With Alan Carr’s Happy Hour acting as a less obnoxious version of TFI Friday over on Channel 4, there’s a retro feeling to Friday night television, and David Walliams’ primetime sketch show Walliams & Friend (BBC1) is chipping in with 70s-style ribaldry. In place of Matt Lucas, the comedy partner with whom Walliams became a household name and catchphrase merchant in Little Britain, is a rotation of guests who each take on an episode’s worth of co-starring. After Jack Whitehall and Harry Enfield, it’s Sheridan Smith’s turn, and there’s a Variety performance showmanship to her that complements Walliams’ “ooh matron” leanings nicely.
This is very, very silly humour that largely exists outside the direction comedy has taken over the past 30 years, but it’s capable of hitting the mark, nonetheless. You think you know where a skit called Carry On Up the Sexual Harassment Tribunal is going, until the hapless boss happens to call his Barbara Windsor-esque tea lady (Smith, camping it up a treat) “love” and it collapses into a stern talking-to about feminism and the patriarchy. Middle-Class Jeremy Kyle sees Walliams doing his best guest-baiting as the aggressive chat-show host, only this time the dispute is over homemade or shop-bought cake offered up for the church sale. Two schoolgirls reminiscing on a park bench get increasingly more surreal as the time window for nostalgia shrinks and shrinks. The Game of Thrones-ish body double-riff, in which Walliams and Smith are paired up, only works because it shouldn’t. The weirder it is, the funnier it is.
Last year, Channel 4’s head of comedy said he was no longer looking for sketch shows, and there’s a wider argument that sketches should now exist as single online videos, to be watched and shared quickly, rather than in half-hour chunks. Walliams & Friend may be old-fashioned, but it thrives on charm and silliness, and points a way for the sketch show to continue to exist on television.
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