Radio Times review

Sometimes, you can't help wondering if Vic and Bob jotted down their script on a hungover bus journey to the studio. Tonight's episode has gloriously silly moments (including Bob as a clashing-cymbals monkey and, later, a Kafka-esque beetle on the wall) but feels more than usually thrown together. As ever the biggest laugh-out-loud moments come courtesy of booming lothario Beef (Matt Berry) who steals every scene he's in. We don't get to see Beef attempt the kiss of life on Bob's ex-wife (who has turned up for his birthday) but we do get to hear it, and that's terrifying enough.

Disaster strikes this week as a geriatric rat steals Bob's wig on the morning of the Toupee Wearer Of The Year Awards. Don't you hate it when that happens? Vic is on the case, though seeing as he's hopped up on Bosh's (Dan Skinner) home-made energy drink, that might not necessarily be a good thing. Other details poking out from the shattered remnants of a plot include Beef (Matt Berry) complaining about a frying pan through the medium of song, and a guest appearance from TV's resident scam-foiler, Dominic Littlewood.

Horses gallop around Bob's beautiful home in this week's surreal scamper as Vic Reeves pastes up some unique wallpaper he bought on eBay. And while ex-con Bosh ropes the gang in on impressing his probation officer - guest star Nikki Amuka-Bird (Luther) - the Beef (Matt Berry) shows up sporting a buttercup-yellow belt. So naturally he gets Vic and Bob to kneel before him to try that thing you do with buttercups - but with belts instead. Come close... no, closer.

Radio Times review

Vic has redecorated Bob's front room using wallpaper patterned with horses - German honeymoon horses, "Some galloping, some not so galloping." It doesn't sound like much of a catchphrase, but as each of the characters enters and picks up on it, the joke builds ridiculously. It's also another instance of the way Bob gets slightly excluded by the other characters and mocked for being a bit square - not least by his sneering teenage (Norwegian) son Erik.

But it's oddball friends Beef and Bosh who steal the show tonight. Beef (the terrific Matt Berry) enters wearing a roaringly daft catsuit, accessorised with "the most yellow of all my yellow belts", then surpasses it later with a tent-like Hawaiian muumuu dress. Add in a coconut-topped pizza, iron-ore shoes and some African nerve agent and you have the best episode yet.

Radio Times review

"I took the liberty of warming up your toupee," Vic tells Bob. Can you imagine that line in any other sitcom? Come to think of it, has there ever been a mainstream series (I'm discounting This Is Jinsy) where the lead character wears a hairpiece that is then subjected to mishaps and indignities?

In that respect House of Fools breaks new ground, and its plots aren't exactly boilerplate either: tonight's revolves around a large pork pie that next-door neighbour Julie has baked to impress a visiting Bruce Willis. When she leaves it for our heroes to look after it fares badly, of course, leading to a robbing-the-pie-factory scene, old-fashioned fart gags and the improbable line, delivered by Matt Berry as Beef: "Don't kill me! I'm ELO's archivist!"

If ever there was evidence that you should quit while you're not as ahead as you once were, House of Fools provides it by the bucketload. The inexorable decline of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer was pretty apparent during their recent online-only sketch affair, for which the description of tepid would have constituted a rave review. And now they're back with a sitcom that almost defiles the memory of their greatest hits (Shooting Stars and Catterick for two) and drags down the normally excellent Matt Berry with them.

It's full of the standard Vic 'n' Bob nonsense, but time has simply not been kind to their brand of non-sequitur surrealism, and you can't help but long for the days of the dove from above and Les Facts. House of Fools is oovavoo indeed.

Vic and Bob's latest offering, House of Fools, is a sort of parody of a classic sitcom and sees the pair's unique humour employed in a new setting.

Anybody who's ever seen one of Vic and Bob's comedy shows before knows exactly what to expect from House of Fools. Their new sitcom is essentially Shooting Stars in a house with all of their comedy regulars popping by to sing a song and do a bit of comedy.

