say "Oh dear. Oh deary dear. Look at your life’s work, Mr Norton. Years upon years of sniggering at strange American people’s homepages whilst sitting next to ‘cult’ celebrities on television, and Totally Saturday was absolutely inexcusable... BUT, you did do that One Foot In The Grave quip at the Baftas, so... yeah, fair enough. In you go."

Read More

An Unstructured Review Of Reggie Perrin

(A review which might not be very interesting or well written, but it is timely. You’ll have to give us that.)

BBC One have starting showing their remake of classic 1970s Leonard Rossiter sitcom ‘The Fall and Rise Of Reginald Perrin’. It is being written by Simon “Men Behaving Badly” Nye and David “The Fall and Rise Of Reginald Perrin” Nobbs, and stars Martin Clunes (who played the part of a middle manager bored by office life perfectly in Men Behaving Badly). One writer who knows the character of Reggie Perrin inside out, and another who knows just how to get the very best out of the lead actor - the omens are very good indeed. It has been suggested that the show takes more of it’s cues from the original Nobbs-penned Perrin novels (then considered too dark and risqué for television, but hopefully now fair game), which is very promising too. Could it live up to our expectations?

Well, no. While there clearly needed to be a visible shift in mood to distinguish it from the original, going about it by simply shifting straight to Reggie getting angry with everything just made him seem liked a grumpy middle-aged sod. While Classic Perrin was merely wearied by the behaviour of his minions, NuPerrin came across as a bit of a bullying arsehole. Having Neil Stuke as Reggie’s boss (named Chris Jackson, though never referred to by his initials) was presumably to avoid direct comparison with the original CJ, but with Reggie’s boss clearly being much younger than him things seemed a little unreal, and not in a good way. Had Stuke been playing a cocksure dotcom millionaire, their confrontations could have veered toward new territory, but with him somehow being Stock 1970s Sitcom Boss Type A, it was hard to see what the character could offer. If they’d managed to transfer Matt Berry’s boss character from The IT Crowd, things could have been much better.

The jarring characterisations didn’t end there. In Classic Perrin, Elizabeth Perrin was a wife who genuinely cared about her husband, and seemed genuinely concerned about why Reggie was unwilling to open up to her. With NuPerrin, the rechristened Nicola Perrin barely seemed to give a flying stuff, more preoccupied with committee meetings and the like. Back at work, the marketing bloke is a dull methodical bore who reels off lists of research-based numbers and everyday conversations in the same dull monotone, and the staff ‘wellness officer’ is a bubble-headed new-ager. With the exception of love interest Jasmine, the people within the world of NuPerrin were uniformly one-dimensional – a shame, as that turned out to be one of the few failings with Classic Perrin. There could have been the chance to round out the characters personalities a little, but if there isn’t time to do that and cram in weak gag about self-harming emos (plus a reference to Amy Winehouse, so we know it’s set in 2009), it’ll just have to wait.

 

Strangely, there was no audience reaction to NuPerrin walking past Sunshine Desserts on his way to work, but a muted cheer at the first utterance of “I didn’t get where I am today by…”.

 

It might have been a better option to take a wholly new direction for the remake, instead of simply mentioning laptops, texting and screensavers now and then. Much as we’ll perpetually champion traditional audience-led comedy, in this instance taking a more naturalistic The Thick Of It-type approach – without an audience – could have worked well. While it might be too much to hope for the script being packed tightly with top-quality gags like (to make an inappropriate comparison) Arrested Development, and the budget wouldn’t stretch to aping (here’s another one) Scrubs, it could turn out along the lines of ‘How Do You Want Me?’, an earlier sitcom from Simon Nye. The fantasy sequences could still be included with such an approach, indeed, they might come over as more of a surprise.

 

(Key phrases quite deliberately missing from previous paragraph: “The Office”; “Canned Laughter”. If we’d used either of them, no court in the land would have convicted you for setting the BrokenTV offices on fire.)

 

There is hope. There’s a pleasing lack of catchphrase-heavy dialogue in NuPerrin. This is possibly due to lessons learned from 1996’s The Legacy Of Reginald Perrin, where devoid of the titular character, all that was left was a cast of characters saying everything was “great”, “super” and remarking on things that didn’t lead to them “getting where they are today” for seven episodes. Also, erm, it’s filmed in HD, which looks quite nice.

