Writers: Julian Barratt & Noel Fielding
Director: Paul KingCast: Julian Barratt (Howard Moon/The Crack Fox/Head Of The Shaman Board), Noel Fielding (Vince Noir/The Moon/Tony Harrison), Richard Ayoade (Saboo), Michael Fielding (Naboo) & Dave Brown (Bollo)
After Vince is left to put the rubbish out, a creepy fox tricks himself into the shop and steals some of Naboo's Shaman Juice...The stream-of-consciousness style of The Mighty Boosh is sometimes a bit too loose for its own good. This episode appears to be about some Shaman Juice Naboo (Michael Fielding) procures, but then seems poised to give us a skewed look a the subculture of bin men, but ultimately decides to jumble everything together with a story about a malevolent "Crack Fox".
The Crack Fox (an unrecognizable Julian Barratt) is the episode's saving grace; a grotty little puppet with a human head, syringes for fingers, sinister laugh, and vile flatulence. Vince (Noel Fielding) finds the Fox deep inside a mountain of bin-bags he's accumulated outside the Nabootique shop, and the little rascal tricks his way indoors and steals Naboo's powerful Shaman Juice...
Naboo and Bollo (Dave Brown) are summarily imprisoned by the Shaman Council and put on their version of Death Row, meaning Vince and Howard (Julian Barratt) must track the nasty Crack Fox to his sewer lair, before he drinks the magic Juice beneath a Full Moon...
The Strange Tale Of The Crack Fox is just as bonkers as you'd expect from the show, but it's more a hotchpotch of ideas than any purposeful tip into weirdness. The best Boosh stories offer some strange method to its madness, but it seems that Fielding and Barratt just liked the Crack Fox character and spend 30-minutes trying to justify his existence.
The return of the oddball Shamans is a bit lame (as they're not particularly funny), although head-squid Tony Harrison (Noel Fielding) is good for a chuckle, while the last-minute introduction of a homeless man to instigate a climactic punch-up with the Fox doesn't really work...
Like I said, it's stream-of-consciousness comedy: a surreal riff that doesn't really work, but contains enough good moments to make it enjoyable: the talking "Plan Pony", fox porn, Kirk ("he's off his tits!") and a brilliant moment when two women in the shop are possessed by an imprisoned Naboo.
It's very hit-and-miss, although the imagination keeps it bubbling along and it definitely improves after a slow start. The Crack Fox himself is a memorable creation and causes a genuine chill when it stares down the lens of the camera at the viewers.
But, without much cohesion and too many distractions in the storyline, The Strange Tale Of The Crack Fox is a fun, but very messy, exercise in lunacy.
6 December 2007
BBC Three, 10.30 pm
