Rob Brydon, Lee Mack and David Mitchell are the host and team captains respectively of Would I Lie to You?, the long-running BBC One panel game. Now they are touring together in Town to Town, which is family-friendly fun (with occasional naughtiness from the delightfully sweary Mack).
Brydon takes the stage first and nicely guys the audience with his trademark insincere flattery of them and the town, and does it while running through a few of his excellent impressions, including Hugh Grant and Mick Jagger. Then Mack and Mitchell join him for a quiz based on how much they know or can guess about the town they are in.
The set is decked out as if it were a gentlemen's club, all leather armchairs, bookscases and portraits of the three comics – Brydon as a ship's captain, which is cue for a string of gags from Mitchell and Mack about Brydon's advertisements for P&O cruises (a "ferry company", as Mack has it); and Mack as a jockey, as he was once a stable lad (“but not a stable adult”, Brydon quips, which shows that not everything these three wits come up with is comedy gold). Mitchell, meanwhile, is shown as a Victorian gent, complete with top hat. “I wear it in bed,” says Mitchell, whose WILTY? persona is a out-of-touch posho. “Actually I look like Jacob Rees-Mogg being entered.”
The first half rather drags (if you've ever wondered what the point of editing on TV shows is, you'll learn it here), as they talk about famous people born locally, or what locals like and dislike about their town, and which of the three the audience thinks might make the best lover. Mack and Brydon are old hands at making scripted material seem spontaneous, but Mitchell looks uncomfortable in trying to present pre-prepared gags as off-the-cuff smarts.
The second half of the show has more pace as the trio answer the audience's questions – on the night I saw it, they had to find the funnies in, inter alia, a 12-year-old lad's problems with his size-13 feet, whether a woman should attend her mother's funeral, and if it was OK for another to pass off cheap gin as a boutique botanical to her brain-damaged husband. What do they put in the water in Portsmouth?
There's much to enjoy in the three being nimble with gags while sparring with each other but, while I’m a fan of Would I Lie to You?, this format feels like a pale imitation.
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