Pretty hit and miss, but better than I expected. It's the first time Bill Baily has made me laugh.

I thought it was rather good. Especially Bailey and Lock.

For a one off it was awful. You would've thought that if you were going to give those performers a half-hour of telly, at least they'd have the sense to make it a really funny, worthwhile half-hour.

Some of it was abysmal but there were moments which made me want it to be a full-length series. Trouble is most of those comedians are used to working in conditions where the audience is pissed, so you have to try to imagine you are for the purposes of frame of mind and it becomes very enjoyable indeed.

I think atmosphere plays a very important role in terms of how a show is received.

In the lift scene, where there was something that sounded like a mobile phone, but was actually a birthday card, was the woman with the card out of Bad Girls?

Not funny. The jokes had no punch lines. Bill Baily was, as usual, pathetic. A complete waste of the BBC's money and my time.

You're a cruel-hearted man!

Didn't notice Bailey being involved in many of the sketches, if any. Just his dodgy tourist routine with Lock. Maybe he was as impressed as the rest of us with the quality of material or else he's loathe to be disassociated from the routines that he's been constantly using for the past five years or so, the ones that his live audience know and love so well.

Anyone remember much about his own series a couple of years back? I remember watching quite a lot of it but there was only one sketch that made me really laugh, something about living next door to a foghorn factory. It was all in the timing...

Bill Bailey and Sean Locke were brilliant, I thought. I could watch them doing the tourist thing for sixteen hours without a break.

The rest was unbeleviably poor. Crashingly, embarrassingly, tear-inducingly, shit-extractingly dreadful. Exactly the kind of gunk that always gets produced by 19 writers, as any Radio 4 listeners will testify.

Lewis-Smith reviewed it in the Standard today and said it was all crap, and singled out Bill and Sean for extra abuse, which seemed a bit unfair, as they stood out like sore thumbs as the only funny thing in it.

Didn't see TV to Go but surprised opinion here seems to be mixed on Bill Bailey. I saw most of his solo series and thought it was excellent. His Chaucer routine, and the cockney reinterpretation of classics (including Bauhaus' 'Bela Lugosi's Dead') was superb. He also did some very clever sketches incluing one about a kind of Marquess of Salisbury type figure that went on for ages but was funny and genuinely unconventional. Of all the recent stand ups I've seen on TV recently he seemed the most original.

Bill Bailey's stand-up is great; he didn't come across that well in his show which was more sketch-oriented. I thought his TV To Go bit was great. I thought the rest of the show had some good ideas but it suffered from being under-written in places (e.g. the loyalty card sketch could have been a lot funnier). But it was better than the typical sketch show, I reckon. I mean, do you remember that terrible TV Nation thing?

i saw it when twas being recorded, as ever was funnier live.....

but there you go....

I think the BBC should offer free booze on the liscence fee so you are more satisfied with their televisual output.

>I mean, do you remember that terrible TV Nation thing?

Do you mean Comedy Nation? Mostly average, as I recall. Kevin Eldon was the funniest thing in it, but he disappeared after a few weeks.
The second series had Simon Munnery doing the League Against Tedium, but as he was only on for about three minutes in each episode, clearly not enough to compensate for the crapness of the rest it. I believe the Boosh also featured in an earlier incarnation called The Pod. Hmph.
Anyway, TV to go...not much left to say about this, apart from that I'm glad it will never be a series. Unless someone comes up with something fresh and inventive soon, sketch-based comedy shows really are dead in the water.

Oh yes, Comedy Nation. TV Nation was Michael Moore when he was still good. Ooops.

I don't agree that sketch shows are "dead in the water". There has been plenty of original stuff, but the better ones never seem to get promoted properly or recommissioned. Anyone remember Miller and Armstrong? Inventive, brilliantly written, highly detailed ... But where's the second series? Plus TMWRNJ's failure to get a third series - hardly a predictable format for a sketch show.
Smack The Pony seems to be popular despite not being as good as the previous two mentioned (still not bad, though).

>Anyone remember Miller and Armstrong? Inventive, brilliantly written, highly detailed ... But where's the second series?


They did get a second series

>>Anyone remember Miller and Armstrong? Inventive, brilliantly written, highly detailed ... But where's the second series?
>
>
>They did get a second series

Three series, actually... two on Channel 5, one on Channel 4.

I've heard that there's been another Armstrong & Miller series commissioned and it isn't too far away. Channel 4 again.

So that would be the third series on Channel 4, OK?

Oops ... I didn't realise they had been on Channel 5. It's great if they're getting a second series on C4 (or third?)
So, DEFINITELY not "dead in the water."

Their main joke was to be naked.

However I do remember this turning out very nicely when that bird from that shitty recent BBC2 sitcom turned up starkers on a farmyard.

I didn't know about the C5 series. But the first one on C4 was, for the most part, excellent. The second one, though, was unadulterated cockwash. What the hell happened? Did a key writer drop out in the meantime? Or did A&M just get cocky after the reasonable success of the first series?

Looked like the second one to me (they write most of their own material). Wouldn't accept it was *unadulterated* cockwash -- the "Does *he* live here?" "No... Jeff lives here" sketch was surely as good as anything that came before -- but yes, this series had a lot of self-indulgent arsing around which was almost completely absent in the series before. I think, from reading some of Ben Miller's newsgroup postings, that he accepts they should probably have held back more (if only in the matter of his cock). We'll see.