Robert Hampton

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26th November 2005

Rimming Shakin’ Stevens
Posted by at 11.35pm | No responses | Uncategorised

I think I’ve worked out why the current series of Little Britain is subpar — Lucas and Walliams have clearly devoted a lot of their writing energy to the live shows, and it showed.

OK, it wasn’t perfect, and we had some of the crap characters from series 2 and 3 in there: Ting Tong, Mrs Emery and the vomiting WI lady. But let’s gloss over that and move on.

Some of my favourites from the earlier series were back: Ray McCooney the Scottish hotelier was great (WHY did they drop him after the first series?). Dennis Waterman was there, and brilliantly they managed to stage the skewed-perspective he’s-a-very-small-man jokes live in the theatre. Des Kay (from HTV’s The Fun Bus) showed up and picked a poor hapless man out of the audience to play Hunt the Sausage (use your imagination).

The show was rounded off with an extended Daffyd Thomas sketch, and what could have been just an excuse to trot out worn out catchphrases instead turned into a marvellous Village People style song-and-dance number.

In short, it was great and went a long way to restoring my faith in the show. It’s just a shame the third TV series isn’t matching up to this quality.

Sadly there was no Matthew Waterhouse sketch, but in the theatre foyer I picked up a leaflet advertising a show which could have come from one of his pitches.

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