"The Catherine Tate Show" (2004) TV series 2004-????

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Gordon Anderson

Writers:

Derren Litten (writer) and
Mathew Horne (writer)

Seasons:

1 | 2 | 3 | unknown

Release Date:

16 February 2004 (UK)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot Keywords:

Sketch Comedy

Awards:

6 wins & 11 nominations

Cast

Catherine Tate	...	Various Characters (22 episodes, 2004-2007)
Niky Wardley	...	Various Characters (18 episodes, 2004-2007)
Mathew Horne	...	Various Characters / ... (18 episodes, 2004-2007)
Andy Dennehy	...	Vern (14 episodes, 2005-2006)
Angela McHale	...	Various (12 episodes, 2004-2006)
Bruce Mackinnon	...	Various (10 episodes, 2004-2006)

Runtime:

30 min (12 episodes)

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Colour:

Colour

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Ireland:15 (DVD rating) (season 1) | UK:15 (Season 1 & 2) | Australia:MA (some episodes) | Australia:M (some episodes)

Company:

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Trivia:

It took three and a half hours each day for Catherine Tate to be made up as "Gran".

Quotes:

Various Characters: Are you a farmer miss? You a farmer miss? You old McDonald miss? You old McDonald, innit.
Teacher: No, Lauren you know very well I am not a farmer, now enough of this.
Various Characters: Well, I'm not being funny or nuffink, miss, but you do smell like a farmer.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross: (#11.7)" (2006)

Did you ever see a drawing of a muchness?

Catherine Tate's comedy ranges from amusing to hilarious. She can be brilliantly inventive, and is almost always highly likable. I regard her less as a comedian than as a comic actress, as indicated by her parody soap-opera characters on this show and her serious performances in other shows. For someone with such a wide range of characterizations, worked in such a broadly satirical vein, she isn't as physical as I would have expected. She seldom goes in for slapstick or pantomime, and evidences little interest in working out the details of her characters' movements. Indeed, she seems to look for occasions _not_ to use her body, so that most of her characters tend to lounge or slump. Her expressiveness lies almost wholly in her face and voice. But her versatility in using these is prodigious.

Her show is less enjoyable to me than she is. I first ran across segments of it as clips on YouTube, and I think that kind of venue offers the best way to see them--one at a time, or at least with a brief pause between each routine and the next. In parade one after another, as they are on the show, they don't seem nearly as funny.

The likeliest reason is that they're all much of a muchness, all pitched to the same key and played, as it were, on the same instrument; like the same sketch replayed over and over. (Some of the recurring routines aren't far from being that.) And most of Tate's characters, despite the diversity of faces and accents, are alike in haranguing people to the point of distraction. A show full of such characters, I find wearing.

This is the more true that few of the sketches on the show can properly be called sketches. Almost all of them are extended bits by Tate, with little dramatic structure to support them. They also have little humorous dialogue. The best of it comes with Tate's awful schoolgirl in her arguments with various adversaries. It's funny in part because in regional teen speech it finds a rhythm and a patois that are either inherently funny or lend themselves to being made funny by exaggeration. Regional speech gives the character a vehicle for progressing from tireless repetitions of her point ("But am oi bovvered, dough?") to ever more aggravated exchanges which she manages to blow to bits and, by continual interruption, to reduce to mere fragments of sentences, sometimes to one word ("Face! Bovvered!"). It's verbal terrorism (she might almost be Groucho Marx reincarnated as a puddingheaded teen). But in the end, it, too, is just a very long bit.

Comparing this show with the old Carol Burnett Show, I recognized for the first time the value of the interludes between sketches on that show, and others in the traditional variety format. I was always impatient of the monologues, musical numbers, and so forth: I always wanted to be getting back to the sketches. I see now that the interludes set those off to best advantage. And anyhow they were more varied in tone than those on Tate's show, and the best of them were better developed. Burnett was a great clown; Tate, as a real actress, would have benefited all the more from greater attention to workmanship in her scripts. Her talent is a live wire that needs grounding.