Late Night Lycett

Anyone claiming this is the 'new TFI Friday' or 'Big Breakfast' clearly wasn't around in the 90s. What we have here is an hour of self indulgent laugh free crass that deserves to be confined to televisual history. Lycett surrounds himself with a bunch of oddball sycophantic nobodies and indulges in his own weak puerile sense of humour for an hour long snooze fest. I long for the days of TFI Friday which at least was original and edgy in a good way given its timeslot. What Lycett's been handed is a late night licence to explore his self infatuated persona and inflict it on an unsuspecting generation with nothing better to compare it to. Give it a miss, you're won't regret it.

So, as the name implies, this is a late night variety show hosted by comedian Joe Lycett in a studio in Birmingham. It's in the slot where The Last Leg normally is on Channel 4, at 10:00pm.

I'll be honest, Lycett is one of the comedians I can take more than most. He CAN be funny, although he does engage in the same dirty humour that most comedians use. Yes, he swears a lot and so does this show, but he mostly puts the focus on comedy towards being twisted and wacky at times. And aside from this show, Lycett is quite a crazy person himself, if you've seen from his marketing stunts and whatnot.

Alright, the whole concept is similar to that of TFI Friday. There are many segments written by Lycett but, as I said in the title, they fall flat. One of them spoofs GB News, which seems like a genius move considering it's a disaster of a network, but nope - it just had to be underwhelming. I don't need to explain, but it just is! When the show isn't being the same vulgar jokes you hear on other comedy shows, it does bring in some funny gags. Katherine Ryan's running gag in Series 1 where she never gets to be on the show shows off Lycett's power to be wacky and slapsticky.

The guests on the show are normally people from the LGBT+ scene. This brings in quite a wide variety of people of various types. However, there are other guests as well, so there is a wide variety. At least it doesn't exclusively feature comedians.

Overall, Late Night Lycett is a let down of a show, but the good points prevent it from being a very bad programme. It's surely better than Smart TV and other panel shows I've watched, which try too hard to be edgy for the sake of being on pay TV.

Only watched this because Chris Packham was a guest and ended up embarrassed for Chris and for the other guests as well. All guests smiled their way through and did their best but it was excrutiating. It does give TFI Friday vibes because it's attempting the same chaotic fun but this show is puerile without reason and with a very low attention span - each segment is short and whips to something else before you really work out what the point is. I spent the whole thing wondering what on earth the crowd are finding to cheer about? Why are the crowd so happy? Nothing much is happening. I do love the idea of the GB News parody, but it isn't done very well. I think this show would improve with a bit more political bite and interesting chat, and less pointless fluff, but maybe that's just me.

Lycett's foray into the realm of the Friday night live show has been a running experiment since its inception. Series 1 got caught up in the same little formula that got tired fast but the second series had tons of progression and promise, a kind of whirligig meta-narrative about Lycett's aunties that is really wild but is perhaps too welded to the celeb interviews to go where it needs to go. That being said - the specific local vibe is unmatched on UK telly, it is funny, the guests were well chosen and the occasional patches of chaos (some planned, some not) can be quite refreshing. I still think we need even more localism, Joe's world could be interesting enough without crowbarring random celebrities into it. Perhaps just a single guest co-host?

I think the show was trying to recreate TFI Friday with Chris Evans. Well, it hasn't. They threw the whole LGBTQ++ celebrities at it. That just made it seem even more desperate. Joe Lycett is capable of better, which is why the whole sorry mess should be pulled, before his reputaion is indelibly tarnished. Even rent-a-posh tottie Joanna Lumley couldn't rescue this rubbish. Alan Carr being a screaming queen yet again just made it worse.

The fact that the programme comes live from Birmingham is an insult to the basically decent folk of that city. They gave us Crossroads, live from Pebble Mill etc. Come to think of it, the city doesn't exactly have a good track record of quality TV, does it?