It's Kevin

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.

If you can't picture Kevin Eldon, you'll know his face the moment you see him. He's the Zelig of British comedy, on the fringes (and often in the best bits) of great shows, from Brass Eye and Big Train to Harry & Paul and Hunderby. Now, giving the lie to the idea that comedy is a young man's game, he gets his own show at 52, and it's exactly the mad, absurdist grab-bag his fans would hope for.

If you've never seen Eldon's version of Beatles producer George Martin you're in for a treat, as he imagines how Hitler would have come across with the voice of the plummy, anecdotal Brit: "Me and the boys marched into Austria, bold as brass, and I immediately knew we were onto something big..."

Review: It's Kevin

It's Kevin isn't wacky for the sake of it as there's no doubting the great writing behind each sketch.

Hidden away late in the Sunday-night schedules, this cheerfully silly sketch show from comedy veteran Kevin Eldon is filled with sight gags, odd noises and mad musings of every hue (from the difficulty of finding lost property offices to fly psychology and what butlers get up to on their days off). A delight from start to finish.

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