The Producer
Saturday 14th December 2013 10:29pm [Edited]
302 posts
Belatedly...I want to the recording last Monday. As has been mentioned, the performers were full of energy, really went for it and some of the biggest laughs were due to their performance and rapport with the crowd. It was a long recording but they didn't drop their energy once.
In terms of the sketches, the show seemed to have a preference (but certainly not exclusively) for sketches that had gags referring to specific modern day things, e.g. Jordan, Peter Andre, Jeremy Clarkson, Snickers, Magnums etc. That's not great for me as I'd interpreted the brief the other way and aimed for future sketches that resonated with modern trends, social norms etc and specifically avoided that sort of thing. Ah well! And they did still use quite a few that took my approach, including almost all the ones I thought were the best (I may be slightly biased...).
As mentioned earlier in this thread, there were a few what I always call "cheeky writer" sketches, where a writer had clearly just taken a contemporary sketch they'd written and added an intro that suggested it was set in the future, changed one word to "alien" or added "oid" to the end of another, rather than writing to the brief. Bad writer, smacked bottom! E.g. there was one that was just a modern day funeral with an inappropriately bantering vicar (it was one of the best sketches, just not remotely set in the future apart from the intro) and also a "press 1 on your keypad for..." dating sketch that put in one early reference to "alien" or similar and then just rolled out a pre-internet telephone dating sketch. I'd be very surprised if they use those though given they were so obviously at odds with the rest of the show, plus they must have recorded almost 2 hours of stuff so they don't need to use "cheeky writer" ones!
As always, very good to go to a recording as when you listen to the broadcast show you can see what they dropped from the recording and get a feel for what they after in the final edit.
Anyway, good luck everyone with recording 3.