The Best of Trigger Happy TV Series 1

• 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
  

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  Directors:

  Dom Joly and Sam Cadman

Producers:

Music

Featuring:

Dom Joly

HELLO?!

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

Do mobile phones in restaurants and other public areas piss you off? Onerunning sketch features Dom answering an oversized one, very loudly, much toboth the surprise and annoyance of unsuspecting members of the publicaround him (damn, I wish I had a signal jammer when those go off!). In anotherhe’s seen trying to attract the attention of other members of the publicand 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, whileanother shows him constantly enquirying in an “Any Item £1” shophow much each individual item is.

The series also included interviews of Dom generally taking the piss outof 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 onTV – and was shot in standard 4:3 fullscreen. The encoding suffers a bit forthe 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 perfectpieces of music chosen including The Smiths‘ Last Night I DreamtThat 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 TVwith the subtitles on, they told you what songs were played. Here there areno subtitles which is a real pain.

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

There are few chapters and, as I stated before, there are no subtitles whichis very annoying because it brings back the “Miami Vice” problem -another show where you kept thinking “What’s that tune?” but you wereNEVER 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 thesix episodes were around 25 minutes long, making at least two-and-a-halfhours of material which has been cropped to 78 minutes before the Comedy Labmaterial is added.