Have you ever had the experience of thinking that something is going to be truly, good-awful, like fantastically monumentally shocking, and then being pleasantly mistaken, and finding it's not too bad, or better, even enjoyable?
I've had that feeling a few times, but I can only remember the one time really well. So I'll tell you about that. A few years ago, my friends kept on telling me about this comedy show, this surreal piece of "brilliance", as one said, called The Mighty Boosh. Now, back then, I hadn't seen these guys who were involved in it in anything, so I decided to avoid it, at least until the season had ended and I could get it cheap. I didn't want to waste money on some wank-pile, after all.
Then, a couple of years after it aired, I found season 1 on DVD in a shop, for about a fiver, so I thought, what the hell, and bought it. I went home, watched it, and within 30 minutes had laughed my tonsils out. Genuinely out. I had to keep them on a plate in the fridge all week.
I loved that show. I went to see it live 2 years later in Manchester. It is brilliant.
Well, Lee Nelson's Well Good Show is the polar opposite of that.
Designed as a kind of Russell Howard's Good News for the Jeremy Kyle audience, the presenter, a character comedian with a truly terrifying stare (think Chucky from Child's Play, but in a tracksuit), seems to have to hold the entire show up on his shoulders. Which is fine. Except this guy has somehow created some kind of chav comedy-vacuum into which all joy and fun of the brilliant Good News goes, and is never seen again. The material is a bunch of one-liners about how there's a fat co-host on stage, interspersed with our man Lee saying "innit" and perpetually fist-bumping the audience, to the point that you start to think that maybe you could run a small country on the energy of this man's fist. How it's sustained over 30 minutes, I don't know, let alone 2 seasons. All the while, he's talking about ketamine and blowies, 'cos, you know, he's hip, innit? And all the yoof like love wank-jokes and baseball caps and stuff, yeah? Man we at BBC 3 is right on the pulse innit?
How are all the episodes of this show on iPlayer? It's not worth the memory it's saved on... at one point in episode 1, they get some dads from the audience, Lee talks about their kids and how he'd like to bang the daughters ('cos he's down with the kids and kids all have sex now and then text about it, yeah?), and then gets them up on stage into a boxing ring, to fight over who the best dad is. Obviously. At this point, I've starting noticing the screen has this weird red tinge to it, and only after I take a look at my hands do I realise that it's blood from where I've been trying to gouge my own eyeballs out for the past 8 minutes.
This show is so self-evidently attempting to be cool and now that I'm surprised there's not an entire 10-minute section conducted entirely through text message. Mind, if that were the case, at least you wouldn't have to hear Lee's ridiculous squeal that he seems to do every time he says something even remotely offensive, or he mentions sex. Or drugs. Or women. Or he fist-bumps a guy. Or... look, he does it a lot, ok?
Oh, and apparently, the best way to decide who the best dad out of these two men that they've got on stage is, is the get them to put a condom on a banana with their mouth. Ha, 'cos it looks like he's bent, innit? And like, us yoofs hate queers yeah, 'cos they're like weird and shit? Yeah...
It's 10 minutes in. I'm turning it off. I can't hack this shitehawk for one more second, even with 14 pairs of irony-glasses practically glued to my eyes. He makes me want to vomit up my own intestines, if only to break up the monotony. If the BBC had hired Lee Nelson creator Simon Brodkin to create a show in which young orphans stripped to the waist and attempted to bludgeon each other to death using only dustbin lids and pool cues in a cold, abandoned warehouse, with music by Tonje Langeteig looped exfruciatingly loudly over the top, I think I'd prefer to watch that.
Actually, if you're reading, Director General, I'm patenting that idea. And I can get it done for half the price of the Well Good Show.
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