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Dom Robinson reviews

The Best of
Trigger Happy TV Series 1

Distributed by

Cert:
Cat.no: VCD 0108
Running time: 90 minutes
Year: 1999
Pressing: 2000
Region(s): 2, PAL
Chapters: 13 plus extras
Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
Languages: English
Subtitles: None
Fullscreen: 4:3
16:9-enhanced: No
Macrovision: Yes
Disc Format: DVD 9
Price: £19.99
Extras: Archive footage (DVD exclusive), Comedy Lab clip

Directors:

Dom Joly and Sam Cadman

Producers:

Dom Joly and Sam Cadman

Music

Featuring:

That's the greeting which will be well-known to fans of this excellent comedy series broadcast earlier on Channel 4 in which new talent Dom Joly gives us his own take on the Candid Camera genre.

Do mobile phones in restaurants and other public areas piss you off? One running sketch features Dom answering an oversized one, very loudly, much to both the surprise and annoyance of unsuspecting members of the public around him (damn, I wish I had a signal jammer when those go off!). In another he's seen trying to attract the attention of other members of the public and make them an offer they can't refuse while standing under a sign, "Do not trust this man" with a picture of him placed alongside, while another shows him constantly enquirying in an "Any Item £1" shop how much each individual item is.

The series also included interviews of Dom generally taking the piss out of people like Patrick Moore, Tamara Beckwith, Ken Livingstone and Tim Rice, but they didn't know the score when they first took part.

The picture looks very good - just as you'd have expected to have seen it on TV - and was shot in standard 4:3 fullscreen. The encoding suffers a bit for the extras though. The average bitrate is 5.5Mbs, twice peaking over 9Mb/s.

The sound is Dolby Surround. It's mostly used for dialogue, with perfect pieces of music chosen including The Smiths' Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, Duran Duran's The Chauffer, Blur's To The End and Elastica's Connection, the latter being used for the theme tune. However, if you watched this on TV with the subtitles on, they told you what songs were played. Here there are no subtitles which is a real pain.

Extras :

The Archive footage is a series of DVD-exclusive clips, introduced by Dom Joly, taken from when he and Sam Cadman worked for the Paramount Comedy Channel. Footage includes their attempt to stand in the 1997 General Election as the "Teddy Bear Alliance", coming fifth in the Kensington and Chelsea borough with 218 votes, plus what would happen after Michael Portillo lost his seat, so couldn't run for Tory leader, but his distant Mexican cousins turned up? In another guise they set off to desecrate Teletubbyland! This section lasts 14 minutes.

The Comedy Lab footage comes from Channel 4's series for which they put together 12 minutes of similar, excellent material as a taster for the six-part series that was to come. I won't count this in the 'extras' score though as it's included within the 90-minute feature.

There are few chapters and, as I stated before, there are no subtitles which is very annoying because it brings back the "Miami Vice" problem - another show where you kept thinking "What's that tune?" but you were NEVER told.

The main menu is animated like the opening credits, but is silent.

Overall, I loved this show and am looking forward to the next series. What is infuriating about this DVD is that it's a "Best Of". Each of the six episodes were around 25 minutes long, making at least two-and-a-half hours of material which has been cropped to 78 minutes before the Comedy Lab material is added.

If VCI can manage to release the whole of The Royle Family Series 1 and The Royle Family Series 2 on a DVD apiece, why must we have to make do with just a compilation for this release? I want the whole thing! (Please)

FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS
OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000

Check out VCI's and Film Four's Web site.

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