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

CHALLOP: Rising Damp is better than Reggie Perrin

xpost it might be alright!

I'd always thought Rising Damp was pretty widely accepted as better than Reggie Perrin.

Ideal was quite good the other night.

but Perrin is infinitely more likeable than Rigsby (likeability!=comedy challop very much in character)

Ach, Rigsby was more one of those people who insults those around him for fun, but underneath it all was moree considerate (ref: the episode where he finds Don Warrington's character isn't an african chief, and the markings were a result of an attack when he was young, Rigsby nods and says he understands and will never refer to it)......

However, saw some recently, and it's like a lot of those 'long running' sitcoms, where they ration out the ideas more sparingly over subsequent series'.

Adam And Joe are remnants from a better age, when Father Ted, Alan Partridge and Brass Eye were the other comedy names on everyone's lips, rather than whatever shite it is nowadays

^^^ fogeyish but true

Young Fogeys Against BBC3

Today in an exercise in actually watching BBC1 comedy instead of just assuming it to be awful, we watched Life of Riley and are half way through Green Green Grass. The former was terrible, but compared to Green Green Grass, it's Seinfeld.

Who the holy fuck is watching these things? Presumably there are some of them, because Green Green Grass appears to be on its fourth series. There's only so much OFAH goodwill you can maintain, surely, by appearance of the Driscoll Brothers and references to Peckham, before you notice that it's utterly utterly shit.

I quite like Ideal, I just can't recall ever laughing at it.

Wow, Sanjeev Bhaskar has just been appointed as our new boss man.

Sanjeev Bhaskar is the new Chancellor of the University of Sussex

cheque please...

Laughed my arse off at Stewart Lee.

http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2009/03/18/8489/peep_show_gets_7th_series
http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2009/03/17/8484/its_the_end_for_gavin_%26_stacey

4th series of IT crowd? jaysus the edge.

2nd season of Plus One, too.

I'm a huge Peep Show fan, but seven series is taking the piss a bit.

Stewart Lee reviews his own show in Time Out under a pseudonym

he interviewed himself in the guardian too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/mar/14/comedian-stewart-lee

that said, the top results in google searches point to this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/17/stewart-lee-comedy-vehicle-tv-ratings

only 1m viewers for his show 8(

"‘I mean, he had a suit on and he was speaking into a microphone and walking around, like Michael McIntyre does, but there were no jokes, just long sentences and these silences where he stared at objects and the floor.’"

The first episode is cringeworthingly unfunny and full of stupidly obvious targets. Dan Brown? So Solid Crew? Harry Potter? Has he engaged with any culture post-2002?

Actually given that he was still doing the routine about Princess Di's memorial ET in 2005 this is maybe not a surprise.

you're only saying this because i told you it was good.

i enjoyed it a lot - apart from the 'rap singers' thing going on far too long.

you could always just pretend it's from 2002 and you missed it at the time.

When did you tell me it was good? I don't remember that.

saturday night

highlights imo: the grange hill sausage at the traffic lights; his Pliny voice during the Harry Potter bit

yeah except for the rap singers bit i thought this was good. Also first thing I ever watched on bbc iplayer.

First almost-showing of 'is it the businessman in his suit and tie' joke on BBC2 for over ten years?

dont forget 'i was 28', another goldenoldie

Only lol = Del Boy falling through bar.

he showed he was still with it with that Disposable Heroes of Hip-Hoprasy ref tho', eh.

the whole Del Boy thing was pretty great.

No, just the archive clip from OFAH was really.

I thought this was better than the first one which I also liked a lot - just thought the phrasing, timing etc was better, don't ultimately give a shit if the jokes are 'dated' or not

Maybe dude would be better off not wondering if “pitch and rhythm are considered acceptable substitutes for content and wit” when he isn't bringing the last two.

The Asher D autobio bit was originally part of a set where he just took the piss out of a bunch of random charity shop shit he'd bought, alongside a comedy album by Franklin Ajaye. In the Iannucci interview he acknowledges that SSC aren't a timely reference and goes off on a semi-convincing thing about them being an important force in British hip hop

I was at the Del Boy one and was amazed that they actually kept in the "I am begging for applause" bit at the end; aside from the A+ sucker punch at the end of 90s Comedian he's always seemed unable to come up with a good killer joke to end his sets with and ends up just floundering and repeating the reasonably funny concept he's introduced over and over with no payoff.

