Reasons To Be Cheerful...

I took the boy to see The Fantastic Four movie on Saturday. It’s now a major point of bonding between us that we go see CGI-laden comic-book-based movies together without the missus. This means we can pig out on popcorn, sweets and nachos without having to face my good lady wife’s chilling line in disapproving looks and sighs when the crunch factor gets too loud.

Sadly it does rob us of the potential for sarcastic question and answer sessions:
Missus: ‘Are you really going to eat all that popcorn?’
Me: ‘No I’m going to save some of it to fashion a length of popcorn rope that I intend to secrete about my person and escape from the bedroom when you’re not looking later tonight.’
Missus: ‘Well make sure it doesn’t snap or you’ll get injured which means I’ll have to nurse you back to health. And that’s quite dull...’
Me: ‘Sod it. I’ll fashion a noose instead...’

But the upside of me and the boy heading off on our own is that I get to watch as many superhero pictures as I want without sitting in the cinema on my own looking like a kiddy-fiddler on reconnaissance.

Good as The Fantastic Four was, though, it provided nowhere near the amount of entertainment that BBC3 offered last night with the return of two of my favourite comedy series.

The first of these was The Smoking Room. This, as its title suggests, is set in the smoking room of a company where various members of staff come to bitch, gossip, moan and generally waste time in pointless chatter rather than go back to work. It’s a one-set sitcom and it uses the same eight or nine characters with odd guests dropping in from time to time so it could easily become quite staid. But the writing by Brian Dooley is razor-sharp and the mundane dialogue and offbeat gags are bang on the button. It’s good to see a standard of writing that you can aspire on telly every now and then.

The highlight of the night, though, was the return of The Mighty Boosh. This is a totally surreal comedy about two zookeepers and their off-the-wall adventures. Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt are the double-act behind this unmitigated piece of genius and last night’s adventure saw the duo and their shaman chum Naboo and his gorilla familiar Bolo go to a shack in the woods and escape a gang of sex-mad Yetis. Think Morecambe and Wise doing Ernie’s ‘plays wot he wrote’ on crack and you’ll get the idea. It’s the most inventive comedy on TV at present and if it doesn’t win a major award soon the world’s gone seriously wrong.

Brit TV drama may be pretty rubbish at present but the comedy’s coming thick and fast. Hurrah!