Daily Express

Gagging for more laughs

- Matt Baylis on last night’s TV

IT’S more or less standard to say that sketch shows are ‘hit and miss’ affairs but controvers­ial newcomer REVOLTING (BBC2) gives a new meaning to the term. It’s possible, watching Shakespear­ean actor Paapa Essiedu do a star turn, to think that you’d stumbled upon a bit of sheer genius.

When not playing Hamlet for the RSC, Essiedu told us, he played one of Britain’s best-loved comedy characters, a loveable clown called Boris.

“An affable, bumbling, kind of cuddly-bear-type figure,” he said, “Like a five-year-old in a grown man’s body.” Intercut with news footage of the real Boris, this was mickey-taking on a fresh level. “We’ve got a lot of stuff planned for my stint as Foreign Secretary... it’s going to be hilarious,” the man in the Boris suit told us with a grin.

Equally off-the-wall was the pair of achingly cool Scandinavi­an designers, who’d transferre­d the space-saving knowhow learnt at Ikea HQ to the farming industry. The resulting ‘squicken’, a chicken bred to be square for the purposes of efficient stacking, duly troubled passers-by at an agricultur­al show, although they might just have been reacting to the comedians’ dreadful ‘foreign’ accents.

Unlike, for example, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, Revolting’s frontmen, Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein are not particular­ly good actors or mimics, and in among the flashes of comic dynamite you sometimes wondered if they are actually that interested in making people laugh.

I’m not one of those viewers who think you can’t make jokes about ISIS or forced marriage (although I might be if I’d had one). I am, however, one of those people who think a joke about any subject can only be called a joke if it’s funny.

I watched the spoof of BBC’s popular show Don’t Tell The Bride, in which an Asian brother made all the arrangemen­ts for his sister’s involuntar­y nuptials, without smiling once beyond the first five seconds. It was one gag, worked to death, worked to the point where, if you weren’t offended by the content, you were offended by how long it dragged on for.

As a whole this show is hit-andmiss on a scale never witnessed before, touches of target-splicing brilliance amid stuff you’d be delighted to avoid.

I’m thinking of writing a book entitled Facts Of Precious Little Interest, and much of the material will come from the TV programmes I’ve watched over the years. The Inside The Factory series on the BBC has contribute­d a lot, from the number of baked beans processed in an hour at the Heinz plant near Wigan, to the number of safety checks performed on a Kit Kat.

Even the most outwardly exciting TV shows can dish up a dazzling quantity of dull factoids, as MARTIN CLUNES: ISLANDS OF AUSTRALIA (ITV) proved last night.

It began in the Tiwi Islands, where, we were told, the indigenous inhabitant­s have a culture quite distinct from Aboriginal groups on the mainland. Pressed to enlighten us further, an inhabitant said they didn’t play the didgeridoo and that when they made their distinctiv­e dot-paintings, they used a cone.

Reeling from such revelation­s we went on to visit Rottnest Island, whose lakes once produced half of all Perth’s table salt.

Tune in next week to see Mr Clunes experienci­ng the world’s third largest ball of eucalyptus gum, and a kangaroo that’s a slightly different shade of brown.

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