In praise of​ Big Train

A tribute to the underrated 90s sketch-comedy gem.

Tracey Ullman's Show review

Ullman throws herself at it with gusto and it's iconoclastic enough to elicit gasps as well as giggles.

Preview: Tracy Ullman's Show series 2

This week sees the return of Tracy Ullman's Show to BBC One, with the first episode airing on Friday 3rd February at 9:30pm. As with the first series, a bevy of TVO regulars are involved: this time around Dan Skinner, Tracy Ann Oberman, Lucy Montgomery and Laurence Rickard are part of the impressive ensemble cast. But is the end result worth a look? TVO editor Paul Holmes took a sneaky peek...

TV preview: Tracey Ullman's Show, BBC1

By their supporting cast shalt thou know them. Or something. The first episode of the second series of Tracey Ullman's return to British sketch show comedy features an enviable cast list of contemporary comedians and actors.

Radio Times review

Steven Toast, the volcanic, pathologically self-absorbed actor, emerges from the debacle of a Lorraine interview stricken with stage fright. He's doing Macbeth in the open air in Regent's Park but is blissfully unaware, until Lorraine tells him, that it's being screened live for ITV's Night of Culture.

It's a thin episode to open a new series of the cult, award-winning comedy, with far too few rank idiocies and not enough laughs. Still, Clem Fandango, the hipster buffoon who torments Toast (Matt Berry) from behind the mixing desk in the voiceover studio, is back - as is the lubricious Mrs Purchase (Tracy-Ann Oberman). But a central story featuring Toast, Stanley Kubrick and a fake Moon landing needs more oomph.

Radio Times review

Kayvan Novak's chirpy ex-hack Woody embarks on another silly caper about a drugs set-up culminating in various high jinks in a funeral parlour. Meanwhile, his old colleague, Bradley Walsh's bar owner Brutus, has to deal with the arrival of his ex-wife, who's none too pleased to discover that her erstwhile (and very much alive) spouse faked his suicide to escape marriage and alimony.

But not even a deliciously angry Tracy-Ann Oberman can entirely rescue an instalment that has a sprinkling of good moments but one or two duff ones. I've seen later episodes and can promise that it picks up.

How to describe Steven Toast, the man/beast at the centre of the absurd but funny Toast of London? He is, in hair and moustache, a postmodern, and quite possibly post-mortem, version of Dickie Davies, who hosted ITV's World of Sport with such aplomb from 1965-85. Toast has Dickie Davies eyes and a Mallen streak in the middle of his bouffant. He has an Actor's voice, designed to reach the cheap seats and no longer capable of modifying its volume. He sounds, at all times, like a repertory version of Patrick Allen, the voice actor who brought an apocalyptic note to the public information film Protect and Survive, as well as scaring an entire generation into buying Barratt homes.

Matt Berry, who plays Toast, is just about old enough to remember Dickie hosting the grappling on a damp Saturday afternoon but he's also a voice-over artist in real life, toiling in the service of volcanic mineral water and financial services. Toast the character (created by Berry and Father Ted co-writer Arthur Mathews) is a distorted echo from those Soho casting calls, rendered from the dreamscape of an insecure thespian -- a place where almost everything that is said is unsayable in polite company. It is also the funniest thing going, with Berry's clowning rendered absurdly plausible thanks to the efforts of Tracy-Ann Oberman and Louise Jameson as the leonine Toast's gamey co-conspirators.

Comedian Hatty Ashdown plumbed her years as a promotions girl for the basis of this new sitcom. Him & Her's Kerry Howard is the hapless Marilyn, perpetually in the bad books of ex-EastEnder Tracy-Ann Oberman, playing her mucky boss Debbie. In an identikit town centre, the team - comprising Cariad Lloyd (the odd one), Miranda Hennessy (bitchy) and The X Factor's Diana Vickers (ditzy) - are sampling new booze Nectarino. Whoever does the best wins a job in Spain with Debbie's tragic underling Steve. It's not awful.

Radio Times review

Kerry Howard is best known as a brilliantly vile bridezilla in BBC Three's superlative black comedy Him & Her. (Trivia alert: she also happens to be the sister of comedian Russell Howard.) Here, her character Marilyn works in promotions, which involves donning tangerine tights and pushing a lurid orange drink called Nectarino ("the taste of sunshine in a bottle!") on resistant shoppers. Ex-EastEnder Tracy-Ann Oberman plays her delightfully un-PC boss, and look out for X Factor finalist Diana Vickers as another of the tangerine mannequins.

Bravo to Comedy Central for putting so many funny women in one sitcom. Sadly, though, the jokes in this first episode are often as weak as Marilyn's work ethic.

Based on its initial airing this week, I hope to God that Over to Bill doesn't return as it was completely flawed from start to finish. The premise sounded promising enough as weatherman Bill Onion (Hugh Dennis) was fired from his job at the BBC and had to look for work elsewhere. His mate Jez (Neil Morrissey) promised to arrange a meeting with a powerful acquaintance but this meant that Bill had to keep his friend's horrible fiancée Selina (Helen George) on side. This wasn't easy as Selina was portrayed as a high-maintenance gold-digger who was only marrying Jez for the money he made selling his dog chewing gum idea.

I was surprised that Over to Bill was written and directed by such an experienced comedy hand as Red Dwarf's Doug Naylor because to me it felt like the work of a first-time writer. Every cliché was trotted out here from Bill accidentally drinking breast milk to him forgetting to bring a wedding gift to Jez's nuptials and having to stop at a petrol station to purchase a replacement.

In addition to the old-fashioned script, the characters were on the whole fairly unlikeable. The only exception to this rule was Bill's wife, played by the lovely Tracy-Ann Oberman, who I felt was far too good for this fool of a man. The fact that the final gag involved Bill and his wife donating bone marrow tells you all you need to know about a programme that more than suited the slot that was recently occupied by such duds as Father Figure and The Wright Way.