The sketch show is a format that goes in and out of fashion. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be at its coolest. There have been shows on the radio such as Sketchorama, but TV seems to be hooked on either sitcoms or panel shows. The first ever Sketch Off competition attracted plenty of entries, so there are certainly plenty of performers out there willing to give it a try. With, it has to be said, mixed results.
Maybe the genre needs to be defined better. The first act, Jasper Cromwell Jones, was not really a sketch act at all. This “freelance adventurer” is a character created by stand-up Joe Bor. I guess he is eligible because he doesn’t really fit into a straight stand-up category, although I have seen characters in stand-up competitions in the past.
Cromwell Jones certainly had plenty of gags in the bag even if the audience hadn’t quite warmed up enough to appreciate them. He is very much in the posh Tim-Nice-But-Dim camp, with a splash of Gap Yah Hooray Henry, Ben Fogle and Bear Grylls lobbed in for good measure. It’s a rich source of crisp one-liners and his well-delivered “posh-off” with an audience member deserved a bigger laugh.
Double act Sisters started slowly with a sketch about how they got into comedy. It didn’t really have much humour in it but then it turned out to be a post-modern set up for a bigger subsequent gag. Unfortunately it still didn’t get much of a laugh, which meant that they were always struggling to build momentum.
A ten minute slot is hard for a sketch group - too long for one sketch, too short to build up any narrative or theme, and it was hard to get a handle on where Sisters were coming from. Their best routine involved some snappy editing of University Challenge footage, which had a whiff of the Two Ronnnies’ Mastermind sketch about it. Maybe they would have fared better if they had had longer to establish some kind of rapport with the audience.
Cook & Davies had the opposite problem, starting with their best sketch rather than their worst - a job interview skit in which the interviewer and interviewee switched places. They then began to peter out after that. There was nothing wrong with the performances but some of the material was a little forgettable. To be the best you have to be great performers and - unless you can pay for writers – you have to be a great writers too.
The joke about sketch shows is that they are hit and miss and by the end of the first half it was starting to look as if the winners would be the ones with the most hits and the fewest misses. The Jest had a lot going for them - good performances and perhaps best of all they didn’t hang around, so that if one sketch was weak the next was good enough to help you forget it.
The quintet got off to a great start with a dark piece about a chugger finding a way of being able to escape from a life of chugging. A gossipy Maggie Smith appeal on behalf of Dame Judi Dench was a nice quickfire idea that did not outstay its welcome. A doctor sketch about illness being sponsored – Pepsilepsy, etc – was their best moment, while a sexy strip to Yazoo’s Only You was their weakest concept - though it went down very well because the audience member invited onstage to watch it close up seemed to be loving it. The judges (including me) voted them the winner of the £500 first prize.
Review continues here
