Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Rush Hour is a new BBC3 comedy which we were, er, fortunate enough to get free tickets for a showing of, where they played 3 episodes to record a laugh track. Since I already typed all this nonsense up in an e-mail to a select few, I decided to post it, but don’t worry, I’ve still got stuff about the Arcade Fire and Tedstock to get to. Before and after the BBC provided us with free drinks, so I came away two bottles of coke up on when I started, and I had a muffin from the cafe which was adequate. This has not influenced my opinion of the program.

The Adam Buxton stuff was the best, presumably because he is himself, but there was plenty that was actually funny. It’s not another Man Stroke Woman “Nick Frost’s stuff is OK but the rest is shite” situation. The camerawork was pretty frantic, but that’s just because people still think it’s TRENDY to be all SHAKYCAM when it is, in fact, often very annoying. Maybe it’s just cheaper. There are quite a lot of children in it, but they’re mostly pretty funny because they’re either mistreated or have very little dialogue.

The best sketch was Adam Buxton’s “Rock Father” (a middle-aged guy teaching his primary-school-aged kid about rock history, getting upset when he can’t remember who produced “Transformer” when prompted) doing a “clean” version of Fuck tha Police because his son was in the car. He sang the whole song, turning down the volume and inserting clean/safe lyrics into it whenever it swore or referenced sex or violence. It was total genius. The other funny ones were about a child who appears to be some kind of antichrist reading her mother’s mind, and another where a kid was telling his mother about the teacher at school he likes who says some sensible things about the world, which included my current favourite joke, holocaust denial.

There was some funny stuff with some polish nannies, and some unfunny stuff with some businessmen complimenting each other ending in the same punchline each time and going on way too long. It’s no Mitchell and Webb, but it’s not as bad as most. I think giving it a theme improves it somewhat. I think the fact it’s got a laugh track will go a long way to making it decent, though, because it’s got a similarly awkward/naturalistic tone to most modern sketch comedy which would usually make it feel too voyeuristic to be jokes. I think having a laugh track will soften that significantly. That horrible Green Wing/Hyperdrive woman even turns up as one character, and manages to not suck, though her role largely involves standing still and not moving.

The warm-up guy was quite funny. He was ripping off Bill Bailey/Ross Noble a bit, but there are worse people to rip off. Also, in the interest of demystifying television, they made us record three “clean” laughs without dialogue or prompting - one small, one big, and one that turns into applause. It’ll be interesting to see how much they feel they need to use those in the show, though to their credit, at least they’re not just canning it, I suppose.

Edited to add: Oh yeah, all the external stuff was filmed around Ealing (Broadway, Northfield Avenue, Uxbridge Road) with additional aerial shots of West London/the M4. Which was cool because THAT’S WHERE I LIVE! I WALKED ON THAT PAVEMENT! ME! I AM BY EXTENSION ON TELEVISION!