Still, The News Quiz could be hosted by Noel Edmonds and have Russ Abbot and the cast of Two Pints of Lager on the panel and it'd still be funnier than The Now Show.

_________________
MY COMMENTS ARE FROM THE HORSES MOUTH AND ARE ALL FACTS

I always remember a recording of an old News Quiz when Sandi Toksvig was a contestant and talking about the time she was, for some reason, sent an implement to enable gentlemen to measure what size of condom they needed. It was apparently a plastic thing with different size holes, which she compared to one of those things for measuring pasta. I still treasure the moment when Jeremy Hardy asked her whether the pasta was uncooked or al dente.

QFT.

However, John Finnemore was on it the other week - moderately amusing.

_________________
Si vas a plagiar noticias, no uses un sitio de noticias falsas como fuente.


Last edited by Carlos The Badger on Thu Feb 31, 2021 18:60 am, edited 666 times in total.

I still like The Now Show although I miss Marcus Brigstocke's rants and Mitch Benn is really grating on me, he seems to be struggling to come up with material, inexplicably he now seems to be doing two songs a week, neither of which are funny.

_________________
That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

The Now Show is pretty weak. Too many songs and a bit too pleased with themselves. It has funny moments but I wonder about the ratio of laughs to writers mentioned in the credits.

Mostly though it's just those fucking songs. I never enjoy them and have switched stations to get away from them.

Comedy songs, hard. Topical comedy songs, nearly impossible - don't bother.

I cannot think of anyone working right now who could do a good topical one (and yes I'm thinking of Bailey, Minching, Conchords et al). There are one or two good comedy song writers out there (it's not realy my sort of thing usualy, having said that look up Jay Foreman if you can find his stuf online, and if he can ever be bothered to pick up a guitar again Greg Davies did some good work with Klang - as did Julian Barratt with The Mighty Boosh).

In radio shows like that, the songs are often the weakest parts, but given their length they are often a good way of filling time (something that must be an even bigger problem for The Now Show these days, after around four hundred series).

I'm also right behind Gourami's other post - it's nice to have someone else around to say it, saves you the trouble of doing it yourself all the time.

_________________
"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

I know someone who used to write for Ned Sherrin's Loose Ends, and he said that it was a horrible experience, but pretty much an initiation rite for any aspiring comedy writer. Stage 2 was writing for Smith & Jones.

It would begin with a trip to a BBC rehearsal space in Acton. There you would meet seemingly every aspiring comic in London. This would be at about 6.00am on a Saturday morning, or sometimes even earlier - maybe 7.00pm the night before. You would be given piles of the week's papers and told to crank out material for the upcoming show.

Now, while this might under other circumstances foster a team writing ethos, as seen to such great effect in the US, there was little chance of getting that here. Writers were paid individually by the gags that made it into the script. The easiest way to do this was to churn out obvious but quick to put on paper material - Prescott is fat and so on - before the other guy, who was crafting his brilliant satirical song, had the chance to get in there, and to overwhelm the script editors with material. It was fiercely competitive, and rarely produced anything beyond the obvious. You may see parallels with Mock the Week.

As for the Now Show, what gets me about it is Punt and Dennis's delivery. OK, more to the point, Punt's. While I acknowledge that he is a highly knowledgeable comedy historian, that there were only two members of the Mary Whitehouse Experience funnier than him (Newman and Dennis, obviously), and that in a bad light he looks awfully like Eric Idle, his delivery is terrible. It's like this:

Read out news story.

Pause.

Read the crucial line with added emphasis.

Repeat that line with the added emphasis.

Wait for the audience to laugh.

Say "You see, the funny thing is..." and proceed to explain to the entire audience who have already worked out why the item was funny and worthy of inclusion in a comedy show, exactly why it was funny and worthy of inclusion in a comedy show.

Then he'll get Hugh Dennis on to do one of his three voices - David Cameron, Duke of Edinburgh or Mr Strange. The benefit of being on the radio is that you won't see him do that mad stare into the camera he always does when he does the Mr Strange bit.

_________________
Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

That's it - the humour of The Now Show is 'Prescott is fat', 'Cameron is posh' etc etc. Yeah, we know.

_________________
MY COMMENTS ARE FROM THE HORSES MOUTH AND ARE ALL FACTS

You want comic songs that are good? I give you the king, Mr Philip Pope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdAgO4wxUdw

And whoever did the music on Not The Nine O'clock News

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLgeiRO63mE

And Neil Innes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEfJGp6VLw

Interesting that you should dislike his delivery, as it is very much like the one member of Whitehouse Experience that you feel was worse than him - Baddiel.

David Baddiel also had a very strained, obvious way of telling a joke, and he to was very irritating.

I'm on the e-mail list for Canal Cafe Theatre, which does News Week. It seems to me like a much less pressured way of doing things.

I've not submitted anyhing yet, but to me that's the whole point. Rather than be stuck in a room with people you are straight away in competition for cash with, you can do stuf by yourself at your own pace.

It seems to me, that the best way to handle this type of submission process, is rather than try desperately to come up with something that fits any of the requests they have sent out (which might therefor not be very good), only send a joke about that topic in if you have one already done, which you had the time to think about and do properly, and so will hopefully be pretty good.

They sometimes ask for songs too, and for those I think the same applies.

_________________
"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

Mitch Benn has done SOME worthy stuff, mind :

_________________
I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Well fact fans, the device in question is used for measuring up one's Little John for the appropriate size of condom catheter. There's a variant which is a plastic disc with different sized semi-circular cut-outs around the circumference, which seems to be unofficially known around these parts as a 'Willie Wheel'.