BBC3 pilot of 'Lab Rats' with Chris Addison

[19pack]

From the BBC's official mini-site:

LAB RATS

Is a new silly, daft sitcom set in a university laboratory co written and starring Chris Addison of 'The Thick of It'. With the world of science as its backdrop there is real scope for stupid things to occur and they do in this surreal world!
Produced by Armando Iannucci and Simon Nicholls.

I went to see this yesterday evening at BBC Television Centre and, inspired by something similar an unnamed friend of mine on this board has done previously, I am going to do a little 'write-up' about it.
I make no presumptions about my comedy analysis credentials, so what you're about to read is purely a take on the show from somebody who is not as 'in the loop' as other more knowledgeable members of this forum, a blissfully ignorant member of the 'silent majority'. I didn't know any of the actors/writers who were involved and how respected they were/weren't. I went into the studio not knowing really anything about any of it deliberately because I know I could have googled the names of those involved, but chose not to so I had as long a piece rope as possible to offer back to the performers. Heck, I wanted to feel optimistic, for both our sakes. So I had no expectations of it being bad or good from the outset. Another thing - I have never seen The Thick of It.
Well, after all this intentional self-grooming for good faith, I now realise, for the most part, I was a fool, and there are now seven hours from my life that I will never, ever get back. Ever.
It all began with getting off the tube at White City with my younger brother who I had dragged along. He said he had to fake an injured leg to get off his evening shift at Pizza Hut, and that 'this better be funny'. If I could go back in time, I would have told him to take his shift and run, £12 of lost earnings wasn't worth what his ADD like personality was about to endure.
We waited in the audience queue for about 20 minutes sporadically conversing with a weird looking middle-aged American guy ahead of us who had come alone.
We got to the x-ray machine, and my brother went first and tipped his belongings into the scanner (three bottles of Frijj milkshake and a half-eaten pork and egg pie in a Tesco bag), followed by the American. He began wandering off onto the site, but the guards called him back because 'Sir, there's a knife in your rucksack' – The pillock.
I waited a further 5 minutes for the 'knife' to be disproved as just having been an iPod.
Christ.
So we wandered into the audience waiting area. While my brother slipped away to the gents so he could later tell his friends 'that he's taken a slash at the BBC', the American guy sneaked up and accosted me verbally. I reluctantly fell into an awkward conversation about how USA television is different to British television ('Y'see, in the states we have advertisement breaks in all our shows, you guys have it so lucky').
We were some of the first in to the audience waiting area, so our ticket numbers were called in the first batch of those let in to the studio. I made a point to my brother that we move as fast as possible down the queue so the American doesn't sit anywhere near us. As we were walking out into the big circular courtyard toward the studio, my brother decided to throw and catch his milkshake up in the air as high as he could. He misjudged one throw and the bottle fell and crashed into the ground and splurged chocolate all over his shoes and his jeans. Luckily, I was just outside of the splat radius. All the other people in the queue (the ones who weren't covered in milkshake) laughed their heads off. It might have been the only time I heard them all laugh genuinely.
So we went into the studio and the warm-up comic came on. He was a twat who thought he was Billy Connolly. He even looked like him, with his bushy beard styled just so. The way his appearance aped Connolly's reminded me of a guy I saw on TV once who was such a fan of Star Wars that over the years he'd gradually metamorphosed his image frighteningly accurately into that of George Lucas. More so, his entire act was Connolly's - He was from Northern Island yet his accent was oddly Scottish, and he kept talking about piss and shit and paused for a laugh every time he used fuck as an adjective. I wasn't alone in feeling the unease caused by his buffoonery, the audience member's reactions to his 'jaunty' interactive questions got increasingly steely as the hours stretched on and on. He even forgot which jokes he'd already told during the course of the recording. When the man sitting behind me pointed it out to him when we all asked if we had any questions, he shuffled a bit, then told an incredibly offensive joke to a poor American woman sitting in the front row that involved taking her purse off her and placing it on his own head and comparing her countrymen to the civilian killing Israelites on the news.
He even stole jokes from Chris Addison that Chris had just told, for example; Chris asides to the audience between set-ups that the set, a mock up of a University lab, was 'a real School-room that was cut in half and air lifted in', was retold by Beard Twat 15 minutes later when he goes: 'This was an actual out of service Doctor's surgery that was sliced apart and shipped in' Nobody laughs. He wanders over to a beaker on one of the shelves, picks it up and goes "See? It says: 'Property of Harold Shipman!' " People audibly groan. He should have just given up then and let Addison tackle audience boredom for the remainder of the show, because for the rest of the time he just dug himself a deeper and deeper hole. I swear one guy almost got out of his chair and hit him when a 'joke' about his weight and baldness went south.

