Comedy news: Such Small Portions's blog

There have been rather a lot of UK exports to America in comedy terms this year. Here's a round up of the casting decisions so far.

WHITE VAN MAN/WHITE TRUCK DUDE

Who starred in the UK

Will Mellor, Joel Fry, Clive Mantle, Georgina Moffat

Who's lined up for America

Kyle Bornheimer

We've not been particularly quiet about our deep love for White Van Man and Bornheimer is a fairly good fit, having already successfully led the cast of the US remake of The Worst Week Of My Life. Still, slightly odd to see the lead character so much older in this NBC version. And The Gays of America are going to be disappointed, given that he's not, well, Will Mellor. 

The well-written UK version was penned by Adrian Poynton, with the US pilot being penned by Bobby Bowman, a former My Name Is Earl staffer. Mellor claimed in a recent interview that the working title is White Truck Dude, which wouldn't exactly be a great sign for its prospects.

REMAKE IDEA: White Van Man means nothing in America and the show will need retitling. So why not go for White van Man, about a Dutch racialist? Just a thought. 

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER

Who starred in the UK

Simon Bird, Tom Rosenthal, Paul Ritter, Tamsin Grieg

Who's lined up for America

Allison Janney, Tony Shalhoub, Aya Cash, Kevin Bigley, Gil Ozeri

Only two things to really know here: the mum is CJ out of the West Wing and the dad is Monk. If you've ever seen Juno or Drop Dead Gorgeous or Monk, you'll know how amazing set of comedy casting this is. The kids are fairly new on us, although this Ozeri character appears to be an 'internet sort'.

Wise words from Tom Rosenthal on the Twitters about the casting: "USA Jonny Goodman is absolutely stacked. Makes sense. #hench" 

Ken Kwapis and Greg Daniels, who are The American Office veterans, are putting this one together. Internet rumours say that HAPPARENTLY the US version is near enough a word-for-word remake of the British one, so make of that what you will.

(AND) ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES

Who starred in the UK

David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Roger Lloyd-Pack

Who's lined up for America

John Leguizamo

Leguizamo is one of those actors whose diverse career means different things to different people. I say ER's Dr Victor Clemente; you say Silly Mail Bird in Dora the Explorer. He has the comedy chops, having already toured his one-man show Ghetto Klown, but for UK audiences there's a lot at stake here. ABC are the most competent US network at comedy so that works in the show's favour.

SUBURBAN SHOOTOUT

Who starred in the UK

Anna Chancellor, Felicity Montagu, Amelia Bullmore

Who starred in America last time they tried a pilot (HBO)

Judy Greer

Who's starring in America this time round (ABC)

Unknown

No news on this yet. If it was Judy Greer again then that would really be quite good actually, she seems a good fit for the skittish steel that fits the concept.

RENTAGHOST

Who starred in the UK

Audrey out of Coronation Street, some other people

Who's starring in America

Ben Stiller in a film version

Poor Russell Brand had been attached to the Rentaghost remake but was reportedly dropped after the box office failure of films like Arthur. Now it's been handed to Ben Stiller, and given how he's turned Night at the Museum into a box office monster with a similar Array Of Wacky Supernatural Characters idea, we can probably expect more of the same here.

TIME TRUMPET

Who starred in the UK

Stewart Lee, Richard Ayoade, Matthew Holness, Adam Buxton

Who's starring in America

Unknown

We don't know yet – sorry about that – but it was a pretty stellar UK line-up that's going to be difficult to match. HAVING SAID THAT Time Trumpet was put together during that mid-noughties era when the BBC's CGI always looked a bit dusty and blurry, so that one might get blown out the water. What's Walmart declaring war on Venezuela going to be like?

Dear Those People Thinking About Putting Some Comedy On Radio 1,

We’ve been thinking rather a lot about that report a couple of months ago that said you might start airing some new comedy for the first time since 1846. This is partly because BBC Three’s efforts at renewing its comedy have so far been rather underwhelming, and someone at the Beeb should be doing some youth comedy in the post-Switch era. (Russell Kane is a great comedian, but he is not the FUTURE YOUTHFUL FACE of comedy.) It’s also partly because it’s February and we don’t have much else to think about.

ANYWAY, this must feel like a bit of a brave new world after this much time, but with the right format (ie, edit the zinging tits off it and make sure it’s available on podcast when it’s inevitably scheduled at 2am on a Wednesday night), there are many a potential winner on offer.

