So Comic Relief is on this friday at 7pm and with that will be some specials which includes...
- Saturday Kitchen Live on the 13th and 20th.
- Ready Steady Cook on the 17th at 7:30pm
- Billy's Big Red Nose Challenge on the 18th at 9pm
- Blue Peter on the 19th
And it looks like the BBC Two will be another Comic Relief clip show hosted by a comedian. I do get why their doing that becuase of what's going on at the moment.
Are we going to get a final return from Tumble Tower to give us one of his running commentaries and complaning they don't book people like Jimmy Cricket?
Are we going to get a final return from Tumble Tower to give us one of his running commentaries and complaning they don't book people like Jimmy Cricket?
Or why they don't do Boogie Beebies at 8pm on BBC One?
Looking at the schedule there appears to be two very different programmes, Comic Relief 7-10pm with Sir Lenny Henry, Alesha Dixon, David Tennant, Davina McCall, and Paddy McGuiness, then Comic Relief’s Prizeathon after the news for an hour with Jason Manford and Amanda Holden. Is the latter to be an independent production from the main evening event? FYI, I can’t see any promotion on the Comic Relief website for it, just for the main show.
Shame that like Children in Need the main show it cut to just three hours, though unlike CiN it does continue with a Later special on BBC2 and content after the news on BBC1. The prizeathon though just feels more ITV daytime than BBC telethon - I know they have given away prizes in recent years but it's usually just something that crops up every hour, not gets it's own show.
Surely with most comedians not having the opportunity to perform over the last year concentrating on live comedy in the late night slot would have been a better use of the time.
I always enjoyed the later hours of Comic Relief where you got the more risky stuff, both because of the content and the steadily decreasing/tired audience meaning laughs were much harder to come by, as shown especially the year Mitchell & Webb performed two sketches that barely got any reaction whatsoever which seemed incredibly harsh.
There's also the 2003 Blankety Blank sketch seemed very weird and unfunny to 14 year old me but I love it now, and a bit of a mystery as to whether it's a canned audience or a real one - generally it sounds canned as it's meant to be a 1970s-era audience to fit the sketch, but occasionally you get some laughter which sounds real (and more modern) such as when someone swears. Possibly it's a mixture of both, but I love the idea that it's genuinely a 2003 audience who ho-de-ho along with Su Pollard and applaud when Wogan makes his Russia comment.
Both Children in Need and Comic Relief felt the post 10pm news slot was not worth bothering with, as it tended to fall very flat, and felt strung out for the most part, especially for Children in Need, when they dumped the BBC Newsreaders annual performance.
It felt like a lot of time wasted, which is a shame as it has been said on here, the later hours could have been used for more edgy performances, however that era for both telethons is well and truly gone.
Audience attention spans and patience wears very thin. Some on forums have commented how they hated waiting for sketches or routines, with no time slot announced, they got bored and left. BBC didn't want that, so concentrating all on a three hour prime time block is much better these days.
Sadly the era of both shows from even a decade ago in 2011 is a vastly different era now in 2021 (even excluding the pandemic).
