BBC Three
BBC Three is to return to TV screens. The move, says the BBC, is part of a drive to deliver more value to audiences. The BBC’s Annual Plan 2020/21 published last year, outlined research which confirmed there remains an available audience on broadcast television for BBC Three.
BBC Comedy, BBC Three and BBC Studios have joined forces to support grassroots comedy talent in light of the significant impact Covid-19 has had on the stand-up comedy industry.
BBC Presents: Stand Up For Live Comedy will start filming this summer in six different cities across the UK, with a mission to kickstart live stand-up again, featuring a diverse array of rising comedy talents.
Based on Grace Rouvray’s popular blog, 600 Bottles Of Wine tells the story of Claire (played by Rouvray herself) who is flung back into the dating scene when she breaks up with her long-term boyfriend.
I don’t know if BBC Three needs to work on their SEO or if it is because I’m not fluent in YouTube-ing, but I struggled to find the third episode of Pls Like by googling alone (and even when I typed it into the YouTube search bar it was spat out as one of 3,080,000 results). I’m beginning to understand why the show it called what it is; the quota of ‘likes’ and subscriptions which become the validation or measure through which their return on advertising is gauged. Oh, what a frightening machine it is.
I was chatting to someone on Facebook about sitcoms this morning and they suggested that the episode of Hancock where he sits around on the sofa all day and nothing happens is one of the weirdest comedies he’s seen. Well maybe he should watch this week’s deliciously bleak episode of the bored-youth-in-the-Cotswolds mockumentary This Country, where most of the action, if that's the right word for nothing happening, takes place in the kitchen while Kerry’s turkey dinosaurs and Kurtan's pizza cook.
We’ve all had a friend at school who disappeared suddenly after only a few terms haven’t we? I know I did. And in the second episode of this deliciously well-observed mockumentary following the lives of “marginalised” Cotswold siblings Lee and Kerry Mucklowe Lee decides to track down old school mate Robert Robinson.
Josh Widdicombe recently cropped up in a BBC documentary about sitcoms saying how much he loved the genre. And he clearly adores the classics because the second series of his flatshare sitcom seems to be channelling a number of milestone comedies from the past four decades.
I’m reluctant to review the final episode of Fleabag. I don't want to give anything away. All I should really say is that you should watch it. And if you haven’t watched the first five episodes catch up immediately.
But very briefly this episode finds Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) hitting the emotional, existential buffers. Despite the usual wry asides this is all smudged make-up and sadness. Her love life is in tatters, her friendships are in ruins and her family life is disintegrating before her tear-stained eyes.
It has taken me a while to get round to writing about the fifth episode of Fleabag. I don’t know what the journalistic equivalent of being speechless is but that’s how I felt after watching it. It’s not quite the same as writer’s block, it’s just when you see something that is so visceral and powerful on a gut level as this it is hard to find the right way of expressing your response to it.
Why do some TV comedies work while others fail to hit the mark? Don’t ask me. If I knew I’d have a better job than this. Is it the writing? Is it the casting? Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and starred in C4 houseshare comedy Crashing and now BBC Three’s Fleabag, and while the first one whiffed a bit the latest one is the real deal.
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