Little Britain is the Boyzone
As is the way with list television, I stumbled into the 50 Best Sketches last night and got sucked in. Lord knows why, it was an intensely irritating programme. Comedians sitting around, discussing why a sketch is funny and how they made it interspersed with bits of the sketches. Firstly the pool of sketches to choose from were miniscule, hence much repeated Monty Python, League Of Gentlemen etc. Obviously this list was skewed towards the most recent sketches (how the mighty History Today has fallen). But considering how long the sketches were, and how much time they had, WHY DID THEY NOT SHOW THE SKETCHES IN FULL!!! Instead we had little way of judging exactly how funny a sketch is.
As for the Lou and Andy sketch that won, it was – like the League Of Gentlemen and Ralph & Ted sketches – a strange hybrid. The humour relied on repetition, on us knowing the set-up. The comedy is cumulative, which is a companion who had never seen Little Britain was remarkably underwhelmed.