Fool Britannia

Dom Joly: Don't do a TV prank on a member of the mafia

Joly tells RadioTimes.com that he was forced into hiding after trying to humliate someone who turned out to be a memebr of the Cosa Nostra.

Dom Joly: I nearly pranked David Cameron

ITV prankster Dom Joly tells RadioTimes.com that he nearly managed to trick the Prime Minister with his ASBO vicar character from Fool Britannia.

Dom Joly talks about Series 2

Dom Joly says he will also be playing a six-year-old boy in the new series, but admitted the boy would be a "very large one".

Dom Joly: Hidden camera scares

When I turned up on set for my new ITV1 hidden camera series Fool Britannia, I thought someone was playing a joke on me. There were 25 crew waiting to get started, compared to the five of us who made Trigger Happy TV back in 2000. How can you secretly film people with 25 crew hanging about, I thought?

Interview: Dom Joly

With a new prime-time TV show and a book about his quest to find the world's legendary monsters, which included a visit to Loch Ness, there's just no hiding the talents of Dom Joly.

Dom Joly interview

Comic Dom Joly, 44, is reprising the format of his hidden-camera show Trigger Happy TV with Fool Britannia. Here he talks to Metro about how it's different to his previous shows, how he hunted the Ogopogo, Canada's Loch Ness Monster, and why he doesn't like Twitter.

So, last week the BBC broadcast The Revolution Will Be Televised and Channel 4 went with I'm Spazticus. Now ITV has hit back with its own hidden camera show, and brought in the genre's most famous name: Dom Joly.

However, Fool Britannia is a much tamer programme. It's being broadcast in a pre-watershed slot, for starters, in another attempt to make-up for the shortfall caused by the end of TV Burp. While it's a nice idea to try and make a more family-friendly prank show, the show appears to be suffering a bit in its slot.

You can tell that Fool Britannia goes out after You've Been Framed - and they share two key traits. A voice over, which for a prank show doesn't really work, and a laughter track. To make it worse, I happen to know that this is canned laughter. Genuine canned laughter, in this day and age! Shocking.

Admittedly, there are some genuine laughs to be gotten out of the show. My personal favourite was Joly's health and safety officer character Ian Yard trying to prevent coffee from being too hot by using a mini electric fan. It has some potential, but it needs to cast aside some of the more troublesome features of the programme.

Review: Doesn't compare favourably to Trigger Happy TV

Fool Britannia was broad, crass and very ITV. Has Dom Joly lost his funny bone?

Fool Britannia Review: A Joly Good Show? I Think Not...

The jokes were simple and immature in the worst sense, and I do wonder who would laugh at Dom Joly parking a New York City billboard in front of a man on a bench at Land's End.