Mock the Week
BBC2
Nause, thy name is Andy Parsons. If we take it as read that there are certain irritation triggers that, when flipped all at once, make placid men kill, then Parsons is all those triggers in corporeal form. Murdering him would be the ultimate crime of passion. Seeing his face on Mock the Week is instant temporary insanity, express diminished responsibility. No jury in the land would convict you. And we haven’t even got to the voice yet. His Radio 4 nails-down-a-blackboard David Frost meets Zippy from Rainbow buzzsaw drone is a sandblaster pulled across your face, its intent very clear: to let you know his business is irony, in a witty, dry, sardonic sense of humour with sarcastic undertones of sarcasm. Dragging every vowel over the coals until it expires through heat exhaustion, his delivery, combined with the Belsen voice and the renal failure poor material, can make grown men into howler monkeys – screeching forlornly at some faceless lunar deity for deliverance.
"Dragging every vowel over the coals until it expires through heat exhaustion, his delivery, combined with the Belsen voice and the renal failure poor material, can make grown men into howler monkeys."
Time becomes meaningless in The Parsons Zone. A 10 second one-liner can last forever. There are Radio 4 listeners, Vietnam POW style, still stuck in a bon mot from 1999 on William Hague. Tonight, he wears a red shirt that says "punch me" in Esperanto. He’s so implausibly chuffed to be Andy Parsons. He even walks like a cunt – sauntering up to the microphone during one of the many improv rounds as if the comedy fairy herself has just slipped him the world’s greatest one-liner. Good mother of God but he’s abysmal.
"Tonight Zoe Lyons got lost in a 36 month old routine about Sarah Pailin being a former beauty queen. A flatling Pailin joke on a TV panel show – will wonders never start?"
Who else we got? Frankie Boyle is a funny guy who stuns you a little sometimes with the sheer nastiness of his material but he is inventive and evenhanded in his misanthropy and the show dies a slow death without him. Mein host Dara Ó Briain is something of a dude and a solid noninterventionist ringmaster — you barely know he’s there which is how I like my panel show hosts (unless they’re Angus Deayton, from whose regicide Have I Got News For You never recovered). Russell Howard is a pretty decent pretty boy. Then there’s Lucy Porter: beautiful and not a bit funny; Hugh Dennis: ugly and not a bit funny; Gina Yashere: makes Dennis look both pretty and funny. Tonight, Zoe Lyons gets lost in a 36 month old routine about Sarah Pailin being a former beauty queen. A flatling Pailin joke on a TV panel show – will wonders never start?
Ah, fuck this show. All you motherfuckers need to know one thing: Improvisation is always smug — irredeemably, immutably, to its very core. It is never not pleased with itself. It’s a parlour game, a posh boy’s piano recital, a spunk fondue evening. Its patron saint is John Sessions.
"Rather like there has never EVER been a funny joke about George Bush, there has never EVER been a funny joke about Prince Charles, the Queen or Camilla or any combination of above. It’s like the fucking 80s all over again."
Tonight they do that Ferdinand de Bargos voiceover round which is just AWFUL. The footage was Prince Charles, the Queen and Camilla walking together at some function and I’m not even going to trouble you with the voiceover as even the functionally illiterate among you can write it yourself. That’s why comedians like this shit — no input is necessary because it writes itself. Rather like there has never EVER been a funny joke about George Bush, there has never EVER been a funny joke about Prince Charles, the Queen or Camilla or any combination of above. It’s like the fucking 80s all over again
I’m not particularly crazy about Heather Mills McCartney jokes either.
The best thing about it: Frankie Boyle
The worst thing about it: Andy Parsons: the worst thing about being a sentient being.
The verdict on Mock the Week: World’s shortest conversation: holes in which Lucy Porter would not get it.
Marks out of 10: 4
Imagined: Friday, August 07, 2009