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

I finally watched the last series, which I had never seen before, this afternoon.

I was struck as it went on that it was, for the most part, a half-arsed attempt at doing Rik 'n' Ade without the violence but with added inclusivity. The neighbours up and down are very traditional sitcom characters but EDGY. And it beats the Inbetweeners by a decade to getting laughs by repeating FLANGE in a funny voice.

Yes. Of its time.

last night i watched rik mayall on wogan and basically every time i see something he was in i fall head over heels in love with him. strangely (to me) he did standup IN character but the interview OUT of character and was very nervous and shy in the latter

Watching it now - yes he was almost startlingly different as himself wasn't he!

but half-watching a stand-up special at home while you play on yr phone and have to get up to stop the dog from scratching the sofa also isn't the same vibe as it would be in a 200-cap room with a low ceiling. good 3-cam audience sitcoms are at least written for that form.

I think this is part of why I find the audience laughter in IAP so distracting. It's not that kind of sitcom at all.

I mean, it's not built with the verbal density of 30 Rock, or the intricate structure of Arrested Development, or the visual concentration of Community - it's written to be played in front of (or near to) an audience. The front desk of the travel tavern scenes come to mind as prominent examples of the cast having to pause their lines around the laughter. (Probably only two cameras, though.)

Entertainment Weekly interview with Davies about the first Who Christmas special just dropped, to give forks even more context:

https://ew.com/tv/inside-the-making-first-doctor-who-holiday-special/

For us, it was the BBC who asked for it. We brought back Doctor Who in 2005. I was so unaware of the possibility of a Christmas episode that I did a Christmas episode in our first series, where the Doctor meets Charles Dickens, and it's Christmas Day, and it's snowing, and there are ghosts. So that's actually secretly the first Christmas special, it just didn't go out at Christmas. So we launched the first series of Doctor Who in 2005, it was such a success that the BBC turned around to me and said, "Let's have a Christmas special." They ordered two more series and two more Christmas specials all in one breath. Which was wonderful, but I just saw my life disappear. [Laughs] I was like, oh God, someone's just slammed the prison door shut! But I couldn't have been happier. I mean, it's very different in America. They don't show lots of big programs on Christmas Day itself, do they? Here, on Christmas Day, those are the highest ratings of all, because those are when the big shows play. So it wasn't just a Christmas special, it was a guaranteed slot on Christmas Day itself, at 7 p.m., and that is literally the heart of the schedule for the entire year. It was like being given the greatest gift in British television you could possible ask for. So we had to raise the stakes! We had to deliver a great big blockbuster and entertain everyone!

London Live showing comic strip presents at various times over Christmas which I don't think I've seen since they were on originally. Unfortunately the epg doesn't say which episodes are which. Five Go Mad In Dorset tonight (which is s01e01)

Just started Ghosts and enjoying it.

Not comedy but I am quite liking Snackmasters.

might be worth recording those Comic Strips, Richardson re-edited a bunch of them for the DVD box set

(and was completely bemused that anyone would care that scenes and gags were missing)

The also have Stella Street on immediately afterwards (and bbc4 is showing the single Christmas episode)

The first CS sees people (him from crossroads) arrested for homosexuality.

Snack Masters is always interesting. Will never look at a quaver quite the same way again.

Catsdown christmas special doesn't seem socially distanced. did they film it in february? last year? (it's says new in the listings, there's a chance it's a repeat)

Upstart Crow funny for the first 5 minutes and then elton keeps flogging the same horse for another 20 minutes, the way he always does. bit claustrophobic as well.

second of the London Live Comic Strip Presents was Bad News Tour, which it'll be nice to see again.

30 years of hignify ended with people saying 'if you tuned in and didn't see paul and ian you'd be surprised' having completely forgotten to mention that merton wasn't there for at least one series.

after two failed attempts I've finally got into taskmaster by following the advice upthread and starting with series 7. but is it all downhill after that? also my wife still doesn't get it.

This recent one is the first series I've properly watched and I found it so funny. Been watching a bit of the one with the Inbetweeners bloke (who always looks so stressed!) and no one else I've heard of on Dave and it seems quite a bit worse - still watchable though.

Worzel slightly down in quality on last year, which I'll blame on covid hitting the production. Best bit was W just delighted to be on a bus.

I like the disconnect of them living in a world with mobiles but the buses being from the 50s.

Series 8 of TM, chap, is probably the nadir, saved by Paul Sinha (stand up and The Chase chaser, look out his radio4 shows). It did make me wonder whether they'd run out of good guests but then series 9 was great and 10, perhaps helped by the move to bigger channel, attracted some top names.

The Chase chaser

Aha! I knew he looked familiar...

The woman, the one that wasn't Lou, is the women from Peter Kay's carshare thing, so probably more famous than the rest of them put together. Doesn't mean I can remember her name though.

Scottish guy is big in Scotland / CBBC / Twitch.

I have seen Lou on other things to be fair, but she's never stuck in my mind.

I saw one of the Comic Strip Presents, which wasn't very funny but was at least entertainingly weird.

'War'? that one came with 'this is old comedy which may offend' warnings, probably because of Cracker doing japanese accents.

That's the one.

Scottish guy is big in Scotland / CBBC / Twitch.

Pretty sure his income these days is from being the voice of Love Island and may even be most social media famous for being Mr Laura Whitmore.

