The last show you loved
My wife and I have just been rewatching 30 Rock, since in lockdown we’ve gone back to watching sitcoms that we really like. I know it’s got into hot water recently with its blackface episodes, but it does otherwise hold up really well. I realised I had forgotten a lot, which is the problem as I get older; it’s almost a new show to me again.
We also watched Community again, which was probably my favourite sitcom when it came out. The first three series of Community are still pretty solid and that’s written by Dan Harmon who also makes Rick and Morty, which is probably my favourite TV show ever. You realise that, with Rick and Morty, each episode is so deep and dense it is extraordinary. It slightly annoys me that it’s so good; it’s almost unbeatable as a TV show.
Your favourite episode of TV
Loads of the Rick and Morty episodes are my favourites. The first time we meet Mr Poopybutthole, which is in an episode [Total Rickall] about this virus that gets in your brain and inserts fictitiously good memories, is just wild. I also find the Meeseeks episodes endlessly amusing. There are so many deep and brilliant ideas, since they’ve got the freedom to be ruder than a lot of conventional TV shows.
Your TV guilty pleasure
I don’t know if this was a pleasure, but it was something I did perhaps guiltily just before lockdown. I watched the whole of How I Met Your Mother. I wanted to see how they could stretch it out for so long and if it was any good, but it just seems like a sitcom from the 90s. A lot of the sexual politics in it are so out of date now. You’re meant to find Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) cheeky and lovable, but he’s tricking women to go to bed with him and then dumping them and he has books of how to seduce women and cheat them into having sex. It’s all very strange and I didn’t enjoy it.
A better guilty pleasure would be Death in Paradise. It’s formulaic, but there’s something very comforting about it and it is surprisingly good. It’s a bit of a middle-aged show, which is maybe why I enjoy it, but I think the central performances are very good and the format is strong, since they’ve lost nearly the entirety of the original cast now. It’s fun trying to work out who the murderer is and you just enjoy seeing the main character sitting in a beach bar and drinking beer. It’s something that I’ll have on in the background while I’m messing around on the internet.
Your favourite show when you were 10
The show that first massively impacted on me was Tiswas, with people like Lenny Henry, Chris Tarrant, John Gorman and the Phantom Flan Flinger. I loved that kind of surrealist, anarchic humour. I actually saw Chris Tarrant when I was about 10 or 11 on a school trip to Switzerland, but he bolted into his car and drove off before I could get to him.
When I got a little older, The Young Ones ignited me in terms of wanting to be a comedian. I was just obsessed with Rik Mayall and I copied being him at school for years.
The show that should never have been cancelled …
Freaks and Geeks is the one show that I think was cancelled way too soon. It still stands up and it’s an amazing cast who went on to be stars in their own right. It hit the ground running and at the time I was very upset about it being cancelled.
Everything I’ve been involved with has ended much too soon! I feel like, in the UK, we tend to end things too quickly. For me, the American Office is better than the British Office because it has the time to develop the characters. It can often work better when you can realise the scope of bringing out other characters and working through different ideas.
… and the show that should be cancelled
Maybe the Simpsons should stop now. That’s just because what it had for the first 200 episodes or so was incredible and now the longer they go on, the more they risk spoiling all that excellent work. There was this real focus on the family life and the relationships between characters for the first nine seasons or so and that’s somewhat been lost now. I suppose I could just stop watching it, but for the love of the early seasons it should end.
The final episode of the third series of Richard Herring’s Relativity is on 21 August at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4.
