The Goes Wrong Show

This might not be to everyone's sense of humor but it had us laughing until our sides hurt! Haven't seen anything that funny for a long time - well done BBC.

It's so good to see a BBC comedy which, while not an insult to the intelligence (Mrs Brown take note), is actually trying to make people laugh - and on prime time too! Daftness, slapstick, beautifully performed live stunts, and above all laughter. The trend for ditching studio audiences and laugh tracks has been a dead end - has led to a string of painfully up-themselves middle class memoirs posing as comedies. Because if you have a laugh track, you have to be at least a little bit funny or you just embarrass yourself - it keeps comedy honest.

To get postmodern audiences to accept this kind of material, though, the makers have framed the whole thing ironically: you're not laughing at what happens on the show so much, you're laughing at the show itself. The drawback is, there's no real story or characters to sustain your interest in the gags. Half an hour of this, therefore, is a lot. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, the first really hopeful sign from BBC1 comedy since Miranda - and that, as they recently reminded us, is now 10 years ago!

If you've watched mischief theatre before then you know the deal. Forgotten lines and dodgy scenery. This episode doesn't fail to deliver. Can only hope the next few episodes keep up the good work

Huge amounts of laughing at each episode, the writing, delivery and timing is absolutely perfect and the cast are exceptional. Original and brilliant.

I don't think it's a spoiler, given the title of the show, to say that this a celebration of things going wrong. It's also a celebration of the cast's attempts to soldier on through it and try to make the best of it. The Christmas story itself is largely inconsequential as it's just a vehicle to cram in as much mayhem as possible. It occasionally feels like anti-Christmas (or an anti-Disneyfied version of Christmas) and is all the funnier because of it.

What's most impressive is the number of different ways that have been conceived for a production to go wrong. It feels like it's been distilled from Acorn Antiques, It'll Be Alright On The Night, the Alan Partridge Christmas Special, but with a flavour of its own too. It's so quickfire that you really need to watch it more than once to catch everything, and it's just as grimly funny the second and even third time around. An increasingly belligerent and cynical Santa ties the whole thing together beautifully, although it wouldn't be the same without a visibly frustrated elf, an invisibly frustrated elf, and a snowman that meets a bad end (how did that do that?)

Very much looking forward to the rest of this series.