Fast And Loose
One look at the producer will tell you why. It’s a program with some heritage to live up to. The man behind this is Dan Patterson. That’s a name an awful lot of people probably remember best as being the last thing read out over the credits by folk like Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie during the iconic and often-repeated improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? You can spot his fingerprints (and evident love of a ‘performance area’) in Beeb2 quiz Mock The Week as well, a show Fast And Loose has gleefully borrowed its host from.
Mock The Week team captain Hugh Dennis takes over the rather dusty chair vacated by Clive Anderson back in 1998, and brings us what is essentially a re-heated Whose Line for the generation who probably won’t bother to watch the originals that now loop eternally on obscure cable channels everywhere.
Alright, there are some differences. It’s not like improvisational comedy went away in the years it was off the TV, and the panellists (some familiar faces, some new) are clearly competent in their field. There are now six guests instead of four, some of the games are fresher and most of the musical content has been axed, but otherwise it remains relatively unchanged. The only major alteration is that the audience no longer gets to throw in their suggestions. (I can only assume the creators believe that the days when the audience could be relied upon to yell “Restoration Comedy” with inexplicable regularity and actually know what it meant are now behind us.)
The Horizontal Wall Game
That’s not to infer that Fast And Loose isn’t entertaining, mind you. It really is, and a highlight of episode one for me had to be the guest appearance from David Armand doing one of his brilliantly insane interpretive dance routines. But while I enjoyed the show, it does feel sort of suspiciously like rolling back to the early 90s, just with shinier sets and less terrifying haircuts.
I think there’s a saying isn’t there, about how if you’re old enough to remember a fashion from the first time around, you’re too old to wear it again the second? I kind of feel the same way about this show. I still really like it when surreality degenerates into outright chaos, and some of the guests are comedians I know I already enjoy. I just can’t quite shake the feeling that I should be watching it with the volume low because I’m not supposed to be viewing post-watershed telly on a school night.
Fast And Loose is running for eight 30min episodes, and if you liked Whose Line you’ll probably like this too. I find it vaguely indistinguishable from its predecessor, which really saves me the effort of remembering which channel on my cable package it’s being looped on today.
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Lady T
Lady T is a great lover of British TV, which is helpful as that's mostly what she gets to watch. She strongly believes that tea can't be made using a microwave, that children's programming really was better when she was a kid, and that there's nothing in the world that can't be solved with a liberal application of common sense. She very much enjoys reading but like most of the rest of the world would some day like to write a book herself. If she ever succeeds in doing so there's a pretty good chance she'll never shut up about it. She can be contacted at lady_t_220 @ yahoo.co.uk.
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