sketch comedy
Helen Hawkins
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.He has opted to depict just the 90 minutes before the show was due to go live, a real-time madcap sprint to the moment when the first sketch rolled and Chevy Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sheeps, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★This is the first new show that Sheeps – Liam Williams, Al Roberts and Daran Johnson – have produced in six years, but they say The Giggle Bunch (That's Our Name For You) is their last. Having gone their separate ways some years ago, the trio have gathered together for one last time to say farewell to their fans.Keen followers will savour every minute of the show, of course, while neutral observers might pick holes in some of the hour's content. Sheeps have always played with – actually disregarded might be a better description – the rules Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have seen Lazy Susan's excellent BBC pilot last year; now a series has been commissioned from Freya Parker and Celeste Dring so we can look forward to more sketches, surreal interludes and tiptop visual gags – as well as returning characters including Northern lasses Megan and Michaela, tottering on their heels to a night out where they “don't want any drama”.In Forgive Me, Mother!, their most recent stage show, they make a slight departure from previous work as they allow their stage personas to come to the fore, while establishing a very funny narrative through their wide array Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Doctor, writer, sculptor, curator, comedian, presenter and director, Sir Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was one of the mighty cultural and intellectual omnivores of our age. To those of a musical or theatrical bent, however, Miller was above all one of the greatest of British opera directors, whose many collaborations with the English National Opera - whether in his mafia Rigoletto, his Edwardian Mikado or the sitcom-sharpness of his Barber of Seville - resulted in the most enduringly popular operatic productions in British history. In 2012, as he returned to the ENO with a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clive Anderson Assembly George Square ****Clive Anderson has obeyed the Fringe comedy gods and given his debut solo show a title and a theme. Actually, Me, Macbeth & I is mostly just him talking very amusingly for an hour about his days in the Cambridge Footlights, his dual careers in law and on television - and that interview with the Bee Gees.He’s a fantastic raconteur, even if he does have a verbal tic of “Oh I must just mention this”, or “Before I tell you that”. Anderson is so full of stories that if he did lose his place in the script it really wouldn’t matter.Anderson demonstrates Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Helm Pleasance Dome ****What a pleasure it is that Nick Helm has returned to the Fringe after six years away after appearing in television comedies Uncle and The Reluctant Landlord.That’s the straightforward reason he has been a stranger to Edinburgh, but doesn’t explain his 18 months away from standup, or why the show is called Phoenix From the Flames. He tells us it’s because he was finally getting to grips with the depression he has suffered from all his life (he’s now 38).That sounds like a bummer way to start a comedy show, but this is Nick Helm, so of course it starts Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sheeps, the sketch comedy threesome, had never really gone away but when they performed Live and Loud Selfie Sex Harry Potter at the Edinburgh Fringe last year after a four-year absence, it was called a comeback. More a welcome reunion, as its members – Liam Williams, Daran Johnson and Alastair Roberts – had been busy doing solo projects.The show, which they have brought to the Soho Theatre for a short run, is in the same vein as their previous work – original and intelligent sketch comedy with a touch of edginess and the surreal.It’s an insightful exploration of long-lasting Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the League of Gentlemen – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, plus non-performing writer Jeremy Dyson – reformed for an excellent series to update us on events in Royston Vasey (“portal to another world, or just a shit hole?”) for the BBC last year, they enjoyed it so much that they announced a tour for 2018, their first live show since late 2005.There is more than a whiff of nostalgia in the first half as the trio – dressed incongruously in dinner suits for their black comedy as they were when they started out in the mid-1990s – perform some old favourites. The audience Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Bass Defence League campaigns for mental health. As with everything Big Narstie does, there are serious points in this release wedged next to the broadest comedy, and it’s no coincidence, as we learn from the vivid parody of “BDL Protest” intro skit, that BDL is only a letter away from EDL. An influential presence in grime for over a decade, it’s a surprise to note that this is his first full album. Then again, Narstie is so busy being YouTube agony star Uncle Pain, or chewing the fat with Andrew Neil and Piers Morgan, it’s amazing he’s a musician at all.Narstie makes the most of his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What joy that Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were persuaded by the BBC to celebrate their 30 (ish) years as a comedy duo with this programme – and that this sweet confection was shown on Christmas Day. It was a pleasing mix of old clips and new material, and a reminder that when F&S are good, they are very, very good.Among the new sketches we returned to Prickly Pear Farm, where Dot and May are now running a hilariously inadequate natural burial site, and visited the Poldark set, where they played two irritating extras (pictured below with Poldark's Eleanor Tomlinson and Jack Farthing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the closing credits of Acorn Antiques, wobbling diagonally across the screen, it says the part of Berta was taken by “Victoria Woods”. Has there ever been a lovelier, truer typo? There was only one Victoria Wood, and yet she seemed somehow to be plural. She wrote and performed sketches and sitcom, songs and stand-up, musicals and drama. She directed, she produced. And she never seemed to stop until, alas, last year.Our Friend Victoria (BBC One) is a piquant reminder that television comedy has never unearthed anyone remotely like her. Her genius is irreplaceable. That genius, as celebs and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sketch format goes in and out of favour. It was huge in the 1970s, crawled under a rock when alternative comedians found other means of expression, and was reinvigorated 20 years ago by genuinely inventive shows like Big Train and The Fast Show. Since then, easily the biggest kid on the block has been Little Britain, which married mainstream appeal with a flair for subversion.After cashing in with a live tour, its stars didn’t really have anywhere to go with the format. They had a crack at ribbing the docusoap genre in the underrated Come Fly With Me, and then went their separate ways. Read more ...