I fear for the beeb sometimes. They cancelled Peter Serafinowicz and Pulling, didn't let Adam Buxtons MeeBox get past a pilot and turned Live At The Apollo to *shudders* Michael Macintyres Comedy Roadshow. It's hard to forget though that in the last 10 years they've given us The Royle Family, The Office, Broken News, The Thick Of It, The League Of Gentlemen, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Gavin & Stacey, Getting On, Mock The Week and continued to supply Have I Got News For You and Buzzcocks.
Reading that you'd rightly think I'm a BBC fan (I am, it still makes some of the finest television in the world) but you might have also noticed only 3 of the shows I mentioned (Gavin & Stacey, Pulling *cancelled*and MeeBox *pilot only*) were BBC 3 productions and while my summary might sound like I like this show it's worth remembering that BBC 3 made about 9 series of 2 pints of lager and let the creators of that monstrosity make another series (the terrible Coming Of Age) as well as the so awful you'll tear your hair out, Grown Ups.
This isn't quite that bad but it's basically Chucklevision with ruder jokes. They leave a lot of mistakes/corpsing in and break the fourth wall (perhaps because they're not massively comfortable with the change of format from stage to television) but it's not cleverly done as it has been in shows like Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. I personally think the jokes they make at the expense of one characters mental disability aren't very sophisticated and there's a lot of hamming it up and shouting punchlines, which hurts the material more than it helps.
It's not a total disaster and I can imagine it would appeal to the sort of people who thought Little Britain and The Mighty Boosh were funny (they're certainly marketing it as though Klang are the new comedy troupe to watch). All that said I found the odd joke funny (If you're having facial spasms I feel bad for you son, I've got 99 problems but a twitch ain't one) but if you're looking for really good British comedy BBC 2, BBC 4 and occasionally Channel 4 are still your best bets.
