Attention Scum

Behold, the voyages of the Starship Transit, (whose excursion seems to be limited to certain parts of England for budgetary reasons) neatly shot and edited into a six part series. The ship's captain? The League against Tedium. Simon Munnery's angry intellectual/dictator character born out of the 1993 would-be comedy show, "Cluub Zarathustra". The League initially found fame on stage in London and later the Edinburgh festival but Attention Scum was to be his first foray into BBC comedy. This series unites some of the cast from Zarathustra under the directorial skills of Stewart Lee.

"The actor" Kevin Eldon is superb in all of his supporting parts, including messenger to the League. Musician Richard Thomas and Lori Lixenberg make up the Ear-fest that is Kombat Opera. And apparently it's Munnery's wife in the monkey suit. The only thing that doesn't quite fit in is 24hr news with Johnny Vegas, but this improved toward the end.

If anything the league manages to really make you think with his philosophical, often patronising, one-liners including,

"In love as in fighting the winner has an eight foot pole"

"My dog has no legs but he still chews bones. How does a dog with no legs chew bones? With a great deal of suspicion I noticed"

"He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Indeed - likewise he who lives by the pen, he who lives by the word processor, he who lives by the fax machine all shall die by the sword. Only he who lives by the tank shall remain immune"

Hidden away late at night, Attention Scum was a midnight feast of peculiarity and included an unforgettable opening sequence. But sadly, there isn't a second series planned and I sense this is one show you might be lucky to see if you have an obsessive friend with an unhealthy interest in recording obscure British comedy shows. In the end AS was a victim of it's own originality.

As there are only two comments, TWO COMMENTS? I thought I would leave another if only to make this program seem better than it is by sheer number of commenter's.

This show was one of the best and definitely most experimental shows(excepting changing rooms of course) ever to grace the screens of the BBC. Lots of weird, philosophical one-liners that in some cases you had to think about whilst the next jokes were almost passing you by too. The show had a unique, fast pace. Not like 'the Fast Show', no, not at all. More of a 'that sketch is now useless here comes the next one..!'and with a double drum-beat (ba-boom!), the sketches were stitched together. My favourite part of the show was the character of Simon Munnery in the tall hat whereupon he stood atop a specially converted van with a screen behind him, a camera on his walking stick and a microphone(sometimes a megaphone) just to get a point across. This section would appear to be filmed, as-is, no poses..just a live recording of him, doing what can only be described as SHOUTING at the slowly forming group/audience of members of the public which would be standing around the van, no doubt in wonder. This tirade of jokes(some of which I am sure were completely misunderstood, if understood at all), would always start with 'Attention Scum'. Hehe, I like that.

The humour is difficult to pigeon-hole.

There was an obvious play on superiority and mocking the so called great thinkers and the like. Mocking idiots and 'the public' was common too. There was also a good amount of mocking religion. No religion singled out though, all of them are bad, and good: but Christianity well.. that is just funny in the hands of Munnery.

I think this show won awards much to everyones surprise.

If you have not seen this and like any form of subversive or intellectual, clever or just sarcastic and cynical humour: hunt this out.

I am struggling to put into words how truly awful this 'comedy' is. Example: near the start there is a black screen which gets filled with large white text which proclaims that the viewer is "NOTHING" amongst various other insults and ends with "THIS IS YOUR FUTURE" with a shot of a grave. Well it is no better when you actually see it either. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy a wide range of comedies including offbeat stuff but this is shockingly bad. A five year old would be able to write the script for this stuff in 10 minutes. I can only assume the people who have given this good reviews are the performers themselves, relatives or have been taken hostage. I would rather get my teeth drilled than watch this - and I'm not even joking.

Loved this show. This is a Dada performance art done on television. Wonderful stuff. But I like Dada and Surrealism and Futurism and all that, which this is a rather welcome addition to the anti-art family. The pilot, Cluub Zarathustra, reminds me of what a night at Cabaret Voltaire must have been like. Of course, like anything in this vein, it needs to be short-lived. Six was about all they could get out of it, and six is the right number of episodes to leave you wanting more before they wore out their welcome.

The performances were terrific, the characters splendid, but the writing could have been a bit sharper. Funny, but it needs a few more good laughs, insightful, but sometimes lacking real depth. I would love to see them all get back together again and do another round, now that they are older and wiser. Recommended.

May I also recommend in this vein the Armando Iannucci Show, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, the All-New Alexei Sayle Show and of course, Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round.

'Attention Scum' was broadcast on BBC2 at 11.45pm on six consecutive Sunday evenings in 2001. To the best of my knowledge, the BBC has never repeated it, allowing now-defunct satellite network UK Play to re-run the series a couple of times before it folded.

The programme was filmed on a budget on £60,000 and the BBC decided before it was shown that they would not commission a second series. It was directed by Stewart Lee, whose progressively hilarious 'This Morning with Richard Not Judy' was also scrapped, this time after two runs.

The show was perhaps the most experimental sitcom ever shown on British TV, merging a number of disparate segments into a coherent, increasingly obtuse whole. Johnny Vegas' drunken insomniac news presenter ranted about 'punk kids' on 24 Hr News; a frightening, Viking-influenced opera singer wailed about being outed as a lesbian by her parents, and how she was twinned with Skegness; 1789-era aristocrats invented the 'New Flippancy'; and Simon Munnery fought with tanks, belittled Plato and Shakespeare, and delivered some one-liners that cut right to the quick.

Ultimately, the show would have struggled to attain a higher level of difficulty or absurdity than it did, but that does not excuse the BBC's bizarre attitude to its more experimental comedy. Munnery now hosts an 'Experimental Half Hour' on Resonance FM, with such gems as Lenin and Prokofiev's walk in the forest to find magic mushrooms, and Karl Marx's stab at a 'Capitalist Manifesto': "Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh ... you have ..."

As the previous reviewer suggested, Attention Scum was hardly mainstream comedy, and it is difficult to see how a 'school' could grow out of its influence, as occurred with Monty Python, The Simpsons and certain other comedy shows. Attention Scum was a genuine one-off, hosted by a bizarre, wonderful combination between Nietzsche, Mayakovsky, Artaud and Bill Hicks. See it if you can, but I suspect that the BBC will not give you another chance. For shame.