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

i get the appeal of strictly but i'd sooner be garrotted with a fish hook

having said all that, panel shows probably don't belong in this thread tbh

Gladiators was better than every comedy panel show

There may be too many comedy panel shows and the pool of people that do them is so small that you can often see the same person on two different shows in the same night.

Someone asked why they changed the format of Room 101 from a single guest to three guests a while ago and was told that these days nobody is capable of holding an audience's interest on their own for 24 minutes. Not sure whether that's a comment on the celeb or the audience though.

AA's list contains some of my idea of lowest common denominator guests, but it's probably accurate as far as it goes. Would add Bob Mortimer, Osman, Comedy B, Milton, Acaster, Pascoe, both Mel and Sue...

some are definitely in the famous-for-being-famous camp, in that they're known to panel show audiences because they've been on panel shows. a bit like the way jade goody went on celebrity big brother because she was famous for being on big brother.

Well yeah, that's an route in for "Other comedians know you're funny* but you can't write a show to save your life".

*or possibly you just always get your round in / are good to borrow a tenner off.

these days nobody is capable of holding an audience's interest on their own for 24 minutes. Not sure whether that's a comment on the celeb or the audience though.

Comment on TV execs I'd say.

24 minutes of Aisling Bea though, can you imagine?

I'd never liked her much on panel shows but I saw her do a live set and actually enjoyed it quite a lot. NB this was at the same show as the Ardal O'Hanlon set described above so maybe she benefited from the contrast.

The sooner these people give up comedy and become actors the better.

lee mack disgusts me, he is pumping sparse and tasty

Gladiators was better than every comedy panel show

― soref, Wednesday, 26 April 2017 01:33

Have you seen an episode recently? I watched a few about maybe 8 years ago, thinking it might be fun (I watched it regularly when it was on in the 90s) and it was maddeningly repetitive and bad.
All presentation, countdowns, rituals and barely any action. The final Eliminator round was the only fun part. Every bloody time someone was struck out, "Another One Bites The Dust" was played and the audience did the same little arm dance every time. This happened several times times an episode. Excruciating.
Didn't need to be a bad show.

I think most would beg for more panel shows after being shown a few episodes of Gladiators.

al pubmurray landlord coming to dublin

comments under fb ads are all

"whod go to see this unfunny cunt"

"no no its ironic"

"...... we know?"

al himself chiming in.

Pity the IRA aren't around anymore to firebomb the venue.

my brother-in-law and sister-in-law have been to see both al murray and john bishop's live shows

they're ukip voters

reader, i leave you to draw your own conclusions

Everything I've heard about Al is that he's a lovely left-wing bloke with too much faith (nowadays much tested) in people's familiarity with irony.

yeah he is p strongly left-wing on twitter.

that said, the entire pub landlord thing prob veered too far into its own world.

yeah, i think he's attracted a fairly sizeable audience who just do not get it, which must be a pretty horrible position to find yourself in

it's complex enough, a lot of his persona, even on his twitter, is kind of "no nonsense" stuff that makes it hard to feel the entire point of the pub landlord was irony or mocking that type of person. he has the deep heart of brexit within him even if he is a liberal.

irony p much means having it both ways tbh -- its value and its weakness

it's funny because it's simultaneously true and false

if thou gaze long into a pub, the pub will also gaze into thee

Everything I've heard about Al is that he's a lovely left-wing bloke

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 5 May 2017 13:16

Definitely. He's always extremely nice whenever I see him as himself.

how well does "extremely nice in person" correlate w/politics? i think poorly

bingo

how well does "thinks of self as left wing, espouses lefty opinions" correlate with producing work which is left wing? not much better

aaaaaaand we're back to young Garry B

i agree with everyone

most relevant thing is that idk if hes known for anything other than his in character persona

and i dont know who, if anyone, is turning up ironically

and crucially its not funny on either level

and crucially its not funny on either level

OTM. And that's what he gets paid for.

ask Johnny Speight how many morals he corrected thru the medium of Alf Garnett

whatever promoter thought irish people would gaf about such average and quintessentially british shit needs their head examined

liverpool joke in there somewhere

not necessarily a good one

best exploration of this i've ever encountered is trevor griffiths' COMEDIANS (1975), a stage play which became a TV play in 1979

it was a (highly complex) dissection of the role and content of working class comedy as it existed in clubs and had been transferring to TV: of what was reactionary and what wasn't, of of what constituted escape from a class trap and what constituted expression of a class perspective (the setting is a group of would-bes in manchester auditioning for a talent scout who might get them onto TV, the narrative is who comrpomises and how)

it featured a proto-punk figure -- a stand-up who literally shaves his head to manifest as a skinhead, whose act is almost intolerably dark (and not, on the page, all that funny) -- who was acknowledged as an inspiration by several of the pioneer alt.comedians, and talked up as such by (for example) long-forgotten SWP skinhead/popstar/nme critic X.Moore, as a hero of non-compromise

which is odd in retrospect, bcz he was a fictional character (and played by omnipresent latterday liberal niceguy jonathan pryce)

anyway, i too basically read the play in an x.moore accent for years -- until it struck me one read-thru that griffiths' portrait of price was really *not* that sympathetic (GP is isolated -- eg split from his wife -- embittered and evidently antagonistically bite-the-hand-that-feeds, including his mentor, who he genuinely respects, and is the play's more obvious centre of sympathetic gravity: absolute absence of compromise is its own kind of escapism)

i'd be up to see a revival, actually -- sadly the topic has dated less than it looked as if it was going to in the early 80s (except that stand-up is now much more middle-class, largely as a consequence of alt.comedy)

(a couple of the characters in the play are manchester irish, one is manchester jewish, griffiths/price/pryce are all welsh, interestingly)

I don't remember the Price character as being all that sympathetic, but then X. Moore was from a public school background, so he was coming at it from a different angle.

SWP too, I think.

haha i love the tv version of that play! think it's on youtube.

xpost

(xp) Ooops yeah, mentioned already. Whatever happened to btw... X Moore/Chris Dean that is, not the SWP.

thats a good post mark but that play sounds awful

i reckon you'd like it.

It is very 70s.

its got monologues from teachers about the etc i mean i dont think its me

also yermans final routine ah here

it's good i think, i like trevor griffiths, he's a man to understand the dialectic blah blah

x.moore (real name chris dean) moved to paris in 1988 and was never heard of again, acc.all reports. This was news to me (except for the last sentence): "After the Redskins split Chris Dean put together a new band under the name of P-Mod. Not much is known about P-Mod but they did record some studio demos. After P-Mod Chris disappeared to France"

P-Mod! This has made me very happy (in an OMG no! kind of a way)

Like P-Funk I'm guessing.

I saw the Redskins getting beaten up by stage-invading Nazi skinheads during the GLC's 'Jobs for a Change' festival on the South Bank in 1984 (also on the bill: The Smiths. Also beaten up: poor old Hank Wangford).

I fancied starting a band called F-Punk for a while.

also on the bill stage joining in with the Nazi skinheads: The Smiths

LOL

Like P-Funk except better bcz mod is better than funk

brb c/ping this^^^ to post on kerr's FB