British Panel Shows

[flyonthewall2983]

Big fan of QI and a few others, mainly watching David Mitchell and Lee Mack bickering on Would I Lie To You?. The Brits seem to have this thing down (as well as with Graham Norton, who's easily funnier than anyone on late night in America and has a better format), whereas a show like @midnight, while very funny itself at times does seem to be a bit too inside baseball with it's geeky references.

[Manny Karp]

QI is very, very funny. Alan Davies is hilariously bemused when he's on the show.

[tenia]

My GF studied in Glasgow and we stumbled by chance on QI which is indeed incredibly funny. In France, we dont have that kind of format so it was a bit strange the first time to understand how it was working but since, I dont think we missed an episode. Some of them are truly epic, notably when the guests are going completely wild.

[ThatKid]

Big fan of QI and a few others, mainly watching David Mitchell and Lee Mack bickering on Would I Lie To You?. The Brits seem to have this thing down (as well as with Graham Norton, who's easily funnier than anyone on late night in America and has a better format), whereas a show like @midnight, while very funny itself at times does seem to be a bit too inside baseball with it's geeky references.

Same here. Here in Australia, the ABC airs QI and Would I Lie To You? quite often, and my family quite enjoys both shows. God forbid if America decides to make their own version. And with Graham Norton, his show is MASSIVE down here, airing on prime time, on the big free-to-air network. Don't know about @midnight, haven't seen it.

[colinr0380]

I'd also highly suggest checking out the BBC radio shows too, which are where some of the best panel shows spring from, or still are. Radio 4's The News Quiz is wonderful (though I admit to a bias in feeling an affinity to Jeremy Hardy's rants!) and even though the wonderful Sandi Toksvig has been forcibly deported back to Denmark under armed guard in the wake of the Brexit vote we still have the "thinking woman's Adrian Chiles" Miles Jupp making for a suitable replacement in the host's seat. That's usually available in the BBC's Friday Night Comedy podcast download, although it rotates in and out - at the moment the sketch show Dead Ringers is running.

And also the wonderfully silly I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, the self described "antidote to panel games" with its regular teams including Tim Brooke-Taylor (of The Goodies fame) and Barry Cryer tackling such rounds as singing one song to the tune of another or the inexplicably convoluted rules governing Mornington Crescent! Plus of course the lovely Samantha!

(Its also really amusing to listen to the early series from the 1970s and 80s of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, where all of the absurd jokes play out to stony silence from the bemused audience!)

[jindianajonz]

I've been hooked on The Unbelievable Truth lately. It's a Radio show hosted by David Mitchell that features 4 panelists who must create a short lecture on a given subject, where everything they say except for five facts are lies. It is up to the rest of the panel to try to weed out these truths for points. It's a great blend of comedy and trivia that let's the listener try to play along as well.

[flyonthewall2983]

...and even though the wonderful Sandi Toksvig has been forcibly deported back to Denmark under armed guard in the wake of the Brexit vote

This proves otherwise. The first look at Toksvig as host of QI.

[colinr0380]

Oh my god! That means they've deported Stephen Fry by mistake!

[zedz]

Oh my god! That means they've deported Stephen Fry by mistake!

I have seen Stephen Fry loitering around Wellington a couple of times, but New Zealand is, after all. the Denmark of the South.

As for British panel shows, my favourites are Have I Got News for You, which on a good night can end up a rollercoaster of off-the-cuff running jokes, particularly if Paul Merton is on form. Also, the immersion in the minutiae of British politics is enjoyably surreal for an outsider (and, in the long term, extremely informative). It's also fascinating in exposing whether or not various non-comedians have a sense of humour (about themselves or in general), and it's not at all rare that the non-coms show up the professionals in terms of off-the-cuff wit. There are also often memorable episodes when genuine acrimony rears its head, or when current events (generally the scandal-du-jour) overtake one of the participants (who had been booked well before they hit the headlines). The ultimate example of the latter was when the show's host Angus Deayton became involved in his very own sex scandal (he only lasted a couple of very awkward weeks after that).

Another favourite is Never Mind the Buzzcocks, which as a pop music quiz show is kind of lacklustre, but as a stage-setting for freeform, surreal riffing is just about perfect. From what I've seen, Noel Fielding (like Paul Merton on Have I Got News for You) actually seems far better suited to this particular, peculiar comic format than he does to sketch comedy or stand-up.

