UK Viewing – Summer of Discontent

September 12, 2011 Reviews, TV, Watching 0

It would not be entirely inaccurate to say that the summer was somewhat devoid of anything much worth watching this year. In the hiatus between halves of this season’s Doctor Who the pickings have been pretty slim. For my money, the much-publicised Torchwood: Miracle Day was a tedious, overblown shadow of its former glory, and the lack of options elsewhere have left my TV switched off for what feels like almost months on end.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Autumn is creeping upon us at last and with it a fresh slew of panel show stalwarts. This week saw the return of of three of them; Mock The Week, Would I Lie To You? and, of course, QI.

Mock The Week brings its usual dose of topical satire and stand-up back to BBC2, though admittedly these days it’s not quite so much about the news as it is the bickering and one-liners. The enormously entertaining Dara O Briain takes up his position as general chairman of the chaos, while panel regulars Hugh Dennis and Andy Parsons are joined this time by Chris Addison in Frankie Boyle’s previously vacated spot.

It is as ever reliable for a half-hour of slightly inappropriate comedy and, depending on who the guests are, one or two impossibly surreal flights of fancy. The quality varies by week but when it’s good it can be pretty spectacular, and repeats stand up surprisingly well even long after the topical events have been forgotten about. If you ever get the chance, in fact, track down one of the episodes where Adam Hills takes off his prosthetic foot. It happens more often than you’d think.

Funnier this week, though, was BBC1’s improvisational fib-telling quiz Would I Lie To You? It’s an odd little show, hosted by Rob Brydon, with two opposing teams headed by David Mitchell and Lee Mack. Joined by four guests each week, the panellists are presented with a card that contains an unusual or unlikely fact about themselves which they then have to explain away. The other team then attempts to work out if the contents of the card are a truth or a lie.

It’s a deceptively simple premise and sometimes the facts are so incredibly bizarre that they’re fairly delicious on their own. But at heart it matters very little because the veracity of the story is usually pretty obvious. What makes it so good are the frequently insane attempts at justification.

It’s a show that lives or dies on the ability of its guests to think fast and bluff convincingly, but when it’s really on a roll the best part is watching professional comedians corpse, repeatedly, over incredibly stupid things.

Rob Brydon keeps it all rolling along at a good speed, interjecting a certain amount of cynicism to the proceedings, and you can almost always rely on David Mitchell to have a really good angry rant at some point in the show. I enjoy it a lot. Starting its fifth season now the first episode at least feels like it’s really hit its stride. With another seven episodes to go I hope it can maintain the pace.

Lastly of course, there’s QI.

Since starting these reviews, I’ve had a number of people ask me why I hadn’t covered QI, and I must finally admit there was a very good reason for that. It’s because when I began writing for TDF, QI was going through a phase of being really quite toothlessly dull. The idea of reviewing it at that point rather pained me if I’m honest. Even though it’s a show I absolutely adore (and a draw for all kinds of people you don’t expect to see on comedy panel shows, like Daniel Radcliffe) I didn’t honestly want to review it when the current episodes weren’t representative of how good it can actually be.

Moved off its late-night BBC2 slot and onto primetime BBC1, the different broadcasting regulations it was required to adhere to rather neutered its freedom to be risqué. The delight of QI (a trivia quiz where you don’t have to be right to win points, you just have to be ‘quite interesting’) was that it never shied away from its own delight in being rather subversively naughty. Restored now to its spiritual home on BBC2, this first episode of the tenth series feels much more like a return to form.

Stephen Fry and Alan Davies resume their posts (as quiz-master and comedy-dunce, respectively) and you can expect to see a number of the usual suspects back again in the coming weeks. In fact if you can catch the series trailer you’ll no doubt be both thrilled and bemused by the sight of Jo Brand trying to dance the Robot with a Honda ASIMO.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the QI XL extended repeats and, this weekend, a special Making Of QI look behind the scenes to celebrate the show’s tenth anniversary. All good and worth tuning in for.

In all then, not a bad start to the autumn schedules. Though quite honestly it’s nice to be able to stop watching repeats on cable. Summer really does feel like it was the most endless mire of boredom, and with the promise of colder weather just around the corner we might finally get something worth watching.

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