Now I can take Johnny Vegas in very small doses - the cheeky but lovable alky who warms the cockles of your 'aat when he spills his can of stella and starts crying for his mam in his croaky Lancashire accent - but it gets old pretty quickly.
So how, I wondered back in 2005, would a man of such limited comedic means be able to pad out an entire 6 episode series of his own 50 minute TV show? Well, the obvious, unsurprising answer is of course...he can't. Morbid curiosity and a mild amusement of Vegas prompted my taking a look, and to be fair, there were one or two surprises - firstly how short it fell of my already low expections, and secondly how Vegas' career managed to survive such public humiliation.
Personally, I managed to survive about 20 minutes of a show that tried far too hard to fill far too much airtime with precious little of anything the slightest bit funny; having little to no interest in that short-lived, so called 'lad/ette' culture that the show falls into, I found the whole spectacle kinda crass and unnecessary - not in a prudish, puritanical way but actually having a reason to be there. 'Pointless', in other words - neither funny, challenging, or in any way interesting - it was basically what you'd expect from Johnny Vegas trying to host his own show for 50 minutes, when as a general rule, I find two or three minutes will more than suffice.
Had I been 10 years younger with a handful of friends and a crate of lager on board, my recollections may well have been kinder, but as it is I found very little to redeem it. The vast majority of the budget (and 'writing') seemingly blown on suspending then Y-lister now nonentity Jodie Marsh, in a cage - which was supposed to be an ongoing joke, that wasn't even funny to begin with...unless I'd missed something?
Smutty, loud, post pub party humour isn't exempt from making me laugh, but it will just as likely embarrass, and in this case I honestly thought the show would have been pulled after the one episode - there was NO WAY it was going to get a series. I fully expected Johnny to take the inevitable cancellation on the chin, lick his wounds, cut his losses, and return to Vic n' Bob as their lovable part-time drunken oaf who cries for his mam when he spills his stella. Anything beyond that surpasses his limitations.
And that's exactly what I assumed to've happened. Never going near the show again I thought everyone else would do likewise...but now all these years later I find 6 full episodes were screened and rated 7 on imdb!?
I suppose the polite thing to say is that comedy is subjective...and I suppose he took his chance and gave it a shot...and I suppose Johnny's still okay in very small doses...but 2/10 it is...and that's being generous...
