Shooting Stars

Shooting Stars: Bad Gags

The bad gag - and the tumbleweed that so often follows it - is an important fixture of Shooting Stars. In the video below you can watch a bad gag exclusive to the web and find out whether next week's guests Martin Freeman and Paddy Considine can do any better (I'd say they're actually worse).

Jack Dee has got what must be the easiest gig in TV at the moment. Turn up, scowl, try not to laugh. Drinks and nibbles in the green room afterwards. Car home. Thanks very much.

Meanwhile, new panelist Angelos Epithemiou is turning out to be quite a hit with his cross-eyed squint at these celebrity shenanigans. "It's all right but it's not my sort of humour," he offers tonight. You might well agree. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's surreal nonsense - like a hallucinogenic Morecambe and Wise - has always been an acquired taste and you either get it or you don't.

What the returning Shooting Stars lacks in novelty, it makes up for in undiminished surrealism. Tonight's guests include Ricky Wilson from the Kaiser Chiefs and Jack Dee ("Your face is like an abandoned walnut. Like a doomed horse"), but it's the enduring madness of the hosts that entertains. Within mere moments, Vic has arrested a jazz pancake and shot it with a clarinet. Even regulars Ulrika Jonsson and drumming baby George Dawes (Matt Lucas) look surprised.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to work out if the return of Vic'n'Bob's Shooting Stars (BBC2) made me smile as much as it did mostly because it was as funny as I'd hoped it would be, if not more so (and a much-needed antidote to the tediously testosterone-fuelled swaggery-smuggery of most TV panel shows), or because it reminded me of 1994, which was a favourite year of mine. No matter, as the contestants (so sweetly and naively) chanted all way back in Big Brother 1, "It's only a game show."

Shooting Stars Review

Time hasn't been kind. There's something a little tragic about Reeves and Mortimer peddling their brand of surreal comedy now they're both 50.

Shooting Stars is back! Show us the scores, George Dawes! Isn't that great news? I think so. As always with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's surreal quiz show (Tuesday, BBC Two), I found about a third of it hilarious, another third perfectly acceptable, and the final third far too weird to comprehend for even a moment. Aside from last year's Christmas Special, the show has been away since 2002. Could it really have been so long? And how would it have aged?

Um, fine. I think. Or maybe it has just aged at the same speed as I have. Vic and Bob have become less like your weirdo neighbours and more like a pair of creepy old uncles, which suits them very well. Bob suddenly seems to bear a startling resemblance to Martin Freeman, although I suppose that might also have been the case last time around, and we just wouldn't have known. Ulrikakaka is back, and Matt Lucas, incredibly, is too. Does anybody know what has happened to Mark Lamarr? Is he OK? They've given us Jack Dee instead ("a sweaty moccasin!" said Vic), which seems perfectly respectable, and also a sort of delivery-man character comic, who might be a regular feature.

In part, I suppose, Shooting Stars was such fun because it was like meeting up with some old friends and hearing them tell all the same old jokes. Will new audiences find them funny, too? Or will they just be baffled and a little scared, like Christine Bleakley was when Vic started rubbing his thighs? Not a clue. Time will tell. I'd quite like to see them hit each other with frying pans in the next episode, though. I've missed that.

Shooting Stars Review

The lazy sense of anticipation might also explain the damp introduction of new regular guest Angelos Epithemiou, a 'burger van owner' who dripped unfunnily all over the show like rancid fat.

Last Night's TV: Shooting Stars

When my mother was in her early twenties, a boyfriend took her to watch a Peter Sellers film. She sat there, sombre and straight-faced, as beside her, and all around her, an entire cinema of men were laughing so hard that they were choking in their 1960s mod collars.

Thirty years on, I spent my undergraduate years being placed in front of Shooting Stars - the must-see new comedy show of the 1990s - suffering from the same affliction. In some communal TV room of a student house boys were laughing so hard that they were dribbling on to their Pixies T-shirts and, occasionally, their transfixion to Vic and Bob and the "Dove from Above" would be broken for a moment to shoot a pitying glance at me, a leaden, lumpen blob who could not even crack a smile at the funniest thing in the universe as it existed in 1995. I think maybe it's genetic.

Little did we know back in 1993 that the bald-headed baby would end up being the most famous person in the room. It's a tribute to Matt Lucas's affection for this surreal platform for Reeves and Mortimer that he is game to play the sideshow. We've had Little Britain since but that hasn't exactly shifted the country's comedic goalposts, so Jack Dee and Ulrika Jonsson are still able to bring misery and sunshine respectively, with relative ease, now being joined by new comic creation Angelos Epithemiou, a burger-van owner with a gelled fringe (played by the once-Perrier-nominated comedian Dan Skinner). The One Show's Christine Bleakley got the trouser-rubbing treatment from Reeves; if he does this for another five years it'll become the equivalent of Brucey's bodybuilder pose. And why not?

Eranu! If the very sound sends giddy shivers down your surrealist spine (an exoskeleton dripping with melting clocks) then the all-old, all-new Shooting Stars would have hit your spot.
If, on the other hand, Eranu! provokes only a baffled shrug, then tuning in to this curiously pointless revival wouldn't have enlightened you as to why it's been exhumed from TV's comedy grave.

It no surprise Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer couldn't let Shooting Stars lie. It was the last hit from the one-time gods of the off-the-wall sketch show and I'll forgive a lot for all the happy times that were inspired by The Man With The Stick.

Add in the fact that Vic had become little more than a support act in the Nancy Sorrell-desperate-for-fame game and Bob was reduced to guest slots on Big Brother's Little Brother, and the chance to reboot Shooting Stars must have seemed like manna from heaven.

But they might as well have screened a repeat because Shooting Stars 2009 was the same as it ever was but not in a good way. It was like watching ageing rock stars who'd once filled stadiums still hacking out the old tunes in a grotty backstreet club. Vic and Bob had turned into their own tribute act but the dodgy stuff they once got away with by the skin of their charm now feels rather creepy.

Back in the day, Vic could carry off the thigh-rubbing perving over female guests but now having him waft his bum crack under the understandably wrinkled nose of Christine Bleakley from The One Show made him look like a candidate for the Sex Offenders Register.

There were laughs but they were drawn from comfy familiarity, not edgy wit. Vic's club singer, riffing out an impromptu chorus of Beyonce's Single Ladies, is still good value.

And Matt Lucas - an unknown in the original but now an unofficial guest star - has a baby-suited ball as scores-on-the-doors George Dawes (offspring of Marjorie?).

But the bad things about Shooting Stars, not least the unforgivable perpetuation of Ulrika-ka-ka Jonsson, made this non-revamp feel as stale as yesterday's droppings from the Dove From Above. They really, really, should have let it lie.