We’ll certainly be sticking with the show for at least the next couple of episodes, partly because we’ve still got faith in Nobbs and Nye to take this down a less well-trodden path, and partly because slagging off a sitcom based on the first episode is a bit like dissing a watercolour of a horse painted by a three year old child just before they grow up to be William Hogarth. It had better improve pretty soon though, because from where we’re sitting NuPerrin is coming across like seeing Horne and Corden ‘reimagining’ Hancock’s Half Hour.

Read More

Comedy Showdown II: Horne and Corden and Hale and Pace

It’s that time again.

Horne and Corden (series one, episode three, BBC Three 2009) versus Hale and Pace (series four, episode one, LWT 1991). The first five sketches from each. Best sketch of each round wins a point.

What with H&C soundly ruining our comparison of them with Cannon & Ball during last week’s bondage and piss infused episode (although Tommy and Bobby outscored them when it came to unabashed homophobia), we’ve upped the controversy stakes for round two. We’ve decided to pair the duo up with the much-maligned Hale and Pace, First thing to point out here: we never really had much time for Hale and Pace, as them taking up the coveted 10pm Sunday night slot meant there was no room for Hot Metal, Not With A Bang or Spitting Image. Second thing to point out here: we’d never really noticed until now, but physically Hale and Pace were very much the Tim and Eric of their day. Go on, pencil a moustache onto a picture of Eric Wareheim, you’ll see the resemblance. But tish and fipsy, on with the scoring.

 

ROUND ONE:

Horne & Corden:
Mr H and Mr C bound onto the stage in jeans a T-shirts and high-five their audience, as per usual, and as per that episode of Larry Sanders where an ailing Larry finally sold out to the network for a few more viewers. After customary greetings, the pair welcome a ‘special audience member’, who turns out to be in a wheelchair. Uh-oh!

There’s a heartfelt appeal from Corden about the need for Josie to get a motorised wheelchair. Event go all Noel’s HQ on us when it reveals Corden and Horne have stumped up the cash for a brand new, erm, electric chair…

Oh dear. A misunderstanding had happened. Corden is dismayed, and Horne expresses his similar dismay over his faux-pas, having misunderstood the meaning behind the term “ease the pain for her parents”. There is a mention of how the chair had to be shipped in from Texas especially, so there are a few consolation points on offer for hugely mistimed satire. Take that, Texas Governor George W. Bush!

Hale & Pace:
Over to H&P@itv. After the into which sees the pair impressed by CGI fish, then perturbed by a CGI shark bearing the H&P branding, we’re into a police line-up. The camera pans across several men, before cutting to an old dear (the witness) being asked to take her time before picking out the perp by N. Pace (a detective).

Subsequent politically incorrect hilarity duly ensures when we discover the suspect is the solitary tall black man in the line-up otherwise composed of short-to-medium-height white men. The old dear picks out one of the white men as the crim, only for N. Pace to suggest she might have meant the tall black man after all. The old dear isn’t sure, so N. Pace suggests she take a bit of a rest and try again.

Fade to black, and fade to a shot of the old dear trying again. Only – my stars! – the remainder of the line-up is now comprised of white women. The old dear still isn’t sure. Fade-black-fade-back, and it’s third go for the old dear. Now the line-up is made even easier for the old dear:

Still not sure, so time for one last fade-to-later:

The old dear still isn’t sure, so the police nick the black guy for wasting police time.

 

The scores:

Both skits stomp all over the cabbage patch of Perceived Good Taste, but while H&C got their bit out of the way that bit sooner, at least Hale and Pace had a kind of escalating multi-gag in their sketch. Plus it was clearly more of a go at institutionally racist policemen rather than being in any racist itself, in a similar (though less amusing) manner to Not The Nine’s Constable Savage sketch.

Horne and Corden: 0, Hale and Pace: 1

 

ROUND TWO:

H&C:
Corden and Horne are both plastered in fake tan and have HTML colour code ffffff level teeth. They chastise the viewer for their shambolic body, and recommend a Power Shake to everyone in the shoutiest manner possible. Circuitous language leaves the pretend-infomercial viewer unaware of how good or bad it actually is for you.

