Quote: Timbo @ February 27 2012, 11:24 PM GMTI honestly don't know why they bother making six episodes of sketch shows these days. Once you''ve seen the first episode that about covers it.
I liked it, but I doubt I will if they keep doing the same sketches every week. I hate this trend in sketch comedy - reusing characters is fine, reusing the jokes is not.
In the podcast (plug plug), the girls alluded to financial cost dictating the re-use of characters.
Quote: Aaron @ February 28 2012, 4:06 PM GMTIn the podcast (plug plug), the girls alluded to financial cost dictating the re-use of characters.
That's fine, so far as it goes - but there's a difference between reusing characters and simply repeating the previous sketch! The only 2 I came close to liking in ep 1 were Will & Kate, and the lady leaving work early. Last night I found that one of them had been pretty much repeated wholesale, and the other was a pointless rehash (in a completely different set with loads of extras, so hardly saving any more expense than a new sketch, so far as I can see).
Lots of sketch comedy seems to be about how well the performers can act nowadays, as if a series is a 6 part showreel. 
Does anyone else find the opening sequence very weak? And their set looks like a game show. Is anyone partial to either of these? (I'm not).
I think they work well together and I'm enjoying watching, however the repetition is off-putting. The wills and Kate runner was a good sketch but totally over-worked.
This week's classical X Factor sketch was really good, and the type of thing they should be doing more of.
Liked their chemistry and enthusiasm - not the material.
Most sketches seemed to peeter out and the Barrowman stuff seemed tenth class M&W.
Did laugh at the detective sketch though.
The improvisation sketches from Edinburgh Youth Theatre, twenty five years ago, were funnier than this rubbish.
Quote: Burton Sparkler @ February 29 2012, 7:14 PM GMTLiked their chemistry and enthusiasm - not the material.
Most sketches seemed to peeter out and the Barrowman stuff seemed tenth class M&W.
Perhaps they forgot to finish the course.
Watching these two for the first and like them very much, which is more than I can say for their sketch material.
Their Smith-Jones/Morecambe and Wise type banter has really good chemistry. I would rather see them in a comedy drama.
Do they write their own material? I ask because it seems to me all pretty serviceable, almost as if they've been given a whole sack of unaired sketches written by sketch writers. Serviceable but not outstanding. So the show's okay but I can't see it being remembered as a classic. They too are okay, not brilliant. It's a rare new female comedy show, and it's okay, I think that's the best you can get out of it. French & Saunders it is not.
I think it's been pretty good so far, I've laughed out loud many times.
My children told it was unfunny, so I didn't watch the first few, but I'm just trying to watch this week's. It's appalling, isn't it? The sketches meander in and meander out, and within four minutes we're into a second-hand, third-rate Austen spoof, which wasn't funny the first three hundred times it was performed by French and Saunders, with extra lack of invention of "Austen characters talking dirty" idea plagiarised directly from Armstrong and Miller. The sketch about receptionists would fit smoothly into 1978. Damien Hurst? Is he still alive? Undercover Millionaire? That was on a few years ago, wasn't it? If you're going to spoof black and white Truffaut, then two "style of film-making" spoofs in the first ten minutes is pretty desperate stuff. The "schoolgirls in a shop" thing was shockingly bad, to the point that even the dubbed laughter sounded uneasy. The National Trust sketch was either something Victoria Wood has done, or a direct clone, and even the voice of the volunteer was pure Julie Walters. By the time it got to the endless James Bond thing, which the "Show Choir" at my children's school would make more of, I'd had too much.
Shocking. Why do the BBC commission this sort of stuff? It's a collection of sketches, few of them funny, few of them original, all of them too long, aimed at targets so long in the tooth that you can imagine the authors desperately removing references to Ted Heath while quickly word-processing them from dusty old carbon copies.
Anyway, middle-class families don't pay at National Trust properties; they just wave their membership cards. Miss.
Quote: youngian @ March 5 2012, 10:28 PM GMTTheir Smith-Jones/Morecambe and Wise type banter has really good chemistry.
Banter? BANTER? You mean the completely scripted appearances of the two of them together, in which the editing removes any vestige of timing so that all the "jokes" (and you can recognise them by their structure, rather than by the laughter) fall leaden on the floor? The opening sketch about their anniversary was cringe-worthy, because 
it existed only in the minds of comedy writers (people might celebrate the first anniversary of their meeting, but not the twentieth, and as the performers are clearly in their mid-thirties there's something really implausible about the basic proposition) and (b) had no punch line anyway. Perhaps it was meant to set up sexual tension? A long-running gag in which the blonde one wants to shag the brunette one but it's not reciprocated? No. It was just there, on the floor, leading nowhere.
If it takes performers multiple takes and a trip to the edit suite to make three minutes of TV in which they talk to each other, there's something profoundly wrong. Eric and Ernie just had a camera pointed at them, did a couple of takes and put the best one on air, and Smith and Jones did those monologues in one take as well. In this show, the opening dialogue is a succession of fairly harsh edits, mostly covered by laughter, clearly stitching it together from multiple takes. If they can't do a two-hander for a couple of minutes without needing editing afterwards, it's a pretty poor show. And if they're going to do edits, can they make them slightly less obtrusive?
Quote: chipolata @ February 27 2012, 10:44 PM GMTIt bumbles along nicely enough, but there's nothing particularly memorable or outstanding in it. With stronger material they could be pretty good.
Still this.
Quote: Tokyo Nambu @ March 6 2012, 8:38 AM GMTThe opening sketch about their anniversary was cringe-worthy, because
That's quite a bizarre bit to take offence to. People do meet at school, y'know.
I believe Watson and Oliver did actually meet at school.
