captain_lucy-1 Reviews

Pushing Up Daisies (1984– )

The Management

[7/10 · 18 September 2007]

This was one of two excellent late-night alternative comedy shows that Channel 4 produced in the early-mid 1980s, the other being Who Dares Wins. It introduced Hale & Pace to the TV audience, and catapulted Chris Barrie's career beyond his impressions and vocal talent as used on ITV's Spitting Image.

The comedy was typical Channel 4 fare. Clever, cynical and often crude, with a definite left-of-centre lean, it left no target safe. Some clips have surfaced from time to time on YouTube (mostly Hale & Pace's most famous characters, the Two Rons) and have confirmed to me just how good this show was.

Marvellous stuff!

Inside Victor Lewis-Smith (1993– )

wonderful weirdness

[9/10 · 29 May 2007]

Inside Victor Lewis-Smith is that rarest of things, a clips show that is not just funny but down-right hilarious. But virtually none of this is down to the clips, it is almost completely due to the somewhat warped and twisted genius of Lewis-Smith himself.

The initial set-up is pretty standard, a man lying unconscious in a hospital bed after an accident with doctors and nurses hooking him up to all sorts of medical machinery. But they soon discover that in his comatose state, his brain is actually pumping out television programmes - not as they were when he watched them, but as they are after being sloshed around his brain for years. Hence we get, for example, the marvellous lunacy of Camberwick Green, with Windy Miller offering to take Captain Snort and his entire regiment round the back of the windmill for some "fun".

There were strong appearances from Nickolas Grace as the Consultant, and Annette Badland as the nurse, further cementing the utter surreality of this show. Absolute inspired lunacy, much better than the later "TV Offal".