I have to personally say that I rarely laughed during the course of the show, but that's to say I didn't enjoy it. Though the antics of Vic and Bob have begun to get a bit stale, especially after seeing how good Vic is when he acts under his real name of Jim Moir. Luckily there's a lot of talent in the supporting cast namely from Morgana Robinson as the sex-starved neighbour and Matt Berry as the boisterous Beef.

I have to say I'm not quite sure about House of Fools yet, as I don't know if it's trying to be a fully-fledged sitcom in its own right or simply attempting to parody the art of the situation comedy. But I'm definitely going to stick with it for now, mainly because I find Vic and Bob utterly enjoyable in whatever they do.

Everyone knows what they're getting with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, whose new comedy House of Fools - an absurdist spoof of 70s sitcoms played to a fashionably live audience - kicked off on BBC2. Would Bob get the peace and quiet he needed to invite his date round to watch Conan the Barbarian on TV? Or would Vic get stuck in a hole drilled through the wall to next door while their booming-voiced friend Beef (crazy Matt Berry in a role familiar to that seen in his recent Toast of London) defecated in a cereal box? Amid the chaos and rude slapstick there was much pleasing drollness, not least Bob's cri de coeur at Vic's promise to change his ways: "You can't change, you're fully realised."

The front room setting for almost all the action was the messiest, most fire hazard-ish, most tinned-pineapples-next-to-gas-masks collection of junk since Steptoe And Son. Even the set-up - one of the occupants trying to break out of this foosty male world to meet members of the opposite sex, only to be thwarted by his co-habitee - reminded me of at least half the episodes of Albert/Harold malarkey in my treasured boxset. This was House Of Fools, the return of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, welcome any time but especially last week.

It's Bob's house, and Vic's his lodger, which strictly speaking makes them the Hugh And I of right now. I imagine that in every instalment Bob will try to evict Vic, along with his gubbins, and fail. "General fannying about and whimbrelling," Bob will mutter. Whimbrelling? As I write, there are a mere seven mentions of the word in the whole of cyberspace, with five claiming Reeves and Mortimer have added a brand new word to the language. Not quite true: the other two mentions state that whimbrelling is the high-pitched call of the whimbrel, the wading bird. Then Vic will promise to mend his slovenly ways, only for Bob to sigh: "You can't change; you're fully realised." A running gag, then, or lying-down one. But that's all right: every sitcom needs one. And the tremendous advantage House Of Fools has over many is that everyone who wanders into the front room must sing a song of introduction.

The other fools include Bob's Norwegian son, randy cucumber-wielding Julie who lives next door, an ex-con called Bosh, and Beef played by Matt Berry, hot from Toast Of London, a ludicrous lothario in a cravat. "I travel this land removing my pants while making love to African ladies," warbled Beef.

House Of Fools is what in comedy used to be called surreal, before the word got appropriated by sportsmen at the London Olympics to describe the sensation of winning. Vic and Bob have just reclaimed it, and a good thing too.

Radio Times review

Imagine a 1970s domestic sitcom left so long in the cupboard it's gone fizzy, then been taken out, dipped in sprinkles and thoroughly baked by the surreal imaginations of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. That's the drift here. The notional setting is Bob's house, where Vic is a troublesome lodger who fills the place with junk - a painting of a pygmy, tins of pineapple, and so on. In the opening scene Vic sings a song about a knight's gauntlet he has just acquired, then Bob berates him for getting toilet rolls and curtains mixed up. Matt Berry arrives as their friend Beef, an expansive lothario of the kind Berry does better than anyone, and there's a man-eating neighbour called Julie.

The farcical sort-of-plot they get wrapped up in barely matters (Vic gets wedged in a hole cut between the two houses) and it's as obsessed with body parts and weird about the opposite sex as a 12-year-old boy. But if you like Vic and Bob's ludicrous humour, it's very funny.