Did you want us to comment or applaude?

>Did you want us to comment or applaude?

Comment on the show. The writers appear to have run dry.

Tell you what though. You know 'Waugh on sport'? You know how it's a achingly unfunny and embarrasing rip off of everyone who does spoof interviews, plus Sally Jockstrap from Private Eye (which isn't even funny in itself)? Yep? Well, there was a joke on it last night (no, there was, honest) that actually made me laugh! Here is said joke. Is it, in fact, funny, or have I, in fact, gone mad?

'I read an article which said you were famous for your relentless charisma. Are you relenting at the moment?'

Come on, that's not bad, is it?

The thing about when they do those wannabe-subversive interviews on third parties, such as the Chris Morris rip off vox pops in the street or that painfully awful Waugh on Sport, people like Morris who are good comedians even when they are talking total nonsense to the other person and the person is baffled, you're laughing at them, not at Morris. Morris should be the one embarassed as it is he who is acting like a weirdo not the punter in the street or whatever, but because he's clever Morris makes them look like the idiot, not him. And from here the humour arises. In the 11 o clock show, not only is it unfunny, but you actually feel embarassed for the poor punter, because the presenters neither have the talent, writing nor charisma to pull it off, it simply makes them look the fool and makes the punter look like some poor sod who is having his time wasted by some childish idiots.

Yes. This is an increasingly common delusion. Being brave is not the same as being funny.
Just because you don't mind gibbering like an idiot in front of a bemused member of the public, that doesn't make it comedy.
I'd like to bring forward everyone from Jeremy Beadle to Dom Joly in front of the jury...

And another thing. When Chris Morris interviews people, the crucial thing that makes it funny is that it's THEM who are eventually cornered into saying something that makes no sense. 'Speak Your Brains' style things only work if you can get someone stupid or nervous enough to tell you that the letter of the law is J, or that anyone who attacks the queen should be smothered, or that soul reversals should happen at football matches. If you can't do that, don't do it! All the copyists, Ali G included, simply spout their long, long, prepared 'joke' suggestion, and then wait for the bemused punter to say... 'No'. On today's 11 o'clock show alone, the Style Wankers got a tatooist to say 'No I wouldn't', Will Smith got a market trader to say 'No' and Jon Holmes got a butcher to say 'No. Not round here', and a barmaid- in her only utterence, after about 15 seconds of build up from Holmes, to say... 'No.' Well done boys. I bet they feel really ashamed of their stupidity. Now, please, everyone, stop doing spoof-interviews-with-the-public forever, please, now. Thank you.

At long last, someone else has said that Ali G isn't all he's cracked up to be. Apparently, Baron-Cohen's "working on a new series full of new characters" right now. Wow....it could be every bit as good as...oh I dunno...Paul Kaye.

Ali G has never been anything special. Everything about the character hinges around the joke of a 'cool' person being in the presence of an 'uncool' one, which in reality is about as genuinely 'cool' as a Ribena advert with a DJing Ribena bottle and some eight year olds in shades.

Tony Benn came out of his Ali G interview very well when he angrily lambasted him for his attitudes eg. "If you go around saying things like that, someone will end up shooting you"

Tony Benn always looks good in interviews. Because he actually believes in something, he has no need to shift or play to the gallery, so he is immune to the tactics of 'funny' interviewers. Chris Morris wouldn't get him to look stupid either.

I remember reading that about the only person Chris has interviewed who he actually walked away impressed by was Max Clifford. He found him to be much smarter than he generally comes across, and either failed, or didn't try in the first place, to make him look stupid when he interviewed him. In fact what ensued was not a comedy humiliation but a genuine interview, and it's a (rather bizarre) tribute to Clifford that all Chris did instead was to get him to do a chirpy Radio 1 ident that he then edited into "Hi, I'm Max Clifford, and I like pissing on baby mice".

Clifford comes over well in all the things I've seen him do. There was a TV edition of "The Moral Maze" in which Dr. David Starkey made a bigger fool of himself than usual by attacking Clifford, and Clifford just politely pointed out that Starkey had no idea what he actually did.

What he actually does is just get self-obsessed celebs to chuck money at him for making them come over a lot better in the press than they deserve. He made a comment a year or 2 back when he more or less came out and said he was contemptuous of the people who paid him. I think Morris and him would be very close in outlook, if not approach.

He did also nearly got in a brawl in a TV studio with a Tory health minister before one of the last 2 general elections, during a discussion show. Clifford has a handicapped daughter and he started raging about health service funding. It happened off camera.

With you all on Clifford - more power to him.

Ali G. Hmmm. I rather like Ali G, and I don't think the joke is about a 'cool' person and an 'uncool' one. I don't think Cohen is trying to 'do a Morris' at all. A lot of the humour is using real life figures to build up a situation which shows what an arse Ali G (and by extension all wannabes like him) is - a good example of this is the FBI visit in the Ali G series. Also, occasionally, the person Ali G is interviewing makes a kind of surreal connection - I'm particularly thinking here of the time he interviewed former US Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig - that was one of the funniest things I have ever seen, (honestly).
I don't think people pointing out Cohen's flaws is anything new - some people on this forum have been venting their spleen at him for ages, probably for the same reasons so many people hate that Budweiser ad - because it's a vaguely affectionate parody of some of the inanities of popular culture which many people have missed the point of and then imitate. Badly.

