Not many comedy shows have a cast that includes Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Helen Mirren. Such is the case with Totally Looped, a US import in which, prompted by audience suggestions, comics improvise new dialogue to old film clips. In LA, regular Totally Looped stars include Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson. In the UK, Phill Jupitus and Marcus Brigstocke are among those slated to appear in the tour. Either might have enlivened a slim-pickings evening of impro in Peterborough, in which several waffly scripts had me wishing we could just listen to the originals instead.
It sometimes works - and maybe the hit-rate is usually higher than here. When the footage offers the improvisers something dynamic to react to - for example, Q demonstrating a booby-trapped briefcase to Sean Connery's Bond - the challenge generates laughs. But the comedy flounders when the clips are static. A lie detector test in a Jimmy Stewart movie, and a conversation in The Queen between Helen Mirren as the monarch and Sylvia Sims as the Queen Mother (dubbed by Pippa Evans and Hattie Hayridge respectively), devolve into directionless twittering. More fundamentally, the improvised dialogue is too quiet, and performers who (as per impro's golden rule) should be listening to one another's every word sometimes seem to be operating in isolation.
It doesn't help that the extracts end arbitrarily, which reduces the comics' control over timing and structure. There's still plenty to raise a smile here, including a tense, black-and-white Claude Rains movie dubbed into the tale of a lothario who plans to marry eight women. And impro itself is inherently funny: to see performers blurt out half-formed thoughts provokes laughter, regardless of the quality of what is produced. Sadly, that quality is too low tonight.
