Ben Miller (I)

Ben Miller Interview

Ben Miller, one half of comic duo Armstrong and Miller, stars in ITV's eagerly awaited new project Moving Wallpaper / Echo Beach.

OK, I'm confused now. Having checked and then double checked the TV schedules, it appears to be true; Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are on ITV1. Yes, ITV1. They're the people who last year washed us away on a sea of swill with Benidorm and unleashed Liza Tarbuck upon us for Bonkers, possibly the worst yet, conversely, best comedy-drama title of the year. But here we have a pair of interconnected shows with a sprightly idea at the core of their very beings. ITV haven't had that on their comedy roster since Rik Mayall transformed himself into a Thatcher-grovelling B'stard.

Echo Beach on its own is, of course, garbage. A glossy soap-style affair with Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon and Hugo Speer and Susie Amy adds up to less than zero, but in the context of Moving Wallpaper (a smart comedy about the making of Echo Beach), it grows more arms and legs than a sand-obsessed, flesh-friendly slab of small screen narcissism ought to. Little moments murmur into Echo Beach and reflect back onto sequences we have seen in Moving Wallpaper as the fictional writers try to make hay on a Cornwall-based rural soap about love and betrayal. Recently hired producer Jonathan Pope (Ben Miller, suitably inspired after his dire sketch series with old buddy Alexander Armstrong) wants to kick some arse into proceedings by ditching the uglier actors and stodgy scripts and injecting his new baby with sex and scandal. It's fruity and fun and so not ITV.

BBC1's The Armstrong and Miller Show doesn't go in for easy catchphrases - the emphasis is on recurring characters and slightly more sophisticated comedy, like the pair of Second World War pilots speaking in upper class accents but with the vocabulary and attitude of Catherine Tate's petulent schoolgirl Lauren.

The situations and the characters are so familiar and low-key that watching them with the sound down you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd tuned into a slightly dull set of documentaries. But pay attention to the script and you find yourself transported to a different world where everything is inverted. This show has been made with a great deal of pace and visual panache.

The Armstrong and Miller Show has an eclectic mix of characters ranging from Rasta-speaking Second World War RAF pilots, a dentist that loves to tell you where he has previously had his hands while delving deep into a patient's mouth, and not to mention the weekly dregs of society that get interviewed only to reveal they became a teacher - hilarious.

It is hard to create a seamless entertaining comedy sketch show, but Armstrong and Miller for my money have done just that. The huge diversity of characters and the quality of script-writing pours effortlessly through the 42-inch plasma and washes over the reality-fatigued viewer. Pleasure could only really be increased by a glass of Pimms. A great transition to the BBC and a loss for Channel 4.

After my blasting of the woefully shoddy The Omid Djalili Show, it's a totally different story on Friday night, thankfully, with Armstrong and Miller. It's good to see some solidly funny sketch comedy for a change, and this has more hits than misses. The big hit of the series are the spitfire pilots with their clipped street slang lines, and this kind of comedy isn't a million miles away from Mitchell and Webb's equally top material. In fact, Armstrong and Miller could be the reformed older brothers of the more anarchic Mitchell and Webb.

If, like Ant and Dec, you've never quite established which is which, let me clear it up for you - Alexander Armstrong is the one who did the Pimms' ads while Ben Miller was the creepy civil servant in Primeval and starred in that sitcom with Sarah Alexander, The Worst Week of My Life. After some very dubious opening titles involving dodgy dancing, there are a surprising number of funny sketches, many of them rather risque for BBC1, including splendid skewering of those 'readers emails' bits on breakfast news programmes.

When this show started, I thought we'd been transported back ten years - Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller were on the screen together, for a start, but the opening credits also seemed incredibly old-fashioned. Indeed, some would say that the very idea of a sketch show is pretty much passed its sell-by date in any case; that those sublime final Fast Show specials should have marked the genre's end.

But no, Armstrong and Miller are ploughing ahead regardless, and good on 'em. It's always hard to judge a sketch show from its first epsiode, as there'll inevitably be a few sketches which don't appeal, and some characters won't even have been introduced yet. But on the evidence we have so far, I'd give this a tentative thumbs up.

I can't pretend that the laughs were constant throughout this episode, and there were a couple of sketches which you felt you'd seen somewhere before, but when Armstrong and Miller let their imaginations run into darker territory, you could see definite potential for a successful series.

One day, some of these Perrier people will have their own TV series, like Armstrong and Miller. And one day, The Armstrong and Miller Show (C4) will be consistently funny. Armstrong and Miller inhabit that dangerous frontier land of challenging comedy - strong language, heartless jokes, ruthless parodies and media stereotypes - which is actually very agreeable, as it's familiar territory. This is comfort TV; it's what twentysomethings watch instead of Inspector Morse.

It's way beyond a joke

Huge is based upon Simon Godley and Ben Miller's early-1990s play of the same name. This 1993 report discusses a London run of the production.