I enjoyed the previous show ( on bestsellers ) immensely, and looked forward to this. Stewart Lee's topic was 'Television'. Great, I thought, he should have plenty of material for jokes here. He began by repeating Lord Reith's famous mantra that the purpose of television should be to 'educate, entertain & inform', before pointing out that his Lordship was a Nazi-supporting racist. Even so, he said, he never put out quite anything as awful as 'Andrew Lloyd Webber's Any Dream Will Do'. We then saw a sketch visualising what a similar show for Beckett's 'Waiting For Godot' might look like.
Lee wondered which channel to hate most. He settled on E4 ( my choice would be I.T.V.-1 ). We got a sequence in which a couple watching Channel 4 got drenched in raw sewage. Unfortunately, it was repeated again and again, labouring the point. He correctly observed that Channel 4 began life as a quality channel, before sinking into a morass of reality dross and tabloid-style 'documentaries'.
Ant & Dec came in for a well-deserved kicking. So far so good.
Unfortunately things then went badly wrong. Lee blasted the viewers who chose Del Boy falling through the bar in 'Only Fools & Horses' in a poll to find Britain's funniest comedy moment. As a fan of that show, I will be the first to admit it that it is a very overrated clip, like something out of one of David Jason's earlier shows 'The Top Secret Life Of Edgar Briggs'. I laughed not at Del Boy's actual fall, but when he stood up and tried to regain his composure. Trigger, incidentally, did not make a face, as was stated, but was expressionless as usual. No-one pays any attention to such polls anyway ( they are usually forgotten very quickly ), so I was a little bemused as to why Lee got so upset over this one. He then proceeded to re-enact the scene, and lay on the floor droning on about how funny it was. Painful. Had I been present, I would have yelled: "Get on with it, mate!".
He barely mentioned 'Big Brother' so I came away feeling a good opportunity had been squandered. Still, he had some good jokes and made one or two interesting observations about the state of television today.
Lee wondered which channel to hate most. He settled on E4 ( my choice would be I.T.V.-1 ). We got a sequence in which a couple watching Channel 4 got drenched in raw sewage. Unfortunately, it was repeated again and again, labouring the point. He correctly observed that Channel 4 began life as a quality channel, before sinking into a morass of reality dross and tabloid-style 'documentaries'.
Ant & Dec came in for a well-deserved kicking. So far so good.
Unfortunately things then went badly wrong. Lee blasted the viewers who chose Del Boy falling through the bar in 'Only Fools & Horses' in a poll to find Britain's funniest comedy moment. As a fan of that show, I will be the first to admit it that it is a very overrated clip, like something out of one of David Jason's earlier shows 'The Top Secret Life Of Edgar Briggs'. I laughed not at Del Boy's actual fall, but when he stood up and tried to regain his composure. Trigger, incidentally, did not make a face, as was stated, but was expressionless as usual. No-one pays any attention to such polls anyway ( they are usually forgotten very quickly ), so I was a little bemused as to why Lee got so upset over this one. He then proceeded to re-enact the scene, and lay on the floor droning on about how funny it was. Painful. Had I been present, I would have yelled: "Get on with it, mate!".
He barely mentioned 'Big Brother' so I came away feeling a good opportunity had been squandered. Still, he had some good jokes and made one or two interesting observations about the state of television today.