Our UK correspondent Ron Bingham updates us on some the comedy happenings from mother country, this issue taking us inside the studios for a first hand account of some the newest television offerings from the BBC…
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been to the taping of two new TV programs. The first was called “That’ll Test ‘em” and is due to be broadcast in April on Channel 4. There was very little information available about this prior to the taping as no episodes have been seen and audience members are only allowed into one episode in the series. The premise of the show was a comedy panel show pitting three teenagers against their parents in general knowledge topics. The host was Jeremy Hardy, who is a seasoned comedy performer primarily on radio shows. The teenagers apparently were on a ‘education camp’ show (That’ll Teach ‘em) that this is a sort of spin-off but I can’t say anymore as I haven’t seen it.
So I was due to arrive at the studio at 6pm, but the tube had serious delays due to an ‘incident’ and I missed the studio on my first walk past. Finally got in and we were seated on rickety little chairs in two groups (oldies v’s youngies). The warmup man was Stephen K Amos, who did a very good job keeping the audience entertained during the breaks in filming. The show itself was fairly entertaining but was not different to most other game shows in its demonstration of the general level of ignorance in both young and old people (nobody had any idea what a patella was, but at least the oldies can spell – even if they can’t text). The studio was in the sub-sub-basement of a hotel near Covent Garden. There was a fair amount of humour between the filming from the host but the show in general is more family entertainment than comedy.
The second taping, a week later, was for a new ‘satirical news quiz’ called _“Mock The Week”_. This started about four weeks ago and has a number of similarities to Have I Got News For You (Good News Week). It is taped on the Wednesday and broadcast that Friday at 10pm on BBC2, with most of the subjects being current news stories. The host is Dara O’Briain and team captains are Hugh Dennis and Rory Bremner.
The teams this week were Gina Yashere (occasionally funny), Frank Boyle (Scottish and evil), Greg Proops (American and even more evil) and Andy Parsons (impish and starred as the devil in a brilliant radio comedy series he wrote). I arrived at the BBC centre at 6 hoping for a bite to eat before the show (doors open at 6.45) to find a huge queue waiting outside. When I got to the door I was given a standby ticket and advised to wait as I would still probably get in (on my own). Did get in and got a seat front row far left. Yay! Got the usual preamble speeches about safety and practice cheers, then the teams were introduced. The first game was called ‘guess the headline’ with the teams improvising what the headline could be from a picture and the first letters of the headline. Some of the answers were very witty and some way too rude for TV. After they had run out of suggestions (was a story about UK Deputy wanting to be PM), we moved on to the second game. This is a wheel which spins and each team member has to improvise a short routine on the subject displayed. Biggest problem in this appeared to be getting the participants to move to the performance area without walking in front of the cameras. After this we had a quick round where Rory Bremner repeats a recent speech (he does impressions) and Hugh Dennis has to translate the speech into what the person really means. Can be excellent some weeks. The next game is make a caption for a picture. Similar to the first game. The last main competition element is making up responses for particular situations. The teams all stand in the ‘performance area’ and take turns trying to top one another for responses to questions like “what don’t you want to hear your pilot say” or “things you aren’t likely to hear in parliament”.
The show wrapped up at 10pm and I got home at 11.30 very hungry! The train was extremely crowded for 11 pm (theatre crowd) and I heard next morning that 10 minutes after I passed through one of the train stations, there were three stabbings. So just another quiet night really. Next show I’m going to is a new TV show based on Chris Addison’s stand-up show Civilization. It will be interesting to see how it translates.