Frankie Boyle's been lanced, Russell Howard's wearing specs, but it's otherwise business as usual for satirical news quiz Mock The Week; a fusion of Have I Got News For You? and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, with irrelevant scoring and a weird mix of rounds that go from sitdown quiz to standup performances. It's all a mere conduit for ribpoking of the week's news stories, and MTW is perhaps more consistent than its contemporaries because
The downside of that consistency is that Hugh Dennis stopped being funny in the mid-'90s[*] and Andy Parsons has never been funny[**], leaving host Dara O'Briain and Russell Howard to shoulder most of the comic burden. And, like a great many modern panel shows, a lot of guests just become glorified audience members, desperate to shoehorn in paraphrased segments of their standup material. This week, Mark Watson coped well as a guest (he's a veteran of this format), Patrick Kielty had the confidence to soldier through any difficulties he encountered, and while Milton Jones sometimes struggled to recycle his material appropriately, he at least didn't just sit back and do nothing[***]. It helps that his stage persona is a spaced-out weirdo, so his weaker moments and slipups could be forgiven as part of his "act".
I'll leave you with a clip of Mock The Week's primary reason to watch, the excellent "Scenes We'd Like To See" round:
But what was your verdict? Did the show miss Frankie Boyle's contentious "gag grenades", or is the show better off without him?
21 January 2010
BBC2, 9pm
[*] Okay, admittedly Dennis is palatable on Radio 4's The Now Show, he puts in a good performance in Outnumbered, and he's good at the Scenes We'd Like To See round on MTW, but the '00s still largely consisted of him playing "Jed Cake" in Jack Dee's Happy Hour and a smug doctor in My Hero.
[**] Did you get his DVD for Christmas? Did you keep the receipt?
[***] In fact, similarly to fellow "oneliner comedian" Stewart Francis, he stole the standup round with his pithy jokes and wordplay.
