Bob Mortimer

TV review: Original comedy shorts (BBC iPlayer)

BBC Comedy has uploaded six Original Comedy Shorts on to iPlayer, possibly to convince disgruntled viewers that the internet service can provide a viable alternative to BBC Three as a showcase for new, innovative and experimental work. Having said that, the writers and performers involved are all solidly old guard, with Bob Mortimer contributing to half the series.

House of Fools: Bob Mortimer reveals series 2 details

Filming for series two of House of Fools will begin in October, star Bob Mortimer has confirmed.

House of Fools could return

Bob Mortimer says rumours that House of Fools has been axed are premature.

The gloriously silly world of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer draws to a close with Reece Shearsmith joining the gang as poltergeist Martin for a ghostbusting end-of-series romp. There's a chimp up for grabs in a ghost photo competition and Vic's determined to bag the primate but Bob's not keen, so Beef pitches in with his Sword of Draxos - which looks a lot like a clarinet - and Julie whips her torch out. Let's hope there's more to come of this delightful delirium.

The great skill of Outnumbered is to keep its humour just the right side of believable. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's House of Fools travels the wrong side, but not as far as you might think. Unbridled absurdity soon becomes tiresome - Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy being a case in point - which is why House of Fools is careful to establish some sort of norm from which it can then deviate.

The starting point is that most traditional of sitcom set-ups: the flat share. Bob is the owner of the property, Vic his infuriating tenant. A parade of comic grotesques pop in uninvited and unannounced, accompanied by some wilfully cheap animations and rubbish props, adding further mayhem to whatever spurious plotline is driving that week's episode.

This week, the flat played host to a pop-up restaurant intended to impress a probation officer, who was subsequently served a coconut-topped pizza made of grout.

I watched it in a state of bemused delight, punctuated by the occasional guffaw, but then I've always been a Vic and Bob fan. Non-fans, I suspect, won't get past the bemused stage.

If ever there was evidence that you should quit while you're not as ahead as you once were, House of Fools provides it by the bucketload. The inexorable decline of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer was pretty apparent during their recent online-only sketch affair, for which the description of tepid would have constituted a rave review. And now they're back with a sitcom that almost defiles the memory of their greatest hits (Shooting Stars and Catterick for two) and drags down the normally excellent Matt Berry with them.

It's full of the standard Vic 'n' Bob nonsense, but time has simply not been kind to their brand of non-sequitur surrealism, and you can't help but long for the days of the dove from above and Les Facts. House of Fools is oovavoo indeed.

Everyone knows what they're getting with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, whose new comedy House of Fools - an absurdist spoof of 70s sitcoms played to a fashionably live audience - kicked off on BBC2. Would Bob get the peace and quiet he needed to invite his date round to watch Conan the Barbarian on TV? Or would Vic get stuck in a hole drilled through the wall to next door while their booming-voiced friend Beef (crazy Matt Berry in a role familiar to that seen in his recent Toast of London) defecated in a cereal box? Amid the chaos and rude slapstick there was much pleasing drollness, not least Bob's cri de coeur at Vic's promise to change his ways: "You can't change, you're fully realised."

The front room setting for almost all the action was the messiest, most fire hazard-ish, most tinned-pineapples-next-to-gas-masks collection of junk since Steptoe And Son. Even the set-up - one of the occupants trying to break out of this foosty male world to meet members of the opposite sex, only to be thwarted by his co-habitee - reminded me of at least half the episodes of Albert/Harold malarkey in my treasured boxset. This was House Of Fools, the return of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, welcome any time but especially last week.

It's Bob's house, and Vic's his lodger, which strictly speaking makes them the Hugh And I of right now. I imagine that in every instalment Bob will try to evict Vic, along with his gubbins, and fail. "General fannying about and whimbrelling," Bob will mutter. Whimbrelling? As I write, there are a mere seven mentions of the word in the whole of cyberspace, with five claiming Reeves and Mortimer have added a brand new word to the language. Not quite true: the other two mentions state that whimbrelling is the high-pitched call of the whimbrel, the wading bird. Then Vic will promise to mend his slovenly ways, only for Bob to sigh: "You can't change; you're fully realised." A running gag, then, or lying-down one. But that's all right: every sitcom needs one. And the tremendous advantage House Of Fools has over many is that everyone who wanders into the front room must sing a song of introduction.

The other fools include Bob's Norwegian son, randy cucumber-wielding Julie who lives next door, an ex-con called Bosh, and Beef played by Matt Berry, hot from Toast Of London, a ludicrous lothario in a cravat. "I travel this land removing my pants while making love to African ladies," warbled Beef.

House Of Fools is what in comedy used to be called surreal, before the word got appropriated by sportsmen at the London Olympics to describe the sensation of winning. Vic and Bob have just reclaimed it, and a good thing too.

Who doesn't need a good wimbrel around the madcap edges of life every now and again? I didn't know I'd forgotten how good Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer could be until House Of Fools came up and slapped me round the kippers with its sheer intoxicating daftness.

The best thing is that, while middle-aged men pratting about like students and cracking gags involving body parts could easily come across as tragic, it just seems appropriately Vic and Bob, like the past 20 years never happened. Just when I was about to send my pointy stick off for recycling, Reeves and Mortimer got good again.

Well, they've never actually been bad, but House Of Fools revealed how they footled around with quiz shows for far too long. I know it's a minority view but I was glad they axed Shooting Stars, it was a show rapidly disappearing down its own plughole.

Sticking with aquatic imagery, you could take a bubble bath in Vic and Bob's luxuriant language, a surreal Jacuzzi of absurdity, filth, poetry and celebrity invocations, often in the same sentence. That the name Sandi Toksvig played a pivotal plot role in episode one gives you the drift.

Oh, yes, plot. For what it's worth, it's poor old Bob being beset by clueless chumps and the odd offspring who clutter up his house and his love life. Mortimer is the perfect fall guy, forever fiddling with his maverick toupee while Reeves gets wedged between walls and has his bits tortured. Not forgetting Matt (Toast) Berry dressed as a regency fop and rolling fol-de-rols round his tongue.

House Of Fools revels in references to forensic pets and psychic cutlery, and comes with bizarrely erotic animated sequences. In one, Vic demonstrated an unusual way of egesting a television.

And there are questions you won't hear anywhere else: 'Why is it always you that suffers from sausage drift?' Yes, they're back.