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Dom Robinson reviews
Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned:Live from London’s West End
Momentum Pictures
- Cert:
- Cat.no: MP013D
- Running time: 70 minutes
- Year: 2001
- Pressing: 2001
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 16 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: None
- Widescreen: 16;9 (1.77:1)
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £19.99
- Extras: Biographies, Photo Gallery
Director:
- Peter Orton
Producer:
- Robyn O’Brien
Well, this time there was something planned about Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned– a video and DVD release, but there may be some comedy fans out there who arestill in the dark about the concept.
The first Unplanned gig was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1998 atthe Pleasance Theatre where the pair charged a mere £2 a ticket andsaw the light of day on ITV in the summer of 2000. No script is planned andthe humour is derived from the questions asked by the audience and the generalquick-witted behaviour of Baddiel and Skinner. For the TV series any subjectwas open to discussion with one exception… football, which made a changefrom their Fantasy Football shows that contained nothing but!
A second series on TV followed and the 10.30pm screenings attracted an averagerating of 6.1 million viewers. Classic moments from all of the TV broadcastsinclude the audience exchanges made for Baddiel, especially, as well as Skinner,which gets a mention during the extras, as well as the time when an audiencemember put their hand up to ask a question, they were picked out and they startedtheir speech with, “At the end of theThe Sixth Senseit’s revealed that…” – and I won’t reveal the ending myself, but afterhe’d said his piece he went on to ask the proper question. Frank hadn’t seenthe film by that point and neither had I and his wasn’t the only jaw hittingthe floor in disbelief at what had happened, particularly when he asked theguy why he’d done it and didn’t get a satisfactory answer.
I remember one thing that was partially planned though from the very first TVshow, which was when Baddiel brought on a book with a picture of him taken ata charity football match showing him to have long straggly hair and saying helooked more like American porn star Ron Jeremy!
Topics for discussion this time round include streaking, what celebrities looklike close up, pub crawls, daytime TV, women, Wembley and Birmingham, as wellas the secretary selections and the need for a song at the end of the gig.The whole thing is excellent through and through, although I’m sure over theweekend this was filmed more than 70 minutes of footage was filmed. I’d liketo see it unplanned and unedited.
Baddiel and Skinner ponder on the show’s success.Like the TV series, this too has been shot in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen andis flawless as you’d expect. The sound is perfectly fine too, but is usedpurely for dialogue and the brief singalongs at the end, with musical highlightsculled from the various shows.
The extras are rather light here – just 20 or so pictures in a photo galleryand the transcript of what happened when the duo’s stand-ins were shown, asstated earlier on in this review.
The disc contains 16 chapters, hence one for each topic which is fine, animatedbut silent menus and, sadly, no subtitles in any language.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.