Late Night Lycett

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.

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?

RogerRoger77 below seems to have seen a different Late Night Lycett than we did. We loved it.

"...but the nadir came with the attempt to parody GB News, an excruciatingly ill-rehearsed and poorly written effort in which Lycett simply couldn't land a successful joke... His cohost in this segment, Alan Carr, at least had the decency to look bewildered and embarrassed by the whole thing."

Um, noooo. Whey then did every punchline have the audience screaming with laughter? The entire segment was brilliant, a perfect parody of GB News' fake white male outrage. And Carr was streets from bewildered. Apparently you didn't get the joke that his character was reading from the prompter? Yeah, you needed to figure that out.

I'm going to guess that you are NOT a "Guardian reader", as you pointedly put it. Not to worry, there are plenty of chat shows for you out there. In fact quite a few on GB News.

Late Night Lycett is not like anything we've seen before, and we look forward to every Friday night now.

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.

Joe Lycett the comedian can sometimes be reasonably funny - though, let's be honest, his act is essentially a watered-down version of Julian Clary's from thirty years ago - but as a 'political' and 'social' commentator he is painfully one-note and predictable. The problem is that his elevation to some kind of figurehead status by Guardian-readers for his oh-so-brave takedowns of the softest of soft targets (like Liz Truss and David Beckham, i.e. People who pretty much no one defends) seems to have gone to his head. Thus, he seems to believe that throwing out any random jibe that sounds a bit contemporary - look at me, I mentioned Twitter! - is enough to make a comment bitingly satirical, when it is usually anything but.

In the case of this programme, he is desperately in need of better writers. The interviews themselves were mediocre enough, but the nadir came with the attempt to parody GB News, an excruciatingly ill-rehearsed and poorly written effort in which Lycett simply couldn't land a successful joke, however much mugging to camera he tried. His cohost in this segment, Alan Carr, at least had the decency to look bewildered and embarrassed by the whole thing.

Satire (and comedy) really has fallen a long way since the golden age of alternative comedy in the 1980s - agree with them or not, but Alexei Sayle, the Comic Strip team, even Ben Elton in his prime, were simply so much funnier.

EDIT: I seem to have upset another reviewer (Lycett's agent?) as you can see in one of the other reviews. Flattered to be acknowledged! Just one point in reply: it's a useful rule of thumb that the more hysterically an audience is laughing in a TV studio, the less funny a show usually is. Those of us at home - not drunk, high, or being whipped up by the show's producers - are generally much better placed to judge.