• New panel shows have broadly stagnated into two very by-the-numbers formats: Radio 4’s middle class lurlz, or Dave-style abrasive filler. But guess what? We saw a truly, truly tremendous game show last night on PUNS, called Punt. It was a one-off at the Vault Festival so you missed it, sorry about that, but it made WORD PLAY funny, thanks to its pacing, utter lack of Brandreth-esque pomposity, and willingness to remix Twitter-esque audience features without sounding like your dad using the word ‘LOL’ in a text. Plus, it was very young: Thom Tuck and Humphrey Ker were the elderly comedy statesmen, and added together they are still younger than Chris Moyles (probably). On paper, it was the most Radio 4 thing alive, but it had so much energy, excitement and quotable LOLZ that it could actually fit very well for Radio 1. Why bother reinventing the comedy wheel? The wheel is there. It just needs tarting up with tinsel and Christmas lights, and with a ban of anyone over 35 ever appearing on it. Seriously, this one is easy: just commission this.

• ALTERNATIVELY, we might have banged on 86 times about the dearth of decent satire in Britain – well, pretty much everywhere apart from sometimes in Australia, REALLY – but guess what? We’re going to bang on about it again. Please make some new satire. Now there’s a fundamental problem, in that we can’t think of any young comedians to competently get stuck in on this. Josie Long is the closest there is to a comedy rep for the angry youth and even before she joined the station, she was a tad too ‘6 Music’. Um…Joe Lycett, maybe, if you wanted to keep it light-hearted and just do a sort of Dirty Digest for the radio? Consider this idea a work in progress but we have mentioned it because like panel shows, it’s easy to write off satire as being suffocatingly smug and middle class, just because that’s what we’ve all got used to. It doesn’t have to be, it’s just going to take a bit of reinvention (aforementioned tinsel innit).

• Actually whichever of those last two you do, Matt Edmondson is very funny and already on your DJ roster to make sure the new show isn’t too horrifyingly new for the audience. Did you see the F Factor online in 2010? Zip, zing, etc. Perfect.

• Also on the satire one, NO PUBLIC INTERACTION please. It’s arguable whether we needed one Newsjack, let alone two.

• We brought up the flourishing of musical comedy in that thing we wrote about what’s going wrong with Buzzcocks, but why not beat TV to the punch and do something about it? Scott Mills very occasionally dips his toes in the musical comedy waters, which is great, but there’s so much more you could do. If there’s one thing musical comedy could use, it’s some sharp editing to keep things moving when it gets flabby (as it often seems to do), and Radio 1 are rather good at that. Throw in some nifty stings and aggressive sifting of content and there’s more than enough talent to do something.

• You might think the ideas so far are a bit ‘6 Music’, which won't fit with your current focus on getting a younger audience. There’s a strong temptation to put Daniel Sloss and Matt Richardson on air for the sole reason that they are too young to hire a rental car on the continent. They are fine young comedians, but if you put talented new, um, talent on air too soon, it can go horribly wrong. (We were going to put a YouTube clip of Jack Whitehall and Holly Walsh on the woeful TNT here to illustrate our point but it was so awful we can’t even find one.) No-one will be offended if you put a 30-year-old on air, really.

• We can’t write this article without mentioning former Radio 1 comedies Blue Jam and Fist of Fun. Now, we can’t think of any outright comic geniuses-in-waiting who could do full-blown series, but what both shows did well was cobble together lots of fractured bits and pieces for late-night radio. So why not raid the character and sketch comedy cupboard? There’s Kieran and the Joes and Idiots of Ants. There’s Cariad Lloyd. Late Night Gimp Fight and Pappy’s could bring the filth. If you have to play the youth card hard, there’s always Sheeps. Maybe even do a showcase (of the zippy sort, not the laconic, idling-on-a-microphone-stand BBC Three showcase sort) and throw in some of the aforementioned musical stars – it’s been so long since you’ve done something that it might help spread the burden of being the first new comedy on the station a bit.

• On a loosely related note, young Stewart Lee: totally would.

ANYWAY, Dear Person We’re Writing This Letter To, it’s a fairly safe bet that Radio 1 and comedy are so unlinked in people’s minds that not a single person mentioned here would have even considered it a possibility. But that can be a good thing. You’ve got a blank canvas and the market pretty much to yourself.

