There has been a fantastic surge of strong female comedy in the last few years. Most recently we've had Liz Kingsman bossing it with a live show that has had five stars across the board and must surely be heading to our screens in some form. Then were was Britney, the duo who turned a show about having a brain tumour into a hilariously surreal BBC one-off, with more episodes surely to come.
And now, on the night that BBC Three becomes a proper channel again, Lazy Susan – Celeste Dring and Freya Parker – get their own show after acclaim in Edinburgh in 2018 and a one-off Comedy Short back in 2020.
Right, I've got to the third paragraph so I think I'm allowed to mention Fleabag now. A lot fo female comedy currently tends to get lumped in with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but beyond the fact that Dring and Parker are, like Waller-Bridge, women, and make jokes about what it is like to be a woman, I can't really see much of a connection.
In the first episode of their four-part run their lineage feels as if it tracks back much closer to C4's Smack The Pony, the first female sketch show that gave women the chance to be as daft and stupid as men. There is one quickfire sketch in particular about a girlfriend being particularly keen on her boyfriend that you could totally imagine Smack's Sally Phillips doing.
Which is not to say that Lazy Susan are not original. I loved their Megan and Michaela, two needy, narcissistic friends on the way to a baby shower and horrified by a whatsapp message who "don't want any drama". And there's a very memorable dinner party sketch - it might look like a standard sketch format but it goes off in a direction you'd never be able to predict.
There's also an excellent supporting cast including James Acaster, Lou Sanders, Kiell Smith- Bynoe, Jason Forbes, Catherine Bohart, John Kearns, Evelyn Mok, Luke McQueen, Sunil Patel, Shivani Thussu, Ellie Kendrick, Rajiv Karia, Anna Leong Brophy, Laura White, and Phil Dunning.
Elsewhere their banter merchant breakfast DJs put a very post-millennial spin on Smashie and Nicey and their cannily self-referential "Sketch Hotline" routine imagines what it would be like of people complained about comedy shows directly face-to-face or phone-to-phone rather than via social media. Don't worry, there are no complaints from this viewer. Well, only one – at 15 minutes this is way too short.
Lazy Susan, Tuesdays, 10.15pm from February 1, BBC Three.
