It starts with Have I got News for you; fine. Mock the week is back on our screens; great. Repeats of Would I Lie to You are on BBC iplayer; excellent. These comedy quiz panels have become a staple of my TV diet but the constant ‘reinvention’ of this formula is becoming quite wearisome and actually, just not very funny.
Comedy World Cup is the show that has put a bee in my bonnet. Hosted by David Tennant, the formulaic set up provides nothing new and clearly falls short of the high standards set by other comedy panel shows. It’s ‘USP’ (if it can claim to have such a thing) is in the fact it is a comedy show about the history of comedy and pitches teams of comedians against each other to find who is the most knowledgeable. 
That’s it, the most knowledgeable, not the funniest.
This factor was evident from the first episode as the team lead by Jason Manford trounced Jo Brand’s team, despite being at best mediocre and at worst just plain dull. Don’t get me wrong, their knowledge was tip top but I expected something more from a programme that so clearly brands itself as comedic and comedians who have become household names.
Now I am someone not adverse to laughing out loud, in fact my housemates have regularly mentioned hearing my laugh through the walls of our house, but Comedy World Cup is simply not worthy of this. BBC iplayer describes it as ‘the competition to determine which of Britain’s comedians have the biggest fountain of funny knowledge’ but this is widely misleading. If you want ‘funny knowledge’ then tune into QI for some genuinely amusing facts, however, if drab, unwitty information on the history of comedy is your sort of thing, then I can’t recommend this programme highly enough.
The show’s most deplorable aspect sees the viewer being subjected to children doing stand-up acts as they attempt to impersonate celebs. This is done so badly that the children’s ‘cute’ factor wears off pretty quickly and the panel are left struggling to identify the comedians being alluded to. In fact it’s not even ‘alluded to’, its reading lines directly from their shows; random, abstract lines that make little sense on their own and say little to nothing about the comedian in question. If that wasn’t bad enough, the viewer is then shown the entire clip from the famous comedian’s actual stand up performance as proof that he/she actually said such things.
Repeating passages in such a way begs the question: were they just trying to fill in some extra time? Desperately attempting to pad out a show that so clearly is destined to be a short lived enterprise? I just get the sense that they are wasting my time. It may be too late for me to recover the 45mins wasted watching this poor excuse for a comedy show but save yourselves the trouble!