(Just for the love of all things good on the radio, please don’t do what we think you’re going to do: retooling the review show to be fronted with Greg James and some Young Comedian panelists and think you’ve done your job.)

Kind regards and inappropriate hugs, Such Small Portions

When 10 O'Clock limped to the end of its first run we wrote a piece on where it needed to sort itself out. Two episodes in to the second season seems a good time to perform a stock check on how things are going. (One episode would have been the obvious point but we were on holiday. SORRY.)

• The first obvious thing is how there really aren't many changes. Twenty minutes have been lopped off; Brooker is still slowly morphing into a crude charade of himself with only an occasional flash of his former brilliance; Mitchell is still talking rampant sense, albeit now with a cuddly beard; the fact that Carr is the most creative, funny and thought-provoking host remains utterly unexpected; Laverne seems simultaneously relaxed about the criticism of her largely lacklustre contribution, and uninterested in doing anything to remedy the situation. 

• First up, Brooker. This week saw his poem on the Sun quite rightly go viral, where he railed against the paper's claims it was undergoing a witch hunt by listing all the groups it has attacked over the years. That's one great piece, but compare it to his ramblings in the first week on what's wrong with the Queen. Indeed, it was quite specifically the Queen and not the monarchy he went for, failing to separate a hard-working 85-year-old woman from the institution that he apparently has a problem with (a mistake Carr and Mitchell seemed to rightly hold him to account for afterwards). It had all the hallmarks of a lazy Brooker rant: the term 'forelock tugging' was wheeled out for the 85th time in one his missives on royalty, even though no-one knows what it means; the Network-esque fake rage about how much a crown costs compared to a hospital was bordering on embarrassing; the frustration that there's clearly something to be said about the obsequious coverage by the BBC that is submerged under such evidence-free opprobrium that it's hard to dig it out. 

• Similarly, during a debate on banking bonuses, Brooker made a joke that he doesn't know what they do. He's paid enough money to broadcast his opinions to the country that the least he could do is some research on what that is. Just because it hasn't been covered on the front page of the Guardian website isn't an excuse for him not knowing the answer, and adds to the sense that they could rename the show Guardian Opinion & Debate Pages, LIVE!.

• It's interesting to compare and contrast Brooker with David Mitchell. Mitchell has written plenty about his dislike of football, but fair play to him, he got in Alistair Campbell and Clarke Carlisle to discuss what good it does in what was one of the best features so far this series. It originally seemed a strange decision to cut David Mitchell's monologue for this second season given its strengths, but what we got with this debate was challenged opinion rather than the rambling and seemingly undeveloping rage that Brooker is offering up.

• Does anyone ever wonder what it would be like if Brooker had been coupled off and was all happy and went running twenty years ago? Would the amazing attention to detail of TV Go Home, a site/book that provides the clear roots for a  decent portion of his better material, ever have materialised? Just me then? Fine, as you were.

• Jimmy Carr remains amazing. His opening joke cracks are like those on 8 Out of 10 Cats but even sharper. There's enough courage and invention in the scripts for shoddier ideas like a Putin press conference that he still pulls it off. And he is clearly competent enough to think his own thoughts, such as a reasoned and rational defence of the Sun after Brooker's (also reasonable) criticism. In short, why can't everyone just BE REASONABLE instead of SHOUTING ALL THE TIME so they sound like SOMEONE WRITING IN CAPS ON THE INTERNET.

• Laverne was the easy target for many people's ire in the first season, and the first episode of this second run seemed like something had changed. Her piece on Stephen Hester (arguing that he should have been allowed to keep his bonus) may have still been a bit sixth form debate society, but it was a counterpoint to the views of most of the audience. But by week two she's back to the easiest of easy targets: mocking the US Republicans. It was joke-free, full of cheap shots (calling Mormonism 'bizarre', for one) and told viewers literally nothing they wouldn't already know about a over-covered matter. 

• The audience are still whooping like its SM:TV Live.

• You know, it's actually getting quite scary how much sense Jimmy Carr talks. A show where him and David Mitchell just talk in a reasonable manner with interesting and evidenced points of view would be The Nuts. 

• Please someone do something about the godawful titles. This is supposed to be satire, not the cover of a 1999 Ibiza Chilled album.