The cast wasn't exactly stellar, although there's something very charming about Josie Long and Kerry Howard definitely has some talent, but everyone else was largely forgettable. Of course, the main problem here was that none of the sketches were actually very funny – with the "highlights" only raising a wry smile, at best. I quite liked the roadside mechanic staging a cliché from a slasher film in order to get a car started, but that was literally the only sketch that lodged in my memory. The rest was very weak, but made worse by the fact quite a few bad sketches/ideas (a dire parody of Loose Women called Looser Women, for example) kept recurring with alarming regularity, as if the writers genuinely thought they were comedy gems the audience would lap up.
Hate to say it, but Smack The Pony is still the only all-female sketch show that's ever worked for me (as a man), but maybe something about Girl Friday got lost in translation between the sexes. All I know is that I didn't laugh once and found most of it rather uninspired (a séance uses a Ouija board to talk to text-speaking ghosts) or dull (old folk recalling odd memories of The Blitz). A few half-decent ideas just didn't go anywhere unexpected or interesting (like a woman meeting her two-timing stalker in a bar), and there wasn't enough raw potential for me to consider giving Girl Friday another chance. A disappointing end to what's been a disappointing run of Comedy Showcase this year.
18 December 2009
Channel 4, 10.05pm
written by: Josie Long, Kerry Howard, Sara Pascoe, Nat Luurtsema, Kathryn Drysdale & Lu Corfield directed by: Ben Palmer starring: Josie Long, Kerry Howard, Sara Pascoe, Nat Luurtsema, Kathryn Drysdale & Lu Corfield
