Animal Antics

Tim Brooke-Taylor interview

From the Footlights to The Frost Report and The Goodies, Tim Brooke-Taylor's spent his career turning out madcap comedy. Now he's at it again...

Clip shows can work brilliantly - just ask Harry Hill - but they need a super-sharp script. The home videos have to be good, too. The third instalment of the pet-focused spoof current affairs clip show fails on all counts, with too many cats and not enough good jokes - even Matthew Crosby looks embarrassed, and he's already dressed as Sparky the dog.

Those who sit through cats playing with hairdryers or pawing guitars will be rewarded with the spectacle of two rats balanced on their back feet, staring at each other with tiny human-like hands aloft. There's also a lovebird felling a variety of children's toys. It's not really enough.

BBC One's carnival of cack starts with Animal Antics, a dismal tundra of a show where one of The Goodies introduces decade-old animal clips as part of a zero-budget fake news bulletin alongside a man who has been dressed up as a dog, presumably as part of a cruel and unusual community service order. It is abysmal.

Until the last syllable of recorded time, there will ALWAYS be something funny about watching camcorder footage of people falling off garden trampolines. There's one at the end of this Animal Antics that doesn't involve an animal, and it's a piece of pure visual and hubristic poetry.

Elsewhere in a daft pretend news bulletin presented by "anchor" Tim Brooke-Taylor and Sparky the dog (comedian Matthew Crosby) you can rejoice in a baton-twirling bear, dogs sitting like humans on sofas, a dancing poodle and, best of all, a man being attacked by a very angry and persistent goose. Oh, and there's a lot of film of cats doing silly things.

Harry Hill is the master of the camcorder clip show. No one comes close to his surreal majesty. Even dressing up snippets of animals doing daft things as a pretend news bulletin, with ex-Goodie Tim Brooke-Taylor and a man disguised as a dog as anchormen will never make Animal Antics into the BBC's version of You've Been Framed. That said, if you love an uncomplicated laugh (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?), there will be something here for you, whether it's a baby grizzly bear stuck up a tree, a pug trapped in a toilet, or a squirrel eating a bacon sandwich. And if you like cats doing silly things, prepare to laugh yourself to unconsciousness.