The Fast Show Live

Starring: Charlie Higson, Paul Whitehouse Director: Bob Spiers, Roxana Silbert Original UK Premiere: 2001 Dvd Release: 18th November, 2002 Number Of Discs: 1 Format: PAL, Region 2 Encoding

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DVD Extras: The Fast Show Live has no special features on this edition, disappointingly.

Recorded live at Londons Hammersmith Apollo in 1998, The Fast Show Live features all of the original cast of the highly successful sketch series including Paul Whitehouse, Simon Day, Charlie Higson & Arabella Weir & practically all of their myriad characters & catchphrases. This live show effectively marks a last hurrah for The Fast Show team, with routines like the Coughing Bob Fleming singalong reworked from the series. However, as a feat of inventive stage management & quick costume changing, they do manage to maintain the Fastness of the TV series live.

It was the catchphrases which earned the series its immense popularity & they raise large, predictable cheers of recognition when wheeled out at the Apollo, from Unlucky Alfs opening Oh, bugger! to the Suits you, sir! of the intrusively camp boys in the menswear department. The shows reliance on these might have been annoying if it werent for the fact that they were built on such esoteric, peripheral & complex sketch & character material. Who but the Fast Show team would have thought of taking the mickey out of bad European TV, even inventing their own mock-Esperanto to do so? Or similarly, lampooned all those old 1930s music hall comedians whose risque jokes are incomprehensible to modern audiences? These, mixed in with modern archetypes like Ron Manager or the endlessly poignant Ted & Ralph made The Fast Show at once comfortingly familiar yet endlessly surprising viewing. They were influential also: Colin Hunt is surely a crude prototype for The Offices David Brent.

Charlie Higson is a British television writer, actor & comedy performer. After dropping out of the University of East Anglia, in the early 1980s, he was for some time a member of the band The Higsons, before he turned to performing. He first came to public attention as one of the main writers & performers of the BBC Two sketch show The Fast Show, which was a great success & enabled Higson to pick & choose his following projects. He worked as producer, writer, director & occasional guest star on the revival of Randall & Hopkirk from 2000 to 2001. Subsequent television work has included writing & starring in BBC Three s Fast Show spin-off sitcom Swiss Toni. In 2004, it was announced that Higson would pen a series of James Bond novels, aimed at younger readers & concentrating on the characters schooldays at Eton. The first novel was released on April 27, 2005 titled SilverFin with a second novel to be released later in the same year.

Editors Choice: The Fast Show, The Fast Show Live, Part 1, View DVDology

Bob Spiers is a British television director, who is best known for his work on various sitcoms & other comedy programmes. He is particularly noted as the director of the early series of Absolutely Fabulous & of the second & final batch of six episodes of Fawlty Towers. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Spiers joined the staff of the BBC in the late 1960s, working as an assistant floor manager & later a production assistant, before eventually working his way up to become a director. In this capacity he worked on several high-profile programmes, such as Dads Army, Are You Being Served? & It Aint Half Hot Mum, all sitcoms, a genre with which he became particularly associated. It was because of his talent for directing comedy that he was chosen to handle the second series of John Cleese s famous Fawlty Towers in 1979, which already had an enormous reputation on the basis of its initial six episodes in 1975.. Posters Of Absolutely Fabulous

Editors Choice: Absolutely Fabulous, The Fast Show Live, Spiceworld The Movie, That Darn Cat, Spice World, Bottom, French And Saunders, Fawlty Towers, View DVDology

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