The sketches have seemed a bit pointless and not much more than "and here's what that last joke would look if it was acted out by the Curious Orange/Simon Munnery/Kevin Eldon". That said "the rappers, you've seen them" etc is basically the funniest thing of all time to me and I can't countenance how it's splitting opinion so much

The first episode is cringeworthingly unfunny and full of stupidly obvious targets. Dan Brown? So Solid Crew? Harry Potter? Has he engaged with any culture post-2002?

― Matt DC, Monday, March 23, 2009 10:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

they are obvious targets (though apart from SSC still "relevant" post-2002) but it was still funny. second ep: less funny, except for the del boy bit and the final bit which was transcendent.

won't go as far as dom in his stanning because it *is* often just G.O.M. material, but im also not *that* bothered that he isn't doing jokes on lady gaga or chris brown or whatever.

the iannucci bits are funnier than the chopped in sketches.

The Radio Four bit was the best part of the first programme I thought, the bits about Harry Potter were the worst. I'll watch the second one tonight, mostly because I like Stewart Lee and want this to turn into something good, but the first one kind of confirmed my long-held opinion that he's occasionally brilliant and often just lazy.

I laughed repeatedly at the Channel 4 shit cannon, but felt guilty about it.

> i enjoyed it a lot - apart from the 'rap singers' thing going on far too long.

was actually funnier the second time i watched it

This was great last night. The Wicker Man Del Boy sequence was totally inspired. Shit cannon also v funny. Nice to see Simon Munnery in the And & Dec portrait sketch too, even if the punchline was obvious from the outset.

iplaying it up when i get home. His tours gone on sale now, managed to scoop tickets for the edinburgh preview he's doing in my ends (crouch ends that is) in june

He's always done a bit in his shows where he goes on for obviously way too long about the same thing, hasn't he? From what I can recall it started with Fist of Fun "Boy who cried wolf" sketch as some kind of comment on how far you could repeat the same thing and still find it funny.
That's he's repeating that concept over and over is dedication to the joke... (it does go on a bit, though).

Loved the re-surfacing of 28 years old. And the massive Del Boy!

thought he lost the plot a bit on the del boy thing.

but found his comparison of Woolworths to Channel 5 quite genius.

Robert Webb has used Twitter to launch a savage rebuttal to a Guardian critic who slammed him and his Peep Show co-star David Mitchell.

He launched a volley of brief updates in the early hours of Friday, ripping apart Zoe Williams’s radio review sentence-by-sentence.

Williams had specifically targeted Mitchell, claiming he was ruining much of Radio 4’s comedy output with his ubiquity, and dubbing him ‘the many-headed hydra of radio problems’.

Webb didn’t mince his words with the comeback, at one point railing: ‘Shut up Zoe Williiams you clueless, pointless, cloud-minded, mean, vacuous, tree-wasting, lazy, mistaken, complacent idiot.’

He further told his 8,500 followers: ‘As usual, the logic of her argument is impossible to follow because it’s irrational, cretinous and seems to be written by a child. Rather a dim child. What is her qualification for judging R4 comedy? It can’t be that she's done any. Might it be her wonderful prose style?’

He also quoted extracts from her ‘banal and semi-literate’ review with sarcastic commentary such as: ‘“This false sense of security buoys up all kinds of ill-fated formats and combinations.” Are you really happy with that sentence Zoe?’

And ‘“Genius [the Dave Gorman show] is just shaming” What shame, Zoe? Who’s ashamed? They’re making an entertainment show, aren’t they? Shame? Did you mean “shame”?’

Webb later admired he was ‘a bit pissed’ when he fired off the Tweets, and confessed to being ‘a bit sheepish’ the morning after.

Are you David Mitchell?

Admired? Did you mean "admired"?
xp

that Robert Webb shit was funny.

Stewart Lee was good this week, political correctness, so lots of old material again, but i liked it.

yeah i enjoyed it more this week too, although not a fan of some of the inbetween sketches.