Kevin Eldon

This could be a first for sketch shows: episode four is the strongest yet. Kevin Eldon's ideas would make no sense anywhere else, but accumulated here they are overwhelmingly funny. Tonight, George Martin/Adolf Hitler recalls the band's late period ("Where did it all go wrong? I'm sure you've heard a lot of people say it was when the Japanese became involved"), Christopher Ryan is an Italian arguing with a tank of bolognese and, in a 1980s BBC drama, the unnecessarily good performance of the week is Julia Davis's drained Scouser.

I have now watched three episodes of It's Kevin and I'm still not sure if it's funny. Kevin Eldon's sketch show is certainly odd, with moments of brilliance, but the set-ups are invariably more inspired than the pay-offs, and Eldon's studied air of deadpan detachment walks a fine line between quirky and irritating.

But half an hour in the company of Eldon's imagination is never wasted, plus he's been shrewd enough to surround himself with an impressive array of comic performers, including Julia Davis, Liza Tarbuck and Adam Buxton.

Silly ideas other sketch shows wouldn't consider, written and performed with care and expertise other sketch shows cannot match: that's this series in a nutshell.

Tonight! A time traveller goes back to 1969 to kill Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice before they can finish Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We ask Buzz Aldrin what Neil Armstrong really said when he stepped onto the Moon. Plus, the Amish Sex Pistols.

It's all great, with Kevin Eldon's bold decision to be at the centre of everything giving it an extra bit of authored uniqueness.

What is it with the name Kevin and connections? In the film world it is Kevin Bacon who is separated from all other actors by six degrees or fewer. In the British comedy world it is Kevin Eldon. Though you probably don't know his name, his face is familiar from Big Train, Nighty Night, Fist of Fun, Brass Eye, I'm Alan Partridge, and so on. He is, in other words, part of that Armando Iannucci-Chris Morris-Stewart Lee set; but until now he has always been in the background, performing cameos.

His own TV show It's Kevin (Sunday, BBC Two) seemed fresh, unpredictable, and, more importantly, funny, especially the opening number in which he sings about the show's title. I had a sneak preview of the second episode, because I enjoyed the first so much, and was pleased to see he sings a different variation on this each week. I was also glad to see the return of a sketch from episode one which imagined what "Naughty German Adolf Hitler" would be like if he spoke as plummily as Beatles producer Sir George Martin.

This was in the tradition of surreal juxtaposition favoured by Monty Python. Another sketch, about a man with a strange medical condition called Soundtrackitis (which meant that his every utterance was accompanied by a relevant clip of music), also felt Pythonesque. And the way Eldon linked sketches by addressing the audience directly from a sofa on a white set reminded you of the John Cleese links in And Now For Something Completely Different.

While all this may suggest that, actually, it is almost impossible to be completely different in comedy, I felt Eldon had a good stab at it. Confident and imaginative, the sense of humour reminded me of another unsung comedy stalwart Simon Munnery, and when I saw Munnery popping up in odd sketches it made sense that they would be friends.

The sketches were a bit uneven and felt a bit student fringe-like at times. But I liked Eldon's take-it-or-leave swagger. And some of the throwaway lines such as "Queuing is a great British tradition, like the Proms and dogging" made me laugh out loud.

Radio Times review

"At least it's made by somebody who cares," said up-and-coming 52-year-old sketch comedian Kevin Eldon at the start of his first solo series, just after a giant boxing glove had appeared in shot to punch him in the face. This was the joy of It's Kevin: silly set-ups other sketch shows wouldn't consider, executed with a level of care and expertise other sketch shows can't match.

Eldon has appeared in Brass Eye, I'm Alan Partridge, Fist of Fun, Harry & Paul, Nighty Night and countless other revered British comedies, its creators all knowing that his impeccable timing and oddball menace would lift their projects. Big names like Julia Davis have reciprocated by guesting in It's Kevin, but they're not just doing Eldon a favour, and this isn't just a chance for a technically gifted supporting actor to have a go at being the lead in a bunch of sketches. Eldon boldly put himself centre-screen as the host and creator of a programme that lovingly, caringly turned the sketch show inside-out. His writing is as impressive as his acting.

It began with a song-and-dance number in a bright white studio, with ticker tape, Cockney walkabouts, puppets and a thrash-punk interlude. If it had stopped there it would still have been the comedy of the year so far, but on it went, often staying in the white studio with sketches sidling in and out of Eldon's interactions with a cast of helpers. His maintenance man couldn't find the lost property office. His wardrobe assistant spoke only in screams (taken, I think, from that "goats shout like humans" YouTube video). The perfect sandwich was made by Hosni Mubarak, a curt young man with a massive dagger. A man played by David Cann explained that the best sandwich he ever had was one a found under a train seat. "I don't know what was in it. Orangey, yellow sticky stuff."

There hasn't been a sketch show with ideas this good since Big Train in 1998 - Eldon was in that as well. He reprised his famous impression of George Martin, giving the Beatles producer's voice to Hitler reminiscing about annexing the Sudetenland ("I immediately knew that we were onto something big"). But the biggest laughs were stupid visual jokes, superbly performed. The bit where Eldon failed to replace a microphone back in the stand went on for an extremely long time, but I could have watched it for longer.

