The week s best comedy on TV and radio
The week’s best new comedy on TV and radio.
Monday May 10
MOTHERLAND: The close-to-home parenting comedy returns for a third series. As a nit pandemic sweeps the school, Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) finds herself accused of triggering a second wave - so decides to host a treatment party in her home to get back into the good books of her fellow patients. Philippa Dunne, Tanya Moodie, Paul Ready, Lucy Punch and Diane Morgan all return, too.
BBC Two, 9pm
INSIDE NO 9: Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith star in a new season of their dark comedy dramas, starting with Wuthering Heists, a mashup of heist movie and commedia dell’arte - though it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know what that is. Pantalone has an audacious plan to steal a consignment of diamonds - but he’s hired a complete bunch of double-crossing clowns to do it. The guest cast features Kevin Bishop, Paterson Joseph and Gemma Whelan.
Xenophobic twaddle: Bush Theatre's 2036 reviewed spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Verdict: Sweet, but still harrowing
Contrary to my persistent belief, Oscar Wilde did not say ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’.
It certainly sounds like him, but it was in fact a line from the much lesser-known Victorian man of letters, Charles Caleb Colton.
Even so, it was a sincere form of flattery if not folly for Yasmeen Khan to produce a pastiche of one of Wilde’s best-loved and most-quoted comedies, resetting it in modern ’uddersfield, the northern town that lost its initial letter.
Wilde’s original features a series of improbable mix-ups involving two men sharing the pseudonym Ernest. Khan replaces metropolitan young cards Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff with vain romcom actor Algy (Tom Dixon) and desperate out-of-work thesp Jamil (Gurjeet Singh).
The Importance of Being Earnest
Billed as a very modern take on Oscar Wilde s classic comedy , Yasmeen Khan s North of England-set, Asian-centric distillation, with its slapstick sound effects, fart jokes, double entendres and variable puns, actually feels more like a throwback to 1970s TV sitcom and the
Carry On films. There s even the You Have Been Watching.. closing credits framework as seen in such old BBC bangers as
Are You Being Served and
It Ain t Half Hot Mum.
That s not to say it isn t funny – it mostly is – but references to modern phenomena such as
Peaky Blinders, Instagram followers and diversity, inclusivity.all the bandwagons , in the words of Algernon s manservant Lane, reimagined here by Divina De Campo as a tartly disdainful drag queen PA, feel more puzzlingly out-of-place than the nostalgia for late twentieth century TV comedy and game shows.
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde updated for the Nando's generation theartsdesk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theartsdesk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.