Another two things to add to the list of things I don't know him from!

Hahaha

He betrays his CBBC origins badly on Taskmaster by just how into (and comfortable interacting with) puppets he is.

Don't think Iain Stirling has even been particularly big in Scotland, btw. Car Share woman is called Sian Gibson. That was the worst series, I think.

I got a sneak preview of the upcoming New Year special. It seems to be people who couldn't commit to a full series, but I wish they could have done.

He did that BBC Scotland one-off about going out on the piss. Anything else?

He did the launch night of the BBC Scotland channel but he really wasn't on my radar at all prior to Taskmaster.

Dream line-up for Taskmaster, of people who haven't done it before, several of whom are definitely too big to do it, off the top of my drunken head:

Richard Ayoade
Michaela Coel
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Dane Baptiste
Bill Bailey

Perhaps in an inferior timeline in which Olivia Coleman had not caught the attention of the Academy she could be persuaded to make an appearance also.

Dane Baptiste would definitley do it if asked imo

would enjoy Kemah Bob, Sam Campbell, Chloe Petts, Sophie Hagen, Sikisa, Gabby Best, John Kearns, Judi Love

pascoe does rhod gilbert's job, or whatever it was called, i enjoyed it more than the premise suggested i would, mainly because of the Cubans, rather than her.

(was less like rhod gilbert's job thing and more like michael palin tbf)

the 'lock three comedians in hamley's overnight' thing was dreadful. i wonder how it would've been with female comedians? (probably uncommissioned)

Yes, that Tom Allen guy seems to have come out of nowhere in the last few months and I'm sick of him already.

he's the new romesh (when sara pascoe isn't being the new romesh). he's been doing the bake-off sister show for the last couple of years as well as all the usual suspects.

in fact he has a show tonight on 4 where he visits a town (wakefield in this case) and then does a show about it (ie, mark steel's in town). think it's a one-off.

I don't think he has a family, so it might give him more flexibility in saying yes to jobs this year.

I personally could do without seeing or hearing Richard Osman for a while. Between his book promotion and the BBC using House of Games as a cheap filler, I have had enough of him now. I'm not saying they shouldn't, and I know they're all stuck for programming, but...

I personally could do without seeing or hearing Richard Osman for a while.

Yeah same. I used to quite like him when he was just on Pointless.

i did see on twitter that osman's left endemol to go freelance. i think the book was a bigger success than anyone expected - was sold out everywhere i looked (all 3 places...)

he always adds value to any show he's on, apart from that dreadful 'world-cup of things' show he did last christmas.

(i don't ever see house of games, apart from monday's standalone thing, which kind of misses the point of the all-week-with-same-contestants scheduling it gets on bbc2)

re Taskmaster : i wonder if its now at the stage where its not just about the fees that they can afford, but folks actually want to do it cos its good fun.

oh, and yeah, every year this is a certain comedy personality who gets an absolute killing over the festive season and is on every bloody show possible.
couple of years back it was Walliams, the year after that cricket bloke, and this year it was definitely Tom Allen.

Not comedy, but Shirley Ballas is getting a fair old whirl around every show ever at the moment - she's in the one-off Taskmaster and was on both BBC and ITV at the same time the other day.

Yes, that Tom Allen guy seems to have come out of nowhere in the last few months and I'm sick of him already.

oh god he's awful, like he was concocted in some laboratory making smarmy and unfunny hosts

C4's experiment in Taskmaster without comedians doesn't seem to have been particularly successful.

I thought it was really good - I’d happily watch a series with that line-up.

Think I agree with aldo. Nobody seemed to have much imagination except rylan who was trying too hard, if anything. And it felt like Greg was having to do more work than usual to make the chatty bits funny. Might've improved with time though.

Next series:

Lee Mack
Charlotte Ritchie
Jamali Maddix
Mike Wozniak
Sarah Kendall

There'll also be a champion of champions special for sessions 6-10 (last one was 2 episodes iirc)

Lack of imagination is probably what I'm stretching for. It might have been just the choice of tasks not really lending themselves to it but yes, only really Rylan trying to use any imagination or playing with the rules and he didn't really work in isolation with everyone else just doing what the card said.

It started with the prize task, which was boringly literal but possibly not as much as the last series which smacked of 'what I can buy in the all night garage on the way to the studio'.

The prize task has not been great a lot of the time. I think we forget how bad most of them are, because the good ones are so very good.

Last night's was more like a corporate jolly than a proper entertainment programme. The participants all seemed to enjoy themselves hugely, but that didn't translate in the same way as the show usually does. Although, as a Strictly fan, I really, really enjoyed how much fun Shirley Ballas was having. I just enjoyed it in a different way.

Funnily enough I can't disagree with any of the above, but I think the best I enjoy most about the show are the in-between bots rather than the tasks. Last night's lot seemed to slot in to being comfortable with each other / Greg's abuse right from the off and it had me chortling away more than any individual show in the last series (which I suppose means for me it did translate in the way the show usually does when it works best).

Yeah Rylan was the only one I think would make a good regular contestant. Although John Hannah was quite charming and Nicola Derry Girls seemed like a laugh. Didn't like Shirley Ballas but I hate Strictly.

Pulling is back on the iPlayer; both seasons, and the one-off last ep. The whole shebang. Stil one of the funniest BBC shows i've seen.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b007m1vk/pulling?seriesId=b009qkg9