The scheduling at 10.30pm on a Sunday, and the lack of on-air promotion and advance marketing, suggest BBC2 thought they had a weird dud on their hands, until scores of comedy pros shouted about It's Kevin on social media, and every broadsheet ran a profile detailing Eldon's impeccable pedigree. Then there was the odd flicker of support from the BBC online, too late: only 430,000 people tuned in according to overnight figures.

Those ratings are on a par with Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle - so it was that another original comedy by a rare talent pouring his heart into his career peak was seen only by the niche audience who were already on side. If people who aren't comedy nerds miss It's Kevin, they have really missed out.

Kevin Eldon has been the Mr Whatsisname of countless knowing comedies down the years (Brass Eye, Smack the Pony, Big Train), so it was nice to see him turning up in It's Kevin, his own smart show. It wouldn't be subtle, he warned us (after the longest song-and-dance-based opening sequence since Family Guy), though the glee that went into covering a woman - a "fly psychologist" - in strawberry mousse, feathers and balloons was more Bob and Vic than Ant and Dec. A lot of the humour arrived in inverted commas, pulling the rug from under itself, sending up comedic tropes, pre-empting the viewer's response. Some of it was just nicely silly. There was a poke at popular science documentaries ("Sandwiches. They're everywhere...") and a brilliant reimagining of Hitler with the voice of Beatles producer George Martin, reminiscing about taking Austria by storm in 1939 ("I immediately knew we were on to something big..."). Characters are Eldon's big strength. I liked his cloth-capped Stanley Dewthorpe, who announced himself as "a fictional man from the north of England" before unleashing a stream of finely honed nonsense that juxtaposed (possibly for the first time on terrestrial television) Colin Cowdrey, Dettol and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. That Kevin Eldon is a crazy guy.

A joyous fresh and imaginative take on the sketch format from one of the nation's finest comic performers. Kevin Eldon's appearances in countless cult comedies have left him with a useful contact book, but the myriad star guests aren't simply doing this up-and-coming 52-year-old a favour in his first solo series: the writing is as maniacally funny as Eldon's acting. The scheduling (late on Sunday) suggests BBC2 don't know what a gem they've got here.

Bill Bailey in a pink jumpsuit can't be all bad

The comedy sketch show has scuppered many a talented performer and, in its more tumbleweed moments, it appeared as though It's Kevin (BBC2) was destined to join the ignoble list of failed efforts. But there was just enough originality in Kevin Eldon's attention-deficit approach to the genre to grant him the benefit of the doubt.

Kevin Eldon, who's been lurking around the edges of the funniest television (Brass Eye, Nighty Night, Alan Partridge, Hunderby) for ages, now gets his own show. At 53! A victory for middle-age in a world obsessed with youth.

It's a sketch show, yes, but it's OK because he pretty much rips up the sketch show book, throws himself and his warped imagination at it, plus a healthy dollop of lunacy. The Führer with the voice of Beatles produce George Martin? Ha!

Comedies are both the easiest and the hardest kind of programmes to review. On the one hand, it's really simple to tell whether it's worked, since there's actually an audible signal to register the fact. As with pornography, success is registered by a bodily response rather than a cerebral one. But, as with pornography, it's intimately a matter of personal taste. You can no more rationalise a third party into laughing than you can argue them into becoming aroused. From the involuntary wheezing noises that persistently interrupted my viewing of It's Kevin, I can be absolutely sure that it's my type of funny. The problem is that anything I write about it is doomed to be an elaborate paraphrase of "I just liked it". All I can hope to do is explain why.

Kevin Eldon himself is the obvious place to start, an enlivening spice in other people's sketch shows and comedies for years now, but here the headline act for the first time. And he can make you giggle just by looking at you, gifted with a face that can twist from bland normality to something gargoylish in an instant. For evidence, see the opening sketch, in which an aggressive drunk staggers down a hospital corridor, abusing the policeman and the nurse who are trying to guide him into a side room. When the camera closes in to look through the door, you see a surgical team ready to go and the same nurse vainly struggling to get the drunk into a surgeon's gown. It's a decent rug-pull, but Eldon's wild clowning gilds it.

Then there's the ingenuity of the structure, a ragbag of sketches and spoofs that pretends to be a free-form mess and is anything but. "Look, cards on the table... it's certainly not subtle or erudite..." said Eldon casually, introducing the format at the beginning. At which point, a giant boxing glove appeared from the side of the screen, whacked him into cartoonish grogginess for a couple of seconds before he snapped back to earnest sincerity "...but at least it's made by somebody who cares." That's a dumb joke and a clever one simultaneously, a trick he pulled off more than once.

Best of all, it keeps you on your toes, jinking from relatively straightforward sketches (including a lovely sequence in which Eldon plays Adolf Hitler as the Beatles' producer George Martin, languidly recalling the day "me and the boys marched into Poland... and I immediately knew we were on to something big") to more surreal self-reference. And it has the funniest and most engaging title sequence I've seen for a long time. And it even had a joke about pornography, when Eldon's secret stash is retrieved from the couch he's sitting on and turns out to consist of a publication called Mildly Flirtatious Ladies. What can I say? It really turned me on.