The actual show though?
Not good.
If the director has to order the audience to 'laugh with enthusiasm' during a pick-up that we blatantly didn't laugh at the first time we saw it, it doesn't reflect well on the standard of it, does it?
Personally, I only laughed at a few choice lines or visual gags; the rest was a turgid load of old nonsense. Disjointed and quite un-followable. The 'story' centred round a renowned Russian scientist visiting the University, who has a problem with his cloning process (a PowerPoint like presentation shows that he has cloned his grandmother 'Babushka' multiple times, except (You guessed it) each subsequent clone is smaller and smaller than the last.) His character is the most pronounced and lively, yet is only seen in two scenes of the show, one at the beginning, the other at the end. I wanted to see more of him. Instead, we were made to put up with three characters other than Addison (who essentially was playing himself), that were annoying and totally un-likeable. There was an older woman playing some sort of useless boss, an old man who is some sort of chocolate fiend who didn't do anything for the entire plot, and a short Brummy student scientist girl who has to tackle the problem of expensive energy bills by plugging electrodes into thousands of lemons (We were told to laugh 'the hardest we've laughed yet' when the camera cuts to this shot.)
Everyone forgot their lines. It seemed as if nobody had even learnt them. What I'm guessing should have only been a 2 and a half hour shoot was prolonged out into a five hour arse-numb-a-thon. The actress playing Clara, the short Brummy girl, even shouts to Addison at 10:30pm that she's missed her bus home, and about a third of the audience peters away in the final few hours because they have trains to catch.
However, one morbidly obese guy waddled out after the first hour. He got up inbetween takes and when the Beard Twat comedian calls out to him "Are ye Coomin' bahk?" The fat guy shouts as marches off: "No I Fucking 'aint!, I'm Fucking going!"
He may have dodged a bullet. The main task I took to during the hours of boredom and terrible jokes that the warm-up comic spouted was eyeing up an extremely attractive runner girl who kept glancing back at me. If it weren't for this little flirtation session, I may have done the same as the fat guy.

I now love Chris Addison though - he's brilliant. He devoted basically all his time between takes making a better job of keeping us laughing than the warm-up guy, and his stand-up stuff is very, very sharp and fast. It was a joy to be a member of the audience while he wasn't acting.
Overall, the actual show though felt like a kind of  BBC reply to The IT Crowd, as I see it. It seems to aspire to emulate the same 'crazy' world, and all the characters barely do their job, just piss around in the lab.
Addison's character is basically himself, but I'd strongly reccommend that he is seen in person at a stand-up venue. The fact that the highlight of the night for me was the banter that Addison indulged us in during the long boring and underwhelming acting bits left me feeling like I had been to see one of his routines, and all for free. The filming of the show was just a dissatisfying rigamorole and I sincerely hope that this pilot is not picked up.
It should be shown in October or November during a season of comedy pilots on BBC3 under the same over-arching title, a bit like Comedy Lab.
If the eventual advertisements for this season of shows touts Lab Rats as one of the highlights, throw your TV away and take up a sport. It'll make you a happier person in the long-term compared to the depression you will suffer if you watch it.

Oh yes, I might also mention that at 11pm after filming had finished (and attractive runner girl had probably ended her shift and gone home), my brother and I stayed behind until the last possible moment to watch the on-set goings on, and Armando Ianucci strode down out the galley behind me, walked past me on the stairs then over to the thousands of lemons used in the scene I'd mentioned and began giggling hysterically over it with the crew like it was the best thing ever.  
I should have taken my own opportunity to 'take a slash in the BBC' right there and then, to demonstrate what I thought of the crime that had been commited before my very retinas in that very studio.

Avoid.

[ffogems]

Armando Ianucci strode down out the galley behind me, walked past me on the stairs then over to the thousands of lemons used in the scene I'd mentioned and began giggling hysterically over it with the crew like it was the best thing ever.

This is the most depressing thing I have read all day.

I should have taken my own opportunity to 'take a slash in the BBC' right there and then, to demonstrate what I thought of the crime that had been commited before my very retinas in that very studio.

This is funniest thing I have read all day.

