Limmy's Show

I can't remember the exact moment during Tramadol Nights that I started whispering to myself "It's over. Comedy is over. There's no coming back from this" but I'm pretty sure it was quite early on. It wasn't so much that the stand-up was mediocre, and clearly padded out with Boyle's 'banter' with the audience, or that pretty much all the sketches seemed to involve someone 'hilariously' being on some kind of drugs that they shouldn't have been that was pissing me off. It certainly wasn't the shameless attempts at controversy mongering that was rife from the first minute to the last. It was just the sense that this was Boyle's vision let loose(he made a big song and dance about Channel 4 giving him more creative freedom) and the best he could come up with was something so tedious and unimaginative. It seems somewhat odd, then, that another sketch show from a Glasgwegian comedian also produced by The Comedy Unit should offer a far more inventive, watchable, and indeed funny show that shows letting one man dictate his vision can be a good thing after all.

It's unlikely that you'll have heard of Brian Limond, AKA Limmy, especially if you don't live in Scotland. In fact, I've realised that my introduction to him was via a short cameo of his in The IT Crowd, playing an unintelligible window cleaner. Look, I even have proof:

Anyhoo, he's been building up quite the portfolio over the last few years, having done shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, appearing in Consolevania and Videogaiden (between them the greatest shows about video games ever made, by quite some way) and having done short pieces for The Culture Show. Probably his greatest achievement was Limmy's World of Glasgow, a collection of podcast monologues from a variety of characters in Glasgow. Many of the characters in World of Glasgow make their transition to TV with Limmy's Show (although some gems are missing, particularly Vijay, a well-meaning asian boy who somehow manages to cause trouble unintentionally).

There's no getting around it: Limmy's Show will never achieve a mass audience (and not just because it currently only broadcasts in Scotland). It's weird, it's offbeat, it strings together memes and motifs out of the most bizarre observations on modern life, and it's very influenced by 1980s culture and music. There are no catchphrases to cling on to. But it has such a different vibe running through it, and such a relentlessly fearless commitment to its ideas and its sense of innovation that it is hard to not at the very least admire it. I've heard a lot of people say they like it more than they find it funny, and I'll admit at times that it can stray too far into being 'clever', but there's more than enough quality gags running through the show as well.

If it's possible to say that there's a recurring theme to the show, it's that it likes to focus on the mundane, and even find the bizarre within. Limmy often turns up and gives us his own worldview, which can be bleak and world-weary, but then these are often offset by (or even lead into) flights of fancy. It often starts off looking like observational comedy, but turns into something very different. Limmy likes playing on our expectations and twisting them around on us.

But perhaps the thing I like about Limmy's Show the most is the pacing. The lesson every sketch show seemed to want to learn from The Fast Show (a seminal programme for me) was that if you have a load of characters who spout catchphrases, then the public will eat it up. The better lesson to learn was in the title of the show: if you keep up a rapid pace (or at least mix it up from time to time) you can get away with a lot more. So whilst there are longer, slower, more cerebral sketches (particularly those involving Dee Dee, a loafer with a wild imagination) they are punctuated with many shorter, sharper sketches. Keeping the audience disconcerted with the variations in pace means that you can catch them off-guard. I always like it when a comedy show surprises me and does the unexpected, and Limmy's Show is very difficult to second-guess. You could be stuck in an extended diatribe on the use of americanisms in British society one minute, then seeing John Merrick dance to David Bowie the next.

Basically, Limmy's Show is unlike any other show currently on British TV right now, and I can't really think of many shows like it from times past either. You can get the 1st series on DVD, and the 2nd series is currently on BBC2 Scotland right now. For those of us stuck down here in England, iPlayer will do the job, and most of it appears to be on Youtube as well. Still, I think it deserves a national audience, even a minimal one. C'mon BBC, you managed to find a time and place for Still Game and Chewin' the Fat in England, why not afford Limmy the same luxury?