Curious Comedy Additions to Men & Motors Channel

[The Mumbler]

It's going to be ITV4 from November 1st, but the usually appalling Men & Motors channel is already undergoing slight improvement.  I was flicking past it at 11.30pm tonight and they were showing a Men Behaving Badly Series 1 episode (which they've actually been running since 28th June).  Right now (12mid - 12.30am), they're claiming to show The Jack Dee Show, but in fact it's the even more odd choice of Jack Dee's Sunday Service (Granada/ITV, spring 1997).  Now, not a great show by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to credit them with being different.  

www.menandmotors.co.uk

They're both on all the time, and the rest of the schedule's foul, but it's a start.

[The Mumbler]

Oh Lord - they're running the Viz cartoon spin-offs as well.  Rightly slagged by Chris Donald in Rude Kids.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Makes a change from running old Chubby Brown videos, which is what they used to do.

Er...I've heard.

[The Mumbler]

11 O'Clock Show repeats?  Never say never.

The Dee show was downright peculiar - I never saw it when it went out, but it was crammed with jokes that were clearly designed to be obsolete by the week after transmission.  Absolutely no concession to the eight years that have passed.  And I know it's Men & Motors' laziness rather than their careful preservation of archive material but the choice of Sunday Service is head-scratchingly obscure.

[Detective John Kimble]

On the site, it looks like Mike Brewer's trying to make a "PHWOAR" face, but he looks like he's eating a sheep's eye.  Twat.

[The Mumbler]

crammed with jokes .

Let's not go mad, actually (it was late).  It had about a dozen mediocre jokes in it, one of which was Rich Hall on location trying to paddle a boat made of paper.

[Jaffa The Cake]

Rich Hall...paddle a boat made of paper.

Oh god I remember that, it was dire. Didn't it have some guy on it that was supposed to look computer generated and supposed to be the anti-Jack or something?

[Godzilla Bankrolls]

No, that was Hugh Dennis being under-used again, on the BBC1 Happy Hour series.

[The Mumbler]

Wasn't that the BBC1 series Jack Dee's Happy Hour (2000ish)?

Like most of his projects after the two C4 series (which was what I really wanted repeated), Sunday Service refuses to give the audience the one thing that Dee excels at: stand-up.  The main reason I got faintly excited at Sunday Service being screened was the tantalising thought: Hmm, well if they've secured the rights to that, what else have they got from the Granada archive?