Yes, but can Baron-Cohen do anything else? Think back to when people were proclaiming Paul Kaye as something special. Or Matt Lucas. <sheesh>

I thought the Ali G Show was fantastic. Laughed all the way through it.

<Yes, but can Baron-Cohen do anything else?

You bet your life he can. This is a man with real talent, he's no fucking waste of space pretender like the rest of the shite we're served up.

That Barat (?) character was the test. I thought it would be rubbish - but it was actually quite funny. And Lucas' Rock Profiles on UK Play are the only funny original comedy they put out.

I'm fond of Ali G too, but I don't like the way that the character had to be put forward through "interviews" (for reasons explained earlier by more cogent arguers than me).
The interviewee very often did just say "no" or "of course not". Slightly embarrassing for all concerned. Notice how the shot always cuts away after each response in an Ali G interview - because the awkward silence where the "interview" goes dead for a bit would show up the exchange for what it actually is: a collection of one liners delivered to an unwitting stooge.
I liked him much better doing stuff like singing with the choir - where the public were in on the joke and joined in.
It is sad that post-Morris all "new" comedy has to have this "tricking the public / fooling the famous" element in order to be seen as dangerous and cutting edge.
Morris wasn't always dangerous in his interviews. Sometimes (My Man Sergeant Murphy) he was just silly.

Morris once said that about 98% of his radio work was pretty innocuous. I'd go with that, especially on GLR. Comedy people are so obsessed with being cutting-edge now that they forget why the fuck they're there - supposedly to make us laugh.

Ali G is just average. Average. Not rubbish, but certainly not great. And those footsteps you can hear catching up belong to Richard & Judy and Alison Graham etc.. "Oh please help us not to miss out!" they all squeal, absolutely desperate that, post-Morris, there's no-one who isn't in on the joke. Whatever the joke is. (See also The Royle Family.)

Will Baron-Cohen ever be forgiven for being born after Morris?

To be fair, the Feedback Reports were never dangerous. Funny and inventive, and brilliantly set up and astonishingly rapidly thought out, yes, but hardly on a par with fooling MPs into believing that a fictional drug exists.

>Will Baron-Cohen ever be forgiven for being born after Morris?


That's got nothing to do with it.

>>Will Baron-Cohen ever be forgiven for being born after Morris?
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>That's got nothing to do with it.
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Quite right, of course it hasn't. The earlier criticism of him was exactly right- most of his interviews (with a few honourable exceptions) consist of him saying something to someone that they won't understand... followed by a pause, and the person telling him they don't understand. That has nothing to do with Chris Morris' work.
I don't hate Ali G, though- there are occasional moments of quick-witted brilliance. Whereas now we have Will Smith... who I have just seen deliver one of his long laborious 'slightly odd' sentences to a member of the public who hilariously responded to the comic genius by saying... NOTHING AT ALL. And the lovely Sarah Alexander, who pretended to cry in the middle of a conversation with a member of the public, who hilariously... looked a bit puzzled. And yet the studio audience laughed like Pavlov dogs because they've been conditioned to think that anything involving interaction with a member of the public is funny. I'm going to cry now.

There's an advert for t11OCkS being shown at the moment which just shows clips of Will Smith (not the actor, or have they stopped using that catchphrase?) saying "Enormously well-hung" over and over to some incredibly puzzled individuals. At the end of the ad one of these people comes back with the hilarious pay-off "really?".


I think that says it all.

You may not be surprised to hear that the impetus for more 'be stupid in front of the public' items comes from Channel 4. Ever since the success of Ali G and Trigger Happy TV their commissioning editors seem to be unhealthily obsessed with spoof interviews and stunts.

Two examples:

1) Before Iain Lee left the 11OCS, the decision had been made by the producer that he would not be going out on the street to make old ladies say 'cock' anymore. Then, a day before the dry-run, the order comes from C4: 'Iain must go out on the street and interview the public about a news story'. C4 also have a habit of looking at people's VTs and wondering 'whether there might not be a place in them for a couple of vox pops?' Hence Waugh on Sport, Jon's Coyote Ugly piece, Sarah's piece on the Turner Prize and the abortive attempts to include the public in Style Wankers and other not yet broadcast items.

2) I and a friend were working on a proposal for a science-based Comedy Lab last year, with interest from a C4 commissioning editor. It was kind of a mad Tomorrow's World. Anway, no sooner had we passed our proposal on to C4 than the message came back, 'that's great guys, but could you put some vox pops, and stunty type things in it? You know, to keep it real.' We don't do those kind of things at all, but we had to include them.

I don't understand why C4 are now obsessed with this element of apparently dangerous comedy, to the extent that they force people who do not have the innate skills to interact with the public cleverly to do them. Let people do what they're good at, for God's sake.

So, yes, in the end, I kind of agree with you.

ABOT11OCS

But what about Ali G?

Of course, at Radio 4 it's the opposite attitude - if you go to them with a show all about asking pensioners which swearwords various public figures inspire in them, they'll just come back and say "Can we have more comedy-drama in it?"