David Mitchell
I’m not enough of a Shakespeare scholar to vouch for the accuracy of Ben Elton’s historical sitcom, but as a comedy geek I can at least confirm that it is funnier than his last effort, The Wright Way.
Maybe I was out when the trumpets were blowing but it seemed to me that Would I Lie To You? slipped back onto BBC1 on Friday night for its ninth, yes, ninth, series without much of a fanfare. Which is a shame. This is one of my favourite panel shows. It is devoid of cynicism, packed full of laughs. It's one of the few panel shows clean enough to go out pre-watershed, but it is never, ever boring.
No, he hasn't ditched Robert Webb and formed a new comedy double act with Jeremy Paxman. But David Mitchell will be temporarily teaming up with the former Newsnight anchor to present an all-night feast of comedy and comment on C4's Alternative Election Night on May 7. Other guests include Romesh Ranganathan, Aisling Bea and Richard Osman. Here's the first trailer for the programme.
David Mitchell is to star as William Shakespeare in a pilot recording of a new situation comedy about the life of the nation's best-loved bard before he became famous. It is entitled Upstart Crow and according to a report on Chortle it is being written by Ben Elton.
Earlier this week I was accused of plagiarising a live review that had appeared on another comedy website. I hadn't, of course. It is just that Steve Bennett of Chortle and I have impeccable judgement. I saw on the Chortle homepage that they have predicted their British Comedy Award winners so I thought I'd better predict mine before I read theirs in too much detail.
It has been a busy time for big comedians lately. Not just busy doing gigs and panel shows and plugging their plethora of product, but also busy being taken seriously. Following his guest editorship of the New Statesman and his appearance on Newsnight Russell Brand has now been taken to task by Robert Webb for being more style than content. Webb wrote a stinging response for the New Statesman saying that Brand's anti-voting stance has made him rejoin the Labour Party.
Update 6/11/13: Final part of Ambassadors tonight. This has been an enjoyable, all-too-short, departure for David Mitchell & Robert Webb. When I think of double acts moving into straighter acting roles together I guess the benchmark is Fry & Laurie as the admittedly more comedic Jeeves and Wooster, while then nadir was Hale & Pace in a long forgotten early version of detective drama Dalziel & Pascoe before Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan took over.
Not sure if this new 'play at home via Twitter' show, hosted by David Mitchell, is the first interactive panel game, but even if it is it is still hard to tell it apart from all the other panel games on the box at the moment.
I think it would be pushing it to say that there is a raging feud between Charlie Higson and David Mitchell about sketch shows being elbowed out by panel shows. In fact if they have not already met I'm sure that they would get on like a very polite house on fire. But recently in separate interviews, linked together in a piece in the Independent, they appear to have taken slightly different stances on the state of TV comedy. The debate feels somewhat trumped up by a journalist looking for a spat where there isn't one.
After a hard stressful week isn't it delightful to slip into something nice and funny and not likely to get the Daily Mail huffing and puffing and hot under the collar? I resisted Would I Lie To You? for a while. Maybe it was the Have I Got News For You baggage Angus Deayton brought as first host, maybe it was the show's initial resemblance to a pub-gossip Call My Bluff. But at some point late to the party I decided that I loved this programme and now I'm hooked.
Pages
Zircon - This is a contributing Drupal Theme
Design by
WeebPal.
