I really miss the Whose Line hour (weekdays, 7pm on Dave), but they had started to repeat themselves quite a lot. I'm not sure exactly which seasons were being shown, but they were definitely mid-90s "hey-day" ones. That means plenty of Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie and (sadly) Tony Slattery. But now Dave have started showing the "early years" (circa 1988), and it's a laugh-free hour of tumbleweeds...
Presenter Clive Anderson (did he ever have hair?) looks scared, camera shy and is more bumbling than usual. He even calls Richard Vranch "Richard Vrance" in one episode! The contestants are mostly British performers (imagine!), but all unfunny – although I'll admit Paul Merton is hilarious compared to the rest. And did shrill Josie Lawrence spend her whole life on this show?
Early regular John Sessions was, is, and always will be a smirking bore, whose only redeeming feature as a person is he admits that's true. Oh, and he does a good Keith Richards impression. I love Stephen Fry, but he's atrocious on Whose Line. And who let so-called legend Peter Cook attempt a "rap"? It's a crime against comedy!
The show's radio origin is also more apparent here. Most games are audio-based – so everything's like watching a live recording of a radio series. A good example is "Authors", where contestants round-robin a story in the style of a chosen writer, which doesn't need a visual element at all. "Authors" also illustrates another clunking aspect of early WLiiA – its high-brow attitude.
Sessions and Fry's involvement is a clear indicator of this -- with Sessions particularly prone to quoting and embellishing literature in every game. His "jokes" always go over the heads nearly everyone watching, and he seems to think it's very, very clever to recite Shakespeare at the drop of a hat.
And did nobody explain to the contestants how the show works 20 years ago? The "winner" is constanly being prompted to leave their seat and read the credits "in the style of..." by Clive!
The 80s vibe is generally more amusing than the games. The audience (who look as bored in '88 as I am in '08) have big hair, shoulder pads, and stonewashed jeans. Tee-hee. Clive thinks someone in the audience called Abi has "an unusual name"! At one point, he almost threatens to explain what "rap music" actually is! And comedienne Jan Ravens pops up, over a decade before she'll become famous appearing in another radio-to-TV show -- Dead Ringers.
No, time hasn't been kind to early Whose Line. But it must have done something right at the time, as it became a classic series 5 years later, and repeats from shows made after 1994 still make me laugh hard. Why didn't Dave continue onto the last few years of Whose Line UK, where they started filming in the US to accommodate the American/Canadian stars?
Presenter Clive Anderson (did he ever have hair?) looks scared, camera shy and is more bumbling than usual. He even calls Richard Vranch "Richard Vrance" in one episode! The contestants are mostly British performers (imagine!), but all unfunny – although I'll admit Paul Merton is hilarious compared to the rest. And did shrill Josie Lawrence spend her whole life on this show?
Early regular John Sessions was, is, and always will be a smirking bore, whose only redeeming feature as a person is he admits that's true. Oh, and he does a good Keith Richards impression. I love Stephen Fry, but he's atrocious on Whose Line. And who let so-called legend Peter Cook attempt a "rap"? It's a crime against comedy!
The show's radio origin is also more apparent here. Most games are audio-based – so everything's like watching a live recording of a radio series. A good example is "Authors", where contestants round-robin a story in the style of a chosen writer, which doesn't need a visual element at all. "Authors" also illustrates another clunking aspect of early WLiiA – its high-brow attitude.
Sessions and Fry's involvement is a clear indicator of this -- with Sessions particularly prone to quoting and embellishing literature in every game. His "jokes" always go over the heads nearly everyone watching, and he seems to think it's very, very clever to recite Shakespeare at the drop of a hat.
And did nobody explain to the contestants how the show works 20 years ago? The "winner" is constanly being prompted to leave their seat and read the credits "in the style of..." by Clive!
The 80s vibe is generally more amusing than the games. The audience (who look as bored in '88 as I am in '08) have big hair, shoulder pads, and stonewashed jeans. Tee-hee. Clive thinks someone in the audience called Abi has "an unusual name"! At one point, he almost threatens to explain what "rap music" actually is! And comedienne Jan Ravens pops up, over a decade before she'll become famous appearing in another radio-to-TV show -- Dead Ringers.
No, time hasn't been kind to early Whose Line. But it must have done something right at the time, as it became a classic series 5 years later, and repeats from shows made after 1994 still make me laugh hard. Why didn't Dave continue onto the last few years of Whose Line UK, where they started filming in the US to accommodate the American/Canadian stars?
