BBC1
It must be exciting to be Rob Beckett at the moment. The BBC has recently announced that he is to star in not one but two primetime entertainment shows. And before that he stars in this sitcom pilot, which he also co-wrote with Shaun Pye.
Spencer Jones is certainly having a busy 2017. He has picked up a last-minute.com Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination for his latest Fringe show and has filmed three sitcoms. He was in last week’s Tim Vine pilot, he pitches up in the imminent new series of Upstart Crow and this week he had his own one-off showcase for his clownish talents, Mister Winner.
The latest BBC pilot, starring clownish Edinburgh Fringe favourite Spencer Jones, is a sitcom about a hapless but loveable and well-meaning man who is prone to accidents, complications and landing himself in unusual and often somewhat dangerous situations.
There have been some interesting comments about new comedy White Gold, which started earlier this week. People who didn’t like it pointed to the fact that there was nobody nice in it. Nobody you could actually like. Which is not how English sitcoms are supposed to be. They are supposed to be full of loveable losers.
If you want simple sitcom laughs you can't go far wrong with Hospital People. This new comedy starring Tom Binns in a variety of wigs and outfits doesn’t miss a trick, whether it is daft visual gags, clever verbal gags or just plain stupid innuendo. It’s not groundbreaking and it is about as far as you can get from, to pluck a comedy at random, Inside No 9, but if you’ve had a hard day flopping down in front of this could be just what the senior registrar ordered.
The hugely popular Mrs Brown’s Boys cemented its status as the nation’s favourite sitcom last July, with its live episode airing on a Saturday night reaching over 11 million viewers and winning the Radio Times Most Popular 21st Century Sitcom poll.
In some ways this is the most interesting of the current Landmark Sitcom Season reboots, in some ways it is the least interesting. Original writer of Keeping Up Appearances Roy Clarke has come up with a prequel following the fortunes of the young Hyacinth to show how the future Hyacinth Bucket was shaped.
For this new version of Porridge the original writers, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, are back on board which should be a good sign. The difference is that the original set-up has been updated. Fletch played by Kevin Bishop is now Nigel Norman Fletcher, the grandson on Ronnie Barker’s Norman Stanley Fletcher.
This sitcom season seems to be a veritable mix of approaches. At least one show seems to have been updated (Porridge), at least one seems to be a prequel (Young Hyancinth) and then there is Are You Being Served? which pretty much recreates the original innuendo-laden shopfloor sitcom.
Apparently 40,000 fans applied for the 400 tickets for this live sitcom broadcast. 40,000 people can’t be wrong can they? Well, 17 million voted for Brexit and we all know what a fecking mess that has got us into, as Agnes Brown might say.
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