At the end of the advert, a voiceover announces that said product has no positive aspects whatsoever.

H&P:
A pair of heavy metal roadies, who speak in Bad Keith Richards Impersonation voices. They mention, in a stoned drawl, how they see a lot of gigs by The Stones (“we got Stoned”), Wet Wet Wet (“we got Wet”), and Big Country (“we got lost”). The audience erupts. For some unfathomable reason.

The scores:

Ach, what the hell. At least the Horne and Corden sketch made a vague sort of comedic sense in relation to the audience reaction (i.e. more muted), and it won’t hurt to level the score out a bit.

Horne and Corden: 1, Hale and Pace: 1

ROUND THREE:

H&C:
News spoof. Will the Comedy Stereotypical Gay Man character be there? Yes, this time at a hostage siege.

Going by the mindset of a lazily-stereotypical gay man, sieges are ‘dead boring’, and hostages having bombs strapped to them are an underwhelming fashion statement. It turns out that one of the terrorists is “so fit” and that CSGM wants to get his number, so he runs off camera. Off-camera carnage ensues.

H&P:
Pub sketch. Hale is with his new girlfriend, who is refusing to use various types of contraceptive (“what, you reckon a hysterectomy is going too far?”) as he doesn’t fancy wearing a condom. His protests continue, as he tries to persuade her to relent. It then turns out he’s been re-using the same condom for years. No, hang on, that brand! Not the same,,, boh.

 

The argument continues, and Hale’s new girlfriend remarks on how lucky he is chaps aren’t expected to just use half a lemon in this modern age. Hale relents, and agrees to get some drinks. He asks the barman for “a bitter and a Martini with ice and lemon”. The barman retorts “lemon? Your lucky night again, is it?” Hale looks suitably admonished, and the sketch ends.

The scores:

The hysterectomy line drew a reluctant guffaw from the BrokenTV panel. meaning it automatically wins the round. Such is the way we roll.

Horne and Corden: 1, Hale and Pace: 2

 

ROUND FOUR:

H&C:
Another one of Corden’s blatant copies of The Fast Show’s “Jesse’s Fashion” sketches. This time:

“A tril-by hat.” Oh dear.

 

H&P:
Hale and Pace, on a sofa, playing themselves. They modestly address their own famousness, and vow to ‘touch base’ with the populace, relating how they used to be teachers before they were famous. Hale remarks on how terrible Pace was as a teacher, and how he still made it to The Big Time. Pace winces a little, then relates a tale of how Hale was also a teacher, and how he’d somehow circumnavigated his side-career as a porn actor to make it to that very same Big Time. Hale tries to laugh this off as matey banter, only for Pace to produce a copy of the sordid VHS in question. “The Adventures Of Captain Hornblower.”

“I was passing the Hot Rod video shop the other day, and I thought, ‘I recognise that moustache’. Then I realised, ‘that’s not a moustache’, but I still recognised it!” Said grotflick is revealed to also include a goat and a bath of custard.

Hale discovers that the tape is missing from the case, leading to Pace’s revelation that the incriminating tape is in the video recorder in the corner of the room, which in turn is linked to the transmitter of the '”entire ITV network". Pace goads to audience into requesting a viewing of this spuff epic, leading to a huge reaction from the studio throng.

Pace presses a button on the remote, but all that appears is an interference-filled screen with a green “AV1” caption in the corner of the screen. He proclaims that, as a friend, he is actually wiping the tape. Hale extravagantly counts his blessings, but then asks why Pace would do such a thing. Pace reveals that his actions have only increased the marketable value of his other tape “The Adventures Of Gareth and Neddy”. The subsequent argument reveals “Neddy” to be a donkey.

The scores:

Bestial shenanigans aside, mentions of “a bathful of custard” and “the entire ITV network” clearly reign supreme over blatantly copying a short sketch from The Fast Show, and even then failing to deliver the lines in anywhere near as supreme a manner as Mark Williams.

Horne and Corden: 1, Hale and Pace: 3

 

ROUND FIVE:

WILL NOT BE NEEDED. Another epic fail for Horne & Corden. Tune in next week for another battle between H&C and… well, whatever we can dredge up.

Read More