Flight of the Conchords

See I meant to post this as a reminder before the first episode aired on Tuesday on BB4 as a ‘heads up’ sort of thing, and promptly forgot and wrote a rant about Halo instead but it’s repeated on Friday at 11pm so that’s not so bad.

Flight of the Conchords have been around on the comedy circuits in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand for years, and are really rather good at it. They mainly produce low-energy song-parody in a folk style. They’re sort of like The Mighty Boosh, but with a dash of David O’Doherty thrown in, capped with a bit of Weird Al Yankovic. If you like any of those, be sure to watch this.

I’ll be honest, it doesn’t start brilliantly and takes a while to find it’s feet, and if you’re familiar with thier songs there’s a definate feeling of contrivance in the plots all being a set-up for a big musical set-piece. The second series should be really interesting, in that they burn through all thier pre-existing songs in the course of these first 12 episodes, so hopefully there’ll be more writing of songs to support the plot rather than plots to support the songs.

The songs themselves are uniformly brilliant (“You know when I’m down to my socks it’s time for business; that’s why they’re called business socks”), the stuff between is variable. Fellow comic Rhys Darby often steals the show as thier Gervais-esque manager, and Kristen Schaal makes a good obsessive fan (and is very pretty…), but sometimes it all goes a little wonky.

Anna reviewed it from a significantly more fresh position that I write, should you fancy an alternate opinion.

Finally fans of irony will be pleased to know that this started life as a BBC Radio 4 show. Some of the plots are re-used, as is Rhys Derby’s character, but the overall tone of the TV show is a lot different. Ther irony being, after doing the radio show, the Conchords pitched it to the BBC as a TV show, and were turned down, as the Beeb didn’t think it would work on TV. So instead they went to HBO who decided it would. It was a hit, and now the BBC are paying through the nose to buy the rights to show it from HBO! Your tax dollars at work folks.

Dean Love would like to apologise for the poor quality of writing in this piece, as he appears to have temporarily lost the ability to write coherently

Dean Love : 27 Sep 2007 00:03 |  Tags: Comedy TV |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem