I’m supposed to write about the first episode of a new (the fifth, can you believe it) series of Sky’s “comedy-drama” Mount Pleasant. But it was so depressingly lame. It’s not even fun-to-hate bad, just predictable and unmemorable, and therefore best to ignore.
And luckily there is an especially joyous episode of of Would I Lie to You? (BBC1) which is already one of the most joyous things on the television.
Tinchy Stryder is a guest, which gives the others – host Rob Brydon especially – the opportunity to be consciously uncool/old/groansome. Rob is looking forward to hanging with Tinchy’s crew and getting on the decks, because he loves a regatta, hoho, groan.
Team captain Lee Mack seems to find it hard to come to terms with the fact that an artiste of the grime genre is rich enough – or would want – to have a conservatory in his house. It’s where Tinchy plays table tennis. Tinchy is ping-pong shy, and finds it hard to ask his neighbour for a game (not a lie, it turns out).
Other team captain David Mitchell, as usual, is funny by being a clever-clogs smarty-pants. At one point, Lee says to him: “Still doing all that old-school comedy I see” – which is rich, coming from Lee. Intentionally rich, and therefore funny.
Romesh Ranganathan was once a maths teacher, it turns out. A good one, I’d think: he says that an effective way to teach something well is to get them to explain it to someone else, which is what he used to do to his students, even if it did involve locking them in cupboards (true). Now a comedian, he takes on Jack Dee at deadpan. Which is brave.
And Jack Dee does a joke to – about – Gaby Roslin that he probably shouldn’t get away with. But he just about does, by blurting it out without thinking and then looking thoroughly ashamed of himself, as well as sort of blaming it on David. You can get away with a lot with the blurt/ashamed/blame-someone else approach, but you have to be quick, which luckily Jack is. As I said – lovely.
