Midweek TV
| NEWS | | | | | SPORT | | | | | INTERVIEWS |  | | | FEATURED ARTICLE | | | | COMPETITIONS | | | | |
|
|
|
Are Thursdays really that funny?
THURSDAYS are funny, so BBC Two insists on telling us every chance it gets.
It's been a tricky tagline for the channel to live up to, with so many different kinds of comedy appealing to so many different people these days. After all, the audience of bland, US-modelled My Family can't have much in common with that of the edgy and inventive Peep Show, can it? Drawing different niche comedies together into a cohesive triple bill of laughs isn't easy.
So off it starts with Mock The Week, at 9pm. There has been an onslaught of comedy panel shows of recent years, desperately trying to replicate the formula of Have I Got News For You. Some are good, like QI, and others just plain awful.
Mock The Week feels like the most rehearsed of the lot, as the comedians trade quips about the week's events, often very obviously shoehorning their own stand-up material into the show. But it can always be relied upon to deliver some laughs.
Every week the star is edgy Scottish comic Frankie Boyle, who is as likely to have the audience stunned into "I can't believe he said that" silence as he is laughing. Teammate Hugh Dennis offers a gentler form of humour - in fact, the one-time Mary Whitehouse Experience star has a slightly old-fashioned feel about him now.
But - and I don't know why I care about this - I wish someone would tell me how the scoring system works. Host Dara O'Briain hands out the points on a whim, sometimes clearly favouring the less funny team. Where's the justice in that?
Next up is Lab Rats which is an odd beast. It's co-written by and stars Chris Addison - a quality stand up who looks like he should still be at school. He's best known for his part in the brilliantly scathing political satire The Thick of It, which, with its foul mouthed assault on the behind-the-scenes world of Whitehall is about as far from Lab Rats' knockabout comedy as it's possible to imagine.
Silly humour may not be fashionable but this just about taps into the spirit of Reeves and Mortimer and Father Ted.
It's a mixed bag - the last show had the most annoying man in the world accidentally released from cryogenic suspended animation. Not a bad idea, but one that shot the show straight in the foot - the blabbering idiot was so irritating he had me twitching to grab the remote control and switch channels.
There were chucklesome moments, though. We learned that Russian newspapers still have spy-friendly eye-slits cut into every edition, as a throwback to the cold war. And Addison had a delightful moment where he stalled an obsessive compulsive auditor by nudging pictures into crooked positions, forcing the bureaucrat to readjust them.
It's not quite there yet, but it shows promise.
Rounding off the evening is Still Game, a comedy about a pair of Glaswegian pensioners. To be honest, though, I've never quite gotten that one, so five minutes in I gave in to channel flicking.
So Thursdays are funny, up to a point - just not for all of the people, all of the time.
1:57pm Monday 21st July 2008
Print 
Email this 
Comment
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
