Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number

i don't have anything sensible or sensitive to say about my brief glimpses of Citizen Khan so i'll just say it's probably not as bad as The Wright Way

I think it's approaching it though

The episode I watched peaked with a scene wherein, via a convoluted set of circumstances, Mr Khan's future son in law had to fondle Mr. Khan's testicles.

Bangladeshi guy I work with loves it

I liked Mr Khan when he was on Bellamy's People.

Just to add a bit of unreserved praise to this thread, I'm finally catching up with series 2 of Pete Vs Life and it's excellent.

Toast of London is making me lol but it's purely down to Matt Berry. Watched them in the wrong order, thought the first one was best maybe.

Anyone watched Ambassadors? Worth bothering with?

Passable, can't say I'd recommend

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/comedy/10437964/Why-I-walked-out-of-a-Stewart-Lee-gig.html

I've watched the first episode of Ambassadors now. Enjoyable, not strictly a comedy though.

3 episodes in and it's great

Yeah I like it as well, the second episode was a big improvement on the first. As far as I can tell though, there are only three episodes in the series and that was the last one! Which is ludicrous seeing as it ended on a cliffhanger. Pity, it seems there is a lot of story left to tell.

Didn't laugh once during The Ambassadors. Deathly.

House of Fools then. Have at it.

I thought there was a huge Smell Of influence to it, the laughter track early on was far too heavy handed but by the time Vic had gone next door for the first time it had got to being solidly amusing. Could have been funnier and there weren't any real highs - but not the disaster that many predicted.

I also liked the routine with the DVDs and the deliberately obvious/terrible jokes, like in the early series of Shooting Stars.

these comments were under the trailer on youtube

Windiness Hat Belt 20 hours ago

You dont know what the joke is sometimes and in fact a lot of it is smarmy subliminal slander & propaganda because they're incapable of taking their private lives seriously... So if they ask you to send them something tell them to F OFF! & dont give them any of your details whatsoever.
Reply ·

Windiness Hat Belt 2 days ago

I find it suspicious that Vic & Bobs boss /business partner /ex sun newspaper reporter tweets 21.03.13 about her new project from CPL the exact same company as Nigella's taste encouraging people to secretly wind others up and catch it on camera, suggestions include putting things in people's food/drink...
Also is BBC's Horse Meat Banquet rigged? why does Vic's assistant from Curious Stuff seem to be in it? Strangely I remember Vic's old buddy Janet Street Porter trying to promote & feed people horsemeat for an episode of the F-word as well. I cant help thinking there's some funny business going on apart from the comedy... & I wonder if Nigella got a bit more than £50 for her clip.
Show less
Reply ·

I realised that since the turn of the decade there has been very little UK comedy for me to get passionate and excited about. Limmy's Show is the only thing I can recall being genuinely tickled by. Psychoville? I think that started in 2009. I could name countless comedies I used to enjoy throughout the 00s but now? And that makes me wonder whether there really has been a drop-off in quality or if I'm just getting old and not finding things as funny any more. It does feel as though there's a lack of ideas and writers are reverting back to tried-and-tested sitcom formats compared to things like the fly-on-the-wall of the Office, League of Gents' horror-comedy, Mighty Boosh's surreal landscapes and the Royle Family's cinema realite. Am I wrong? Amirite?

no, I don't like anything anymore either

There were a few things in Toast of the Town that made me giggle ("I saw your advert on the computer"), but it felt a bit cheesy, a pet project rather than something to get really into.

I mean it's not like this thread is a hotbed of activity. Limmy is the only thing in recent years that there seems to have been any kind of consensus about

The first episode of Uncle was v good

is the internet to blame? things like facebook memes and buzzfeed have kind of taken the fun out of a lot of once-funny things imo.

The use of canned laughter - which is a comparatively recent phenomenon in UK comedy - doesn't help but if the shows weren't so unfunny then I suppose the programme makers wouldn't feel the need to resort to it. As for this Vic + Bob thing, it seemed to me that they were almost deliberately making it look as if it was in some way live by leaving in little flubs and pauses and then at the end they go and pull back to reveal it's being performed in front of an audience - I thought that was pretty desperate. There was actually applause at several times on the laugh track - since when did sitcom audiences applaud? I don't remember that in "Fawlty Towers"!

so laugh tracks are back are they? that vic and bob thing sounds like mrs brown's boys

What do you mean back?

