Liza Tarbuck

DVD review: Upstart Crow

You could feel the shockwaves reverberating around the British comedy world for days afterwards: Ben Elton had written a good sitcom.

Upstart Crow, series 1 review

Predictable in places, perhaps, but the ridiculous nature of some of these plot lines is arguably in the same vein as of the bards own greatest comedies.

Preview: Upstart Crow, episode 4, Love is Not Love

I'm not enough of a Shakespeare scholar to vouch for the accuracy of Ben Elton's historical sitcom, but as a comedy geek I can at least confirm that it is funnier than his last effort, The Wright Way.

Upstart Crow: joke's already wearing thin in episode 2

Last week's episode of Upstart Crow (BBC Two), Ben Elton's new ye olde sitcom starring David Mitchell as William Shakespeare, would have worked as a one-off stand-alone special for Comic Relief or similar. The thought of a whole series of the thing is a bit tiring.

Very early on in Upstart Crow, a collaborative Ben Elton-William Shakespeare vehicle for the hopelessly thick and untalented David Mitchell, a member of the studio audience reacted to Liza Tarbuck just saying something in an accent, with her titty-dumplings to the fore with the kind of prolonged loud screeching fit that you or I could only hope to achieve while dousing our genitals in hydrochloric acid. My heart sank. But soon it actually began to get funny, sometimes very. The audience member had obviously been led out by an intern with the promise of a cup of tea and perhaps, actually it's to be hoped, a reassuring whisper of "you're not clever enough for this, dear". By the end, this mashup of Will's artistic frustrations in an England seething with stupidity, and as relevant to today as to 1584, had become a delight, to the extent the audience was anticipating the gags. Of a fiendishly cunning plot to frustrate young love, in which it had become necessary to procure a play-dead potion, Mitchell's brimming "I can't see how it can possibly go wrong" had much of the hubristic glee in seeing it coming of a Mainwaring, a Hancock.

Inevitable parallels - there was much God's bodikins! and gut-porridge stuff - will be drawn with Blackadder, although perhaps someone could tell me why that's in any conceivable way a bad thing. But Mr Elton has (almost) wholly redeemed himself for crimes against David Haig in the relentlessly smile-free elf'n'safety trudge that was 2013's The Wright Way, and it's nice to see he's got his brain back. And I do like Spencer Jones as Kempe, played as Ricky Gervais as David Brent - way too knowingly see-what-I-did-there, but that's how Ben rolls.

We had a new comedy from Ben Elton, a phrase that's likely to strike fear into the hearts of any sitcom fan after the woeful The Wright Way. Thankfully Upstart Crow saw him back at his best although the show seems to have been made up of deleted scenes from Blackadder II. The show focuses on the life of Will Shakespeare (David Mitchell) as he splits his time between his family home in Stratford-Upon-Avon and his digs in London. As this was an opening episode, Elton seems to have focused on a universal subject matter namely the Bard's creation of Romeo and Juliet. In Upstart Crow though Shakespeare has all intention of having his young couple living happily ever after that is until he allows the lovelorn son of Sir Robert Greene (Mark Heap) to stay at his home until he goes to university. Unfortunately Florian (Kieran Hodgson) soon falls for Shakespeare's serving girl Kate (Gemma Whelan) and the Bard is forced to find a way out of a predicament that could cause him serious bother. Although you can see some of the gags coming a mile off, especially what will ultimately happen to Florian, Elton perfectly paces the show so that the gags never overpower the story. There's also a great running gag about the line 'Where For Art Thou' Romeo that is actually very clever and Elton also satirises the sexual politics of the time to great effect. Of the cast I found that Mitchell really anchored the action well as Shakespeare and his tortured academic persona really suited that of the Bard. In supporting roles I found Liza Tarbuck and Harry Enfield gave memorable turns as Shakespeare's wife and father respectively. Similarly amusing was the performance given by Dominic Coleman as the go-to performer of female parts who was hurt that he couldn't play the thirteen-year-old Juliet. Although there is the argument that a lot of Upstart Crow is just recycled Blackadder gags that's not exactly a bad thing as Elton's historical comedy still remains one of the best British sitcoms of all time. Whilst I don't think Upstart Crow will ever match Blackadder in terms of quality I still found it to be a consistently funny sitcom and a return to form for Ben Elton who I'd almost written off after the debacle that was The Wright Way.

Loving Ben Elton's new Shakespeare sitcom

There's no way of saying this without shredding the last vestiges of my critical credibility, but this new Ben Elton comedy series, Upstart Crow (BBC2, Mondays), about William Shakespeare: I'm loving it and think it's really, really funny.

Ben Elton finds the comedy in Shakespeare's history

With David Mitchell playing the Bard as a flowery show-off, there's lots to enjoy in this knockabout sitcom with Liza Tarbuck.

Upstart Crow review

Gadzooks! After some high-profile flops in both hemispheres, Ben Elton has rediscovered his mojo... and all it took was a return trip to Elizabethan England.