James Corden

BBC pulls Horne & Corden gun sketch

The BBC has pulled a sketch from repeats of the first episode of Horne & Corden in which the duo perform a spoof anti-gun crime dance, in the wake of the shooting of 15 children in a German school this week.

Review: Horne & Corden 1x1

It didn't take us long before we noticed that this wasn't a fun show. After all, it started with James Corden running around a Saturday Night Live-esque set in a fit of incredible self-congratulation that left something of a bad taste in the mouth.

Too much of a good thing

This Gavin and Stacey spin-off is long on fat jokes but short on belly laughs.

Review in The Times

Corden and Horne may have won our hearts with subtle performances in Gavin & Stacey, the sitcom on which they met, but subtlety is not their strength here.

Bruce Dessau Review

At times it is so blatantly end-of-the-pier it seems like this kind of retro-humour must surely be being ironic and knowing. There is even a camp war reporter ("It's all kicking off. It's nuts") played by Mathew Horne, who, like Al Murray's current camp Nazi in his ITV1 sketch show is so over the top it is as if alternative comedy never happened.

Their dodgy turn on the Brits served as a warning. Left to their own devices, without the narrative of Gavin & Stacey to keep them anchored, Horne & Corden are - and it hurts me to say this - really not that funny.

There are only so many times you can resort to a wobbly belly for belly laughs and, by the end of episode one of their first sketch show, it felt like you'd been chubby-chased in your own living room.

There's no doubt Mathew Horne and James Corden are engaging characters. And they've definitely got chemistry, even if the homoerotic undertow to their relationship feels a tad exploitative given their hetero status. But the big problem with Horne & Corden is the thinness of the material. It was a good ten minutes in before a genuine rib-tickler, and that was the sight of Corden wobbling down the finishing straight of a relay in Lycra running shorts. Which is a bit like laughing at the fat kid at school.

The playground was where H&C seemed stranded. Like over excited schoolboys, the pair of them couldn't keep their hands out their pants, with nearly every gag involving some kind of cock-and-bull story. At worst offensive (a camp war reporter on the Iraq frontline because, obviously, being gay is in itself so hilarious) to downright dull (Superman and Spider-Man embarrassed while stripping in a locker room), this was a sad case of a show trying way too hard.

Sam Wollaston Review

A sketch show by G&S stars Mathew Horne and James Corden was never really going to be my thing. But I wasn't prepared for quite how awful it was.

It's not good. At all. They've tried to put a twist on the usual sketch show set-up by starting the programme with a piece to camera with a live audience - and a couple of sketches are performed there in the studio too - but this is not nearly enough to save the show. Corden joked on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross last week that Horne is his 'straight man' but in fact, in many of the sketches that is precisely what he's reduced to, while Corden gets to play the big character. This is far from an equal partnership, though it has to be said that the sketch in which Horne was the star - as a camp war correspondent from Leeds - was one of the few to raise a smile.

One other major problem with this show is that the sketches often simply went on for far too long. One of the live sketches saw teachers teaching a class of boys 'cock-drawing'. Now, while the concept is puerile, it is at least an original one (and little boys do seem to love drawing them...) but the punchline came within the first minute, and the rest of sketch was completely unnecessary and just embarrassing.

Tom Sutcliffe Review

One wonders how the first instalment of Horne & Corden would have managed without James Corden's belly, a comedy prop so central to the first episode of their new sketch series that it surely deserved a billing of its own.

Two stars of Gavin and Stacey, Mathew Horne and James Corden, now have a show of their own. Like so many sketch shows, it is a wildly mixed affair. The best of it is the quality and variety of their acting, which is spectacularly accomplished - these guys are very, very good. One sketch in particular, in which Corden plays a seedy, down-at-heel wastrel who embarrasses an old schoolfriend in front of his family, is a masterpiece of loathsome observation. The downside is that much of the material is crude and horribly unfunny. It is no surprise to discover that the series was directed by Kathy Burke, who was never likely to add a lightness of touch. In one sketch, two teachers give a joint lesson to a class on how to draw penises; in another we meet a gay news reporter; elsewhere, Corden pulls up his shirt and rolls his stomach in front of a burger bar as a form of consumer complaint. Nice.