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The Best...sketch comedians

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul
  • Posted at 3:25pm
  • 22 August 2008
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 3 comments

Anyone who watches comedy programmes with an unhealthy regularity will know that the sketch-show format is frighteningly unreliable. Even the ones that you mark down as your favourites end up coasting - as soon as the comedians figure out that if they can make 20 per cent of it thigh-slapping stuff, they can get away with padding out the rest with familiar catchphrases, shaggy dog stories and the ubiquitous and horrible musical pastiche stuck at the end.

As a result, half-hour skit shows seem to have lost their way, superseded by other comedy formats on the rise - darker sitcoms with no laughter track, comedy characters given their own shows, and even the resurgence of top-notch stand-ups like Peter Kay and Al Murray.

So it's doubly surprising that when Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse decided to make a comedy show together last year for the first time in a decade, they chose to do it in a sketch-show format - and that they came up with a collection of characters that were as good as, if not better than, the creations that made them famous.

Since The Fast Show, we've known Paul Whitehouse as not only a brilliant comedian, but a gifted actor who can build up tension and, dare I say it, pathos. And Harry Enfield will always stick in our minds thanks to a sackload of preposterous, bumbling creations such as Wayne Slob and Tim Nice-But-Dim.

The first series of Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul delivered brilliant scripts and a host of great characters, including the elderly American tourists thrust into an alien British environment, thousands of miles from their home in Badiddleyboing, but still displaying relentless cheerfulness, and the mysterious man in a strange hat who deflects criticism from brusque women in positions of power by simply offering a selection of soft-centred chocolates.

Of course, Paul and Harry are both pushing 50 now, and it's not surprising that the majority of their newer skits say more about the lives led by a couple of wealthy blokes in the throes of middle age than anything else: like the owner of the Notting Hill boutique who sells nothing but junk hauled out of a skip, but nevertheless manages to get prices upwards of £1,000 from his persistently brainless clientele.

And, best of all, the wonderful running sketch of the timid, bespectacled man who returns persistently to buy a cappuccino from a pair of stunningly attractive, but frustratingly inscrutable, Eastern European waitresses. The sketches might not say anything to us about our lives, but they still make us laugh, without fail. Let's hope the second series brings more of the same. What more could you ask for?

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Comments

  • Posted on 06 October 2008
  • at 7:53pm
  • by Rich

Mitchell and Webb are pretty funny, and so too are Armstrong and Miller, but sketch shows are a dying art form. Harry Enfield in his prime was funny, with his Grayson and Cholmondley-Warner characters possibly the funniest I've ever seen, but I can't be bothered watching his latest series. I'd much rather watch HIGNFY or QI.

  • Posted on 03 October 2008
  • at 9:17pm
  • by Dom

i was disappointed with this sketch show from harry and paul and didnt hink they showed their true comic genius, with this new show. i was hoping for something 'new' but was presented with the same old harry and paul stuff, which i really enjoyed, i was just under the impression that this was going to be different and groundbreaking like their original material. maybe i was expecting too much from 2 comic genii like harry and paul. enjoyed the show, and it made me laugh just dont expect something new, its pretty much the same characters with new names!

  • Posted on 03 October 2008
  • at 5:39pm
  • by Jim

I like that coffee man too. That sketch is a bit like Ted and Ralph from The Fast Show.

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