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Dan Owen reviews

Harry Enfield's
Brand Spanking New Television Programme

Showing on

Sky One

Monday nights at 10pm (rpt Thurs, 10.30pm)

I've liked Harry Enfield since I first saw the first series of "...Television Programme" and watched him reach his peak with mates Paul Whitehouse and Kathy Burke. There was never anything truly amazing about him - I'd hardly consider him a comic genius.

He's merely a man who has a slightly above-average ability to "do accents" and exaggerate certain aspects of stereotypes into "characters". The closest he's come to anything inspired was his Kevin The Teenager character, while the rest are fairly 2-Dimensional and obvious targets: The Slobs (thick, disgusting), Tim Nice-But-Dim (thick), The Old Gits (nasty), etc, etc.

But it was always good for a chuckle, and could actually be very amusing and occassionally "laugh-out-loud humour". TV worth watching, basically.

But... how things change. In Sky One's new series, Enfield has totally lost the plot. Without comedy partner Burke and Whitehouse to back him up, things already sounded shaky... but the promise of a more "adult" approach to the comedy given its non-BBC production, pasted over that.

Sadly, the verdict is that his "Brand Spanking New Show" is brand spankingly awful. Truly terrible. I've never seen a sketch show with practically NO funny moments... until last night.

Enfield's spurned ALL of his past characters, and instead of giving us worthy replacements, he's simply cobbled together the naffest bunch of 2-D reject ideas ever known. I actually remember Sky running a competition for viewers to suggest new characters for Enfield to do -- and it seems he's basically used all of them! No disrespect to the public out there, but the "characters" he masqueraded as in his show were the kind of thing kids would make up... and then realise they're a bad idea.

Not so with Enfield. Didn't he realise that every character was unfunny, the dialog was laden, the sketches had no rhythm, and that the catchphrases were cringe-makingly bad?

I'm sure he does realise, and no doubt people will mockingly say he's laughing all the way to the bank. If so, he's an idiot. This show will ruin his career (if enough people get to see it) and perhaps cements the fact that Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson were the real talent behind his previous shows.

I could go through every sketch and rip it apart. Even sadder was the blindingly obvious fact that some sketches were merely included because they were a bit "naughty" and "rude". But even more unfunny than the other sketches because of this.

And since when does he have to do bad impressions? His David Beckham (which gave away the fact Sky have been sitting on this project for aaaages, given his out-dated hairstyle) was pathetic... as was his Jeremy Paxman.

Enfield's not an impressionist. He's just like a lot of people in the world who can "do accents". I thought he had a writing talent, but that was completely missing from this show.

An utter waste. And you know you have a bad programme when the makers decide to put a "bloopers" tape over the end-credits (see L.A 7, too). The idea is to leave the viewer smiling and happy so that they marginally forget the 28 minutes of shit beforehand.

Not gonna work Sky. This show was memorably BAD.

Review copyright © Dan Owen, 2000.

E-mail Dan Owen

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