Kalifire

For month prior to this being broadcast, Gervais was busy congratulating himself about this on his marketing reel, sorry, blog. We were told this was the funniest thing he'd done, so expectations were high; this was the man who co-created The Office, after all.

As it turns out, pre-declaring his own brilliance was a misjudgment, because this isn't very good. No, worse than that, this is terrible. It's not that it's offensive (though it tries to be), and it's not that it's badly acted (though nobody is going to win any BAFTAs for this), it's just badly written.

The entire premise is that a documentary crew is filming Warwick Davis, quite inexplicably. That tenuous premise is then stretched beyond breaking point to allow a series of interactions between celebrities and Gervais, and put Davis in a sequence of set-pieces that essentially invite the audience to laugh at a dwarf in compromising situations. There's literally no more to it than that.

Life's Too Short gets the odd chuckle, but by episode three, where we plum the depths of try-hard television by engineering awkward situations for the sake of it, at the expense of any laughter whatsoever, it's clear this has become a car-crash event for the writers. Fortunately for them, they have an army of sycophants who'd rather tell each other that a wheel-bound child being called gay and being unable to get up stairs is HILARIOUS rather than use their discernment to consider that it's not remotely funny; rather just an attempt to raise eyebrows in a distinctly witless fashion.

For the discerning comedy fan who wants to believe that Gervais and Merchant are as good as we all hoped they'd be ten years ago, avoid this like the plague.

When I heard about the many cameos and the premise of this movie, I was quite excited. Then I found out it's a Gervais project and my heart sank a bit. You see, Gervais isn't actually very funny. There's an irritating smugness running through his work, combined with a common 'one joke' theme. This is very evident here; Gervais takes a joke that a sketch shows like Mr. Show or SNL would nail in three minutes, and drags it out painfully over 90 minutes.

It doesn't help that the premise isn't nailed properly - it's not that people can't lie, they just feel compelled to say what's on their mind. After about ten minutes and a couple of laughs, it becomes clear that there really isn't anything more to this and you sit awkwardly in your seat as an over-rated comic relentlessly tries to make something of this idea. We lurch clumsily from romcom clichés, to out-of-place *serious* acting (i.e. Gervais crying), to messianic type religious rants, to a desperate attempt to wrap it all up focusing on a relationship that was never believable to begin with.

This movie plain sucks. A laugh-free, awkward experience and entirely unenjoyable. Gervais may put this down to a 'British backlash' against his work but the reality is we've had so much of him that we've now been able to see that he's not actually very good. Your time will come too, America.

This is a really, really good comedy. We tend to live in a culture where if something isn't making us laugh every few seconds, it gets overlooked. Such is the case with this show. The target is the repugnant daytime chat shows that exploit misery and anguish for cheap light entertainment through armchair psychology and stereotypical prejudice. There's a very tangible anger running through this show that elevates it from satire into something very biting and raw.

Saunders and Richardson are magnificent, Richardson particularly. Theirs are intelligent performances, superbly delivered. The show is co-written by Tanya Byron, a clinical psychologist and the show itself is largely about the manipulation and exploitation of emotion and vulnerability in the name of greed and media status. Will it make you laugh hysterically for 30 minutes a time? No. Is it designed to do so? No. Is criticism of it for not doing so therefore an epic failure of understanding and appreciation of dark comedic satire? Absolutely.