Comedy and sport do not mix. That’s why the average episode of A Question of Sport makes you feel like you’re suffering a bout of carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s why Freddie Flintoff makes Jacamo adverts and not stand-up specials. It’s why, whenever Jimmy Greaves would turn to camera and say “It’s a funny old game”, he’d do it in such a genuinely mournful way that foreigners would be forgiven for thinking he was actually saying “The universe is cold and random” or “All is naught but pain and dust”.
And yet people won’t stop trying to shove them both together. This Saturday, ITV launches Play to the Whistle, a sports-based comedy panel show starring Holly Willoughby, Frank Lampard and – in an act of flagrant disrespect for that piece I wrote last year calling him one of our biggest talents – Bradley Walsh. It feels unfair to judge a show before it even begins, and yet I’d put money on Play to the Whistle being little more than a lazy rip-off of A League of Their Own. In fact, while my wallet’s out, I’ll put a tenner on it being about as funny as a wasp attack too.
Because the signs aren’t good. Whenever sport and comedy attempt to mix, comedy is always the first thing to die. It withers and fades and gets replaced by its boneheaded cousin, banter. A League of Their Own, for example, was banter city – a boorish, self-congratulatory, oddly public school mixture of physical pain and humiliation that would routinely die in its boots whenever a professional sportsman had to explain something with the faraway monotone of the post-match interview.
The dreary cadence of the sportsman has historically killed shows like this again and again. Jim Davidson’s snooker-themed gameshow Big Break already had enough to contend with, with shellshocked members of the public and a violently unpleasant host, but the addition of mumbling professional snooker players like Peter Ebdon would never fail to grind all momentum to a depressed standstill.
And sometimes, as with Jimmy Tarbuck’s 1996 golf-themed gameshow Full Swing, things would get even more desperate. In a weird bid for sporting authenticity, everyone from Tarbuck to the contestants to whichever member of the Moody Blues happened to be guesting that week ended up adopting a tedious golfer’s monotone. The end result was that you felt like you were watching a particularly awful workplace training video rather than a primetime BBC1 entertainment programme.
Worse still, perhaps the worst of the whole bunch, was You Cannot Be Serious. A 2012 Alistair McGowan vehicle intended to become to sport what Harry Hill’s TV Burp was to television, it came and went in such a low-key manner that it isn’t even listed on McGowan’s IMDb page.
In fact, the nearest thing to a workably funny sport comedy show is American sitcom The League, which can be found in the UK on Netflix. Even then, it only manages to be fitfully amusing when nobody is mentioning sport – whenever American football is brought up, or a player lumbers onscreen for a cameo, everyones’ eyes begin to involuntarily glaze over.
But still, it doesn’t matter if Play to the Whistle isn’t very funny. It doesn’t matter if it’s so unfunny that it gets pulled off-air after a single episode. It doesn’t matter if it’s so unfunny that people literally clutch their chests and die during it.
Because, before long, someone else will make another sport-based comedy show. Comedians and athletes will always be drawn to each other, and that’s because they complete each other. Comedians have the verbal dexterity and speed of thought that athletes lack, and athletes have the physical capabilities that comedians were born without. And, while it’s great for them that they get so many chances to hang out with each other, it always spells terrible news for the rest of us.
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