The Fast Show

It is more than ten years since the debut of The Fast Show, and attention spans are greatly reduced. So it is hard to believe that the show was born of what at the time was a rather unique concept - keep the laughs coming by keeping comedy sketches as short as possible, firing them out one after another, and being as precise as possible with barbs and gags.

If you are familiar with the British alternative comedy crowd - French and Saunder, Lenny Henry, Ben Elton, Rick Mayall - you understand why the notion of brevity and precision was somewhat revolutionary. The alt-com crowd had a tendency to squeeze every possible laugh or chuckle out of an idea, to - in short - end up flogging a dead horse. Arguably, the reason for such a habit was that making your point was more important than getting easy laughs. The Fast Show turned this around, asking, what was the point of comedy if you were not getting a stream of laughs that never let up?

The Fast Show featured a collection of talented comedians - all relatively young, with their own appeal, but who were also great character actors and impressionists - twisting the mundane into the absurd. Family dinners, foreign news programs, the country-house set, all became fodder for laughs. And, over the half hour of the show, sketches flew by.

Over the course of The Fast Show's run, certain characters became extremely popular, and there were numerous concepts that could have been rolled into sitcoms or movies. However, the greatest success of The Fast Show is that it reintroduced a certain slickness to sketch comedy, something that had existed with shows like Not the Nine O'clock News, and previously had been toyed with by Monty Python's Flying Circus, but had been largely banished by the alt-com crowd.

The Fast Show bears, in an interesting way, a resemblance to Laugh In, the American variety show from the 60s/70s. Both shows were frivolous, sharp, often silly, and zippy. The difference is this: The Fast Show, relying more on character comedy, and drawing it characters from the stable of English and European "types", will never seem as dated as Laugh In.

The Fast Show represents some of the finest comedic writing, performances, and timing since the very early days of BBS comedy (which is huge praise). The format is based around mostly quick sketches of characters that are not only funny, but immediately identifiable. Every single sketch is magic, not only being outright funny, but many also mixing comedy, with tragedy and usually with a poignant comment on society. The acting is, to use a Fast Show catch phrase - Brilliant!, with the performers going over the top when needed, but also being subtle and somehow surprisingly dramatic just at the right moments. With that said though, there are many laughs to be had, and I still get a good laugh out of it five years after the series finished up (and having seen all the episodes many times before). For those of you that need big names mentioned before you'll give a show a chance, then watch the last Fast Show ever which stars Johnny Depp in a scene with two of the funniest characters from the whole series (Depp was a huge fan of the show, especially the driving force behind it - Paul Whitehouse)

An American not familiar with this show, as I was, will probably compare it to SNL (Saturday Night Live).

However, there are four big differences. One, it's not live. Two, no music. Three, no guest stars. Four, it's consistently funny.

Anyone who has watched SNL will know that for every absolutely-roll-in-the-isle-genius-sketch, there are about ten poor ones.

These sketches range from the monotonous to the downright painful. Then there are the painful one-joke movie franchises (Wayne's World excluded).

Then I saw the Fast Show, while living abroad a few years. Each sketch was hilarious or memorable, and each character was inspired and sometimes even vaguely rounded.

The editors are intelligent enough to cut off one joke characters before five minutes of an painful, drawn-out sketch. In the Fast Show it is: character's on, cut to a new character, cut back, cut to a new character, cut back etc. Humor is mostly timing, anyway.

Imagine SNL with much better editing and consistently funny and that's what you've got here. It is disappointing that the talent in the show has gone largely unrecognized to this point.

From start to end, I've always found "The Fast Show" (known as "Brilliant," in America) hysterically funny. It's well written -- very grown up humor, here. Anyone who was hooked on SCTV will adore every moment! I can only hope that they'll produce another run of shows. 'Priceless.

The Fast show is one of the funniest programs to come out of the home of sketch England. It is full of one liners, running gags and send ups that leave you laughing hours after the show is finished. Characters such as Arthur Atkinson and the news team from channel nine will become timeless classics of British comedy. Also check out previous works by some of the team especially the "Harry Enfield and chums" television program.