But let's not confuse laugh tracks with canned laughter again! This was canned, I'm certain of that.

Linehan addressed this exact situation over Count Arthur strong - filmed in front of an audience, but uses a laugh track. His position is that the audience shows where the track should be, and nothing more.

The pull-back-and-reveal of an audience is fairly standard BBC fare for conventional comedy these days, I've seen the back end of several episodes of Miranda and it does exactly the same thing. I'd like to think Vic & Bob's was maybe more of a homage to the end of Croft & Perry shows, but Miranda is maybe even closer in form to them so this is probably wishful thinking.

Linehan addressed this exact situation over Count Arthur strong - filmed in front of an audience, but uses a laugh track. His position is that the audience shows where the track should be, and nothing more.

Stop making shite comedies then, Graham

There was no pull-back-and-reveal in Croft + Perry shows, or have I lost my marbles? (xp)

But let's not confuse laugh tracks with canned laughter again! This was canned, I'm certain of that.

I'm still confused as to the difference. Wikipedia says they're the same thing but a laugh track could be live.

OK I mean live vs. canned

What do you mean back?

― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Wednesday, January 15, 2014 12:49 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They fell out of fashion circa 2000 - Royle Family, the Office, League, Mighty Boosh and pretty much any sitcom that wasn't total shit did not have audience laughter.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply there was a pull-back-and-reveal in Croft & Perry, but it seems to be the current BBC mechanism to enable a "you have been watching" close (cf Miranda, My Family).

That's definitely a thing in Mrs Brown's Boys which is fair enough as it has its origins in a stage show.

I get the feeling, but with nothing to justify it, that house of fools is supposed to look staged. Practically the whole show is in that 3/4 front room set, giving it a distinctly Sykes feel.

It's interesting that Linehan admitted to using a laugh track (as opposed using live audience laughter), did he use it on The IT Crowd though? I mean, would he use it on a show that (whatever your own opinion on the IT Crowd) was actually funny enough to enough people that you would imagine it wouldn't need one? Or maybe you only notice it when you don't find it funny? I (as a self-appointed representative of the canned laughter police) was always a bit suspicious of the second I'm Alan Partidge but was that because I didn't think it was as funny as the first series?

DL, I'm thinking the same. I used to hoover up all new comedy, but now there are a few things that tickle me but no life-changers. I do like Fresh Meat, and Toast was OK. The new Vic and Bob I could watch in small doses.

Rolling UK Comedy Into The Shitbin Thread

House of Fools is 100% filmed in front of a live studio audience. And since there are no VT cutaways, all of the laughter you hear is the audience laughing in the room. Whether it's sweetened or bolstered in the sound mix is a different story, but audiences go nuts at TV recordings - it's intoxicating and infectious.

The use of canned laughter - which is a comparatively recent phenomenon in UK comedy

UK sitcoms have been using laugh tracks since the early 1980s.

so he really did that trampette jump over the painting of the pygmy?

House of Fools is 100% filmed in front of a live studio audience. And since there are no VT cutaways, all of the laughter you hear is the audience laughing in the room.

And applauding the entrance of characters they've never seen before? For example.

I know the dude who did audience warm-up for this programme. Maybe he's just brilliant at his job!

studio audiences are encouraged to clap does this surprise you

In sitcoms though? In general entertainment shows, yes. Obviously you applaud at the end of the show but 5 or 6 times during the show? I'm obviously totally out of the loop concerning sitcoms.

... thank fuck

The more I think about this, the better I think it was. Top use of Throbbing Gristle too.

Eh? What where?!??!?!

A pretty uneven hit/miss rate, but the good bits were proper, hearty lols. Vic is so weird though - a pretty dreadful performer compared to Mortimer and Berry, but I don't think the show would work without him. Emo brother upstairs was good in small doses.

Hamburger Lady was used behind one of the puppet sequences, the first one I think.

Wow, I missed that!