[colinr0380]

I don't really condone Angus Deayton's off screen antics during that period but one problem with his departure and the decades of rotating guest hosts (at least for me) was that it felt as if it overbalanced Have I Got News For You too far in favour of the team captains. At their worst Paul Merton and Ian Hislop can sometimes come across as insufferably smug, 'knowing' that they're the real stars of the show. It was perhaps telling that Jeremy Clarkson, Boris Johnson and so on, felt as if they fit in with that company when they hosted!

I must admit that I've never really taken to Noel Fielding on Never Mind The Buzzcocks either, perhaps because of the same issues of a Team Captain suddenly being promoted to Host. That issue seems to happen all over the BBC panel shows, as in The News Quiz and QI to a lesser extent. I kind of have a suspicion that those roles shouldn't be as interchangeable as they sometimes get treated as being. There are certain more necessarily detached qualities of a host that just don't feel to be the same as those required in a competitive team captain trying to score points. For instance I think Jeremy Hardy is amazing on The News Quiz but the couple of times he almost seemed forced into subbing as a host between Sandi Toksvig leaving and Miles Jupp replacing her, he seemed very awkward in that role of a compere constantly having to calm down the chaos and bring a bit of order to proceedings, and it prevented him from going off on his own tangents about the news stories. Similarly I'd never want Alan Davies in the QI host chair, despite ideas that he'd be natural to promote into that position because of his longevity on the show, simply because he has the perfect niche in the series as it is.

In terms of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, I much preferred the early Mark Lamarr years (who was sort of a music-minded, deadpan younger Jack Dee figure for a while there), though he apparently grew ever more frustrated with the hosting duties. Then Simon Amstell took over and did a great job as well for a while before similarly seemed to burn out and moved on after a few years. Even more than Have I Got News For You, Buzzcocks at its best traded on a regular bit of teasing of the bands getting regularly booked onto the show (plus the occasional bemused American singer unaware of what they were getting involved in!), which along with the unpredictable nature of highly strung public figures not seeing the funny side of things (who would have thought musicians could be so temperamental!) often made for some interestingly edgy shows. Amstell's key moment of course was the whole situation with a musician/ex-Big Brother contestant, in which reading out lines from his other half's autobiography caused the guy to walk out.

A lot of these panel shows go in cycles though. There are times when they're essential viewing, but it comes and goes and generally the TV shows cannot seem to stay consistently at their peak. Have I Got News For You peaked in the mid 90s, Never Mind The Buzzcocks in the early to mid 2000s and Mock The Week during the early Frankie Boyle seasons in which he pushes things further and further until you can see the rest of the other comedians on the show in as much shock as the audience! Though of course even a transgressive Frankie Boyle joke is made even funnier when repeated in a deadpan way on Newsnight!

[thirtyframesasecond]

I prefer the Amstell years of Buzzcocks. Lamarr just seemed to go through the motions and seem thoroughly bored. Amstell could ramp up the faux-innocent style of ribbing he developed on kids' TV into something more mainstream - with the Preston example as one of the best. He too seemed jaded by it, which he referenced in the excellent Grandma's House, which sadly didn't last very long. Best thing about that show was some of the major players from the Thick of It being in it (the Nicola Murray, Glenn Cullen, Stewart Pearson characters), plus Iwan Rheon from Game of Thrones playing a mumbling Ben Whishaw type actor.

[colinr0380]

Simon Amstell did also recently turn up as the narrator in the unweidly titled game from some of the creators of The Stanley Parable: Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (which only seems to play further on his 'host on the verge of a nervous breakdown as the show collapses around him' persona!)

[Ribs]

Network will be releasing the first thirteen series of QI on DVD over the next six months, with the first two "volumes" (spanning A to D and E to G) available now and the remainder split into two volumes releasing in September.

PS. Is it my imagination or has Network literally not had a sale since the calamity of their summer sale nearly a year ago?

[colinr0380]

I think it is unlikely that this will have been factored into the sets but I wonder if these will be the 'normal-sized' shorter 30 minute QI episodes, or the extended "QI XL" editions that ran for 45 minutes? (Preferably both with the option to view either version of course!) The XL editions did not start until Series F, so it won't be an issue for the first volume at least.

[Ribs]

My guess/vain hope would be that is why the first set is four series and the rest three - 16x45x3 being roughly equivalent to 16x30x4. Network may well answer if they were to be emailed about it, though, and obviously as it's being released it'll be public knowledge regardless soon enough.