Spencer Jones Q&A - Edinburgh Fringe 2016

Interview with Spencer Jones.

Broadcast Digital Awards: Best Scripted Online Short

Shot in two days with a stripped-back crew, using innovative production techniques, judges described the warm-hearted farce 'utterly hilarious and brilliantly executed'.

DVD review: Upstart Crow

You could feel the shockwaves reverberating around the British comedy world for days afterwards: Ben Elton had written a good sitcom.

Fringe 2016: seen previously

Planning your Fringe schedule? Trying to figure out what's worth seeing? As it happens, we've already reviewed plenty of this year's shows - either they've been touring Scotland, or they're returning from last year. So, here's a handy list of the shows we've seen and recommend...

Fringe preview: Spencer Jones

I will be honest. The first time I saw Spencer Jones I didn't get it. He was in the New Act of the Year final and I thought he must be a mate of the promoter or just someone who had wandered in from the pub next door, pausing only to put on a pair of stupid white tights. The second time I saw him it was at a Malcolm Hardee tribute gig. He did pretty much the same slapstickish, childlike set, mucking around with props, hardly saying a word, but it suddenly made sense. He really is a gifted clown with genuine funny bones. And since then other people have got it too. Jones was one of the hits of 2015's Fringe.

Upstart Crow, series 1 review

Predictable in places, perhaps, but the ridiculous nature of some of these plot lines is arguably in the same vein as of the bards own greatest comedies.

Upstart Crow: Bard saved Elton from sitcom oblivion

Alack the day! Upstart Crow (BBC Two) has shuffled off its chortle coil. There was something for everyone in Ben Elton's learned Bardcom.

Review: Upstart Crow, episode 5

I couldn't see a co-writing credit alongside Ben Elton's name for William Shakespeare, but as anyone with a basic grasp of English literature will spot this week's episode is a comical rewrite of Macbeth. And a pretty nifty one, with David Mitchell as the bard convinced that he has committed murder at the behest of his scheming wife so that they can move to the big house in Stratford before prices rise out of reach.

Very early on in Upstart Crow, a collaborative Ben Elton-William Shakespeare vehicle for the hopelessly thick and untalented David Mitchell, a member of the studio audience reacted to Liza Tarbuck just saying something in an accent, with her titty-dumplings to the fore with the kind of prolonged loud screeching fit that you or I could only hope to achieve while dousing our genitals in hydrochloric acid. My heart sank. But soon it actually began to get funny, sometimes very. The audience member had obviously been led out by an intern with the promise of a cup of tea and perhaps, actually it's to be hoped, a reassuring whisper of "you're not clever enough for this, dear". By the end, this mashup of Will's artistic frustrations in an England seething with stupidity, and as relevant to today as to 1584, had become a delight, to the extent the audience was anticipating the gags. Of a fiendishly cunning plot to frustrate young love, in which it had become necessary to procure a play-dead potion, Mitchell's brimming "I can't see how it can possibly go wrong" had much of the hubristic glee in seeing it coming of a Mainwaring, a Hancock.

Inevitable parallels - there was much God's bodikins! and gut-porridge stuff - will be drawn with Blackadder, although perhaps someone could tell me why that's in any conceivable way a bad thing. But Mr Elton has (almost) wholly redeemed himself for crimes against David Haig in the relentlessly smile-free elf'n'safety trudge that was 2013's The Wright Way, and it's nice to see he's got his brain back. And I do like Spencer Jones as Kempe, played as Ricky Gervais as David Brent - way too knowingly see-what-I-did-there, but that's how Ben rolls.