For The Win

The jury's out on whether this bright, noisy sketch show - with skits including Come Dine With Me (featuring Jesus) and a relationship counsellor who talks in street slang - will make it beyond the pilot stage. But the committed performances by its cast (including Rich Fulcher who popped up in The Mighty Boosh) may see sitcom offers come their way. Plus it's a chance to catch newcomer Sam Fletcher - the main man in the bum-bag/third nipple sketch - who is fresh from a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe.

This is so frenetic, furious and fast-paced you'll be panting for breath by the end. Everything hurtles past at insane speed, which is no bad thing for a sketch show, notoriously hard to get right.

It probably says more about me than about For the Win, the latest BBC3 online comedy to be given a TV airing, that I laughed hardest at a fart gag involving two pompous TV film reviewers, but much of it is dizzyingly surreal and cheerfully vulgar. Filthy, even, especially the bit about a woman with a cartoon mouse living where no cartoon mouse should ever go. Fart gags aside, I liked the biblical Come Dine with Me ("there was a bit of an atmosphere with Judas") and the song about an obnoxious City banker.

For most of us, 'For The Win' (generally shortened to 'FTW', to those still abbreviating 'lots of love' as 'LOL') is a mildly annoying linguistic meme, popping up less frequently than it once did back in 2010. Quite why any writer would want to date their work so pointedly, and embarrassingly, by naming their sketch show after an internet tic is one thing. Trying as hard as For The Win does for surreal irreverence is another. The show isn't wholly terrible: there's the germ of a good idea in the Come Dine With Me-cum-Last Supper spoof and the metacritical review of the show within a show is a nice touch. But talking nipples, a man-python and an extended riff on bumbags? It's an unfunny improv class that needs work and while the cast are, as expected, enthusiastic, the results just seem too desperate.

For The Win review

A surreal, anarchic, sketch based comedy that has evolved from seasoned Edinburgh fringers. Comparisons to The Mighty Boosh are inevitable, but BBC Three's new show For The Win is more than good enough to succeed on its own merits.

Fans of the underrated Snuff Box will be delighted at the prospect of For the Win, another pop at the surreal sketch show featuring the excellent and slightly creepy Rich Fulcher. He joins a cast including John Hopkins, Lizzie Daykin and London Hughes with knowingly peculiar material penned by Matt Stronge and Hopkins. There's Embarrassing Bodies on Ice, a talking nipple called Reg and a resurgence of the bumbag, while Lizzie has some relationship issues and so decides to buy herself a python. Some of this works, some doesn't.

The BBC's youth channel is airing a series of comedy pilots that were originally made to be shown online and have clearly tickled the fancy of the channel's commissioners. Written and directed by John Willie Hopkins, this latest, a mix of sketches, songs and characters, is genuinely endearing and entertaining. Rich Fulcher, of Mighty Boosh fame, provides the voiceover.