T.W.
Tuesday 30th October 2007 6:48am
15,786 posts
Unfortunately, 'It's Adam and Shelley' suffers from a lack of the two basic ingredients of good comedy - 1) sharp, tight, intelligent writing and 2) understated but razor-sharp comic performances.
Okay, so it's supposedly meant to be a mere frippery... a silly, throwaway sketch show aimed at a younger audience, but even the silliest comedy (see Father Ted for example) relies on really taut and clever writing.
These sketches smell of a lack of a quality buffer, a lack of re-writing and editing. The premises are tired and predictable, the writing is bland and meandering. When you get thirty seconds into a sketch and you know how it's going to end it's bad enough. When the initial premise hasn't even made you laugh and you have to wait around another couple of minutes for the sketch to crawl to its finish, you're in the disaster zone.
The characters are unsympathetic and not funny enough to justify their behaviour. Whatever one thinks of Little Britain or Cath Tate they keep their absurd and often cruel characters grounded in a real world, as gross exaggerations of underlying human characters and human experience. The Fast Show & Harry Enfield perhaps showed how absurd characters really blossom out of real people. Adam & Shelley simple take a sledge-hammer to stereotypes and invent characters who simply don't behave as human.
The performances are massively over-the-top and not in a funny way. They never really inhabit a character, and no amount of wigs, costumes and make-up can diguise that. Whatever the merits of these two in live performance, nothing has been toned down for the magnifying effects of a TV camera lens.
In the performers' defence they may have felt obliged to compensate poor writing by 'turning-up' their performances. Presumably though, this being their breakthrough show, they had more than a hand in the selection of material, so no excuses there.
You can always reply to any criticism of a comedy show that it's "not you're kind of thing". True, but I really don't that this is anyone's kind of thing. That should have been apparent after they shot a pilot.
I'm all in favour of the Beeb showing its commitment once again to the sketch show (I'm waiting to see whether I'll be involved in writing one, probably to be on BBC 3), but they seem to be desperate for anything that apes Little Britain. Now, Little Britain ain't on the whole for me, but I respect the fact that Walliams & Lucas are genuinely very talented writers and performers who obviously know what they want.
I'd like to see more sketch shows along the line of Mitchell & Webb, Armstrong & Miller. OK, some might say they're very middle-class, but they don't rely on one-trick pony characters and they genuinely explore new comedy territory on occasion.
Probably the best sketch show of recent years was Big Train, especially the first series written by bother Arthur Mathews and Graham Lineham. But even the second series was pretty damn good.
One little tip for budding sketch show producers. Go and look at the writing credits at the end of really great sketch shows, e.g. the early Alas Smith & Jones, The Fast Show, Harry Enfield, Big Train, The Day Today, Brass Eye etc...
See how many very diverse and talented writers (and subsequent performers) contributed to each episode. Sketch shows should employ a large number of quality writers providing a large batch of sketches from which the producers & performers cull a series out of. Not a second of air-time should be wasted in a sketch. There is no place for lazy writing. Assemble a bunch of performers who can act rather than a bunch of stand-ups... Oh, I could go on and on and on... and indeed I have.
