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 Mondays, BBC 2, 9.30pm
Man Stroke Woman, the Beeb’s latest sketch show comes on when your
little brother and sister should be in bed, which is just as well since
there’s quite a few references to sex in this half an hour of cheap gags
and off-the-wall comedy. Yet this isn’t blue humour. There’s no strong
language, graphic details or really anything to make this offensive.
From the bloke who writes a love poem to his mum, to the fella who
checks out a hot girl whilst taking a stroll through the park with his
missus, it’s all relatively tame silliness with a little dose of
cheekiness of the boys-in-the-playground variety.
A strong cast star in this show, including Ben Crompton from rubbish
Johnny Vegas comedy “Ideal”, crook-nosed Canadian Merideth MacNeill,
Nick Burns (who reminds me of an older version of Alex Lomas from Wigan
band “The Randoms”) and Nick “That Bloke From Shaun of the Dead” Frost.
Labelled with the “From the producer of The Office” tag, Ash Atalla’s
latest show delivers the same off-the-wall comedy, only less funny, and
a tad more confusing.
For whilst there are a few priceless comic moments here (Frost’s “Is it
because I suffer from obesity?” and the aforementioned “love poem to
mummy” are not to be missed!), some sketches are repeated that often
that they rapidly move impact. Once you’ve seen the guy who keeps
misplacing his child first take a load of bottles to the bottle bank in
his pram, and then put a chicken in his highchair, you soon get the
point, and it’s a point that isn’t that funny.
Yet for all the moments here that are genuinely funny, for the first ten
minutes or so, I was left a bit confused as to what was actually going
on. With nothing to really differentiate between characters (They all
wear every-day street clothes and don’t change their accents) I spent
the first ten minutes of this programme thinking it to be a rather
head-blagging sitcom rather than a sketch-show, which is where this
really fails.
For sketch-shows to work well, you need caricature and larger-than-life
comedy for that all important suspension of disbelief. Harry Enfield or
Little Britain did it perfectly, Man Stroke Woman, with its silly laddish
humour does it badly.
Recommended Links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/manstrokewoman
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