Cheers 19pack. Can you remember any specific gags? And even though the experience was obviously arduous do you think the content of the show has potential?

[19pack]

Thanks f-f-f-ffogems.

Scenes I can remember that are half worth mentioning:

The show begins with the main characters Alex (Addison) and Clara (the short bird) walking into the lab talking about some russian that Clara had been stalked by onine, she says: 'E-mails have been blocked and my peep-hole is now in the door the right way round'. I actually thought that was quite funny.
However:
The older scientist man comes in complaining that there's a noodle in his Hot Chocolate, and that the drinks machine must be on the blink with 'the Hot Chocloate must be coming out the soup nozzle!' (cymbals followed by silence.)
He later points out the 'window' into the audience at a solid gold statue of himself that all his grant money was spent on when he won the nobel prize. Made totally unfunny by the fact that all the characters look out the window and keep adding a new bit to the statue's description such as 'yes it is lovely...' followed by 'and I like the was the sun reflects off your horse'...'...and the adoring villagers at your feet fleeing from the burning church...' and 'I love the way the several dragons are reflected off your shield...' yada yada yada. A perfectly ok short aside type line stretched out beyond its elasticity allowed for upwards of a minute. made even more putrid by the 3 or 4 pick-ups done of it.

Addison's character spends most of the show in a pink white coat because a red hanky was accidently thrown in the wash by his useless boss (who likes to hide a toblerone from the other older male scientist who does nothing in the show apart from accost her for a piece). He kept mentioning that the pink coat made him 'look gay', only other characters then kept replying, no, it's you hair that makes you look gay. Repeated at least 7 times throughout the script.

Addison is excited about a russian scientist he admires coming to the lab, saying he is one of his 'five favourite scientists' the older scientist walks past holding the paper and says: 'Have you seen the obituaries?' Addison then says; 'One of my four favourite scientists'.

Other 'gags' involved the crappiest prop ever in a swivel chair that 'clamps shut' whenever somebody sits in it, but the restraints that swung out of the chair wouldn't have even kept a hippo smeared in no-more-nails from escaping.

Near the end Addison uses an old 'growth serum' that Clara had developed on a snail to solve the Russian scientist's clone shrinkage problem, but the snail grows to massive proprtions and we were shown a V.T. of Addison on the floor shouting for help and crawling away from the C.G. Snail behind him. He himself accidently injects himself in the leg with the growth serum and we then see him with pillows stuffed down his trousers for the 'effect' of it having grown too big. Addison's tale to the audience about the BBC's costume dept.'s process while he was fitted for it was funnier than the leg's eventual use.

A visual gag that I liked was when addison reaches slowly for a giant metal on/off lever to initiatre some sort of Frankenstein like Cloning experiment, but then at the last moment flicks a tiny, regular light-switch above it to actually initiate it.

And does it have promise? I can't tell, but I'd say on the strength of the pilot: NO. But as it is set in the world of science, that there's a huge amount of potential for scientific gags. I feel that if they focus the comedy on the gags that relate to the hair-brain science rather than jokes that can be cut and pasted into other shows easily, the show would have a more individual tone, yeah. The brummy girl is extremely annoying though. All the scenes she was in I was bored shitless. She kept singing songs the wrong way also by intersplicing lyrics to popular songs with those of traditional xmas carols or classic tunes that share the same tune (come on Eileen became Come all ye faithful or something).

[purlieu]

Addison is excited about a russian scientist he admires coming to the lab, saying he is one of his 'five favourite scientists' the older scientist walks past holding the paper and says: 'Have you seen the obituaries?' Addison then says; 'One of my four favourite scientists'.

A visual gag that I liked was when addison reaches slowly for a giant metal on/off lever to initiatre some sort of Frankenstein like Cloning experiment, but then at the last moment flicks a tiny, regular light-switch above it to actually initiate it.

Smiles from these, but nothing I haven't seen fifty times before.
Such a shame, when I first read about the show it seemd quite a promising idea.  Oh well.

[The Duck Man]

Makes sense, mind.

This is the BBC, having "discovered" Addison in The Thick Of It, shoving him into a vehicle. He'd already transcribed The Ape That Got Lucky into a radio show (a rather poor one at that), and by the sounds of it this is based on the unfunny stuff they added onto the stand-up material to make it a radio show - inter scientist banter stuff.

[Toad in the Hole]

Dunno where he gets the science thing from... his mum is doing a PhD in English here in Manchester.

Does sound disappointing... is Armando going the same way as CM?