johnny smith
Monday 29th October 2012 1:34am [Edited]
279 posts
It really beggars belief how the BBC continue to recommission all the wrong and undeserving shows (and hasn't really done much to encourage more from popular, successful and actually funny comedy series like The Mighty Boosh and Pulling) - but then again this is the TV corperation that in the past has commissioned 3 series of After You've Gone AND Life Of Riley when even the first episodes of those 2 shows was one too many.
Now we are up to series 4 (which is more series than Chums, Television Programme or even The Fast Show ever had) of Harry & Paul...and it just boggles the mind. There are unfunny sitcoms/sketch shows and then there are those from reliable old seasoned luminaries of the genre who sadly now have clearly lost whatever raw and fresh, innovative creativity and humour they once possessed in spades in their heyday.
In the early 90s - 20 YEARS AGO - Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse were pure genius (though Kathy Burke was also responsible for a lot of that too, of course). Kevin the Teenager, Smashie and Nicie, Tim-Nice-But Dim, Wayne and Waynetta Slob, The Scousers, Mr Cholmondeley-Warner, Julio Geordio, Lee and Lance, Michael Paine the Self-Righteous Brothers, Captain Stefan Van Der Haast Graacht, Stan and Pam, Mr You-Don't-Wanna-Do-It-Like-That, The Old Gits, Harry and Lulu......Harry and Paul were pure, pure genius at genuinely hilarious character comedy and their work together back then is as funny now as it was at the time...perhaps even more so seeing as there's seemingly so much sheer unfunniness to be found on TV nowadays.
Now to go from those heights of inspired genius to such sketch ideas as 'I Saw You Coming' is just...well...it's embarrassing. In that sketch you really do have the same joke....no actually make that a unfunny beaten, dead horse of a so called 'joke'....repeated again and again through out until the sketch finally ends whilst never having created any real narrative or development for anyone or of anything.
...and don't even get me started on that run of sketches in previous series of this show where Enfield plays a man who likes to emphasise how important he is. What must go through their heads when writing such a sketch? "Right, we're in the age of bleeding edge British comedy like Peep Show, The Thick Of It and Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle - now how should we convey how important this man thinks he is? I know! Let's have him say 'I'm very important' over and over agin. That's 21st century comedy gold, isn't it?'