We are only a couple of years away from the centenary of the moment when Scottish inventor John Logie Baird broadcast live television for the first time via the BBC. For the first two decades of TV's existence, the technology to pre-record shows didn't exist, and so comedy was dominated by revues and variety hours, sketches and songs. With the dawn of the sitcom, however, live telly became largely the preserve of rolling news and breakfast chat shows.
Recently, however, British comedy has started to return to its own live roots, with SNL UK a surprise hit, and now Joe Lycett embracing the spontaneity with his new Friday night variety hour, Live from the Lycett Arms. Looking like a traditional boozer – albeit one with studio lighting and an unusually photogenic cast of regulars – the Lycett Arms, the comedian Joe Lycett announced last night, is “your favourite local pub”. He twirled onto the stage with a gloriously camp musical number, introducing his first guest, comedian Guz Khan, as well as his “actual biological aunties Margaret and Pauline” who would be tending bar for the evening.
From there, the Lycett Arms became a venue for bawdy, musical hall comedy, japes with comedians like Mark Silcox and Jake Bhardwaj, and celebrity cameos by everyone from DJ Spoony, Prue Leith and Ross Kemp, to Big John and Stephen from The Traitors. There was a mackerel in a hat, a dragooned toast to Priti Patel, and an interview conducted via a gloryhole (Michael Parkinson could never). If that sounds like a lot to squeeze into an hour, you’re half right.
Live from the Lycett Arms is undoubtedly trying to push the comic envelope, knowing that not every joke will land. That laxness was typified by a sequence in which Lycett appeared genuinely unaware that his guest, Khan, had just starred in the Netflix hit, The Gentlemen. That was quite a jolly detour from the usual PR schtick, but the interviews conducted with both the main guests – Khan and radio DJ Sara Cox – felt perfunctory and pointless.
As an interviewer, Lycett seems desperate to move on to the next question, the next skit. He is transparently more at ease with the rambunctious shambles of moving through an audience that looks “like a Met gala for people who get their clothes from TK Maxx”. The whole evening was both tightly choreographed – Cox, presumably roped in because of her experience as a live broadcaster, seemed encumbered by the script – and determinedly slapdash.
It left Lycett with a lot to get through. There was a sort-of pub quiz, a toast battle, sword swallowing (no euphemism), and a Dolly Parton drag act. Not to mention a live connection to a real pub, which would be “twinned” with the Lycett Arms.
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