[Brekkie]

Now, I haven’t watched either telethon for years, but did they not try a rather radical ‘revamp’ of Comic Relief roughly six years ago, when they had a ‘comedy club’ feel and did it live from the O2 and it all went really badly?! So it’s not as though they haven’t tried different formats over recent years.

Weren’t the main reasons for it not working, firstly sound issues, where the ‘clubbers’ in the main part we’re talking amongst themselves, particularly when items were going on off the main stage in the wings, and secondly because Richard Osman did that ‘World cup of biscuits’ thing that worked ok as a bit of fun on Twitter but didn’t translate to TV

I’d welcome a change now though, if they carry on with the telethon, I don’t want to see standard BBC safe presenters standing on a stage in Salford reading autocue into VTs. This and Children in Need are so similar I’m surprised they don’t just have a single set with the lighting changing from red to yellow

There was a night at the O2 but before that I think a night at a theatre (the Palladium or Apollo) which felt more like the classic vibes - and things going wrong would be welcome to the super slick production it's become.   It used to feel like anything could happen, as did many live TV shows in the 90s especially - but as we've discussed before perhaps other than Saturday Night Takeaway production teams aren't used to making that sort of show anymore when they used to be the bread and butter of not just live TV but entertainment TV in general.


It's probably a bit lazy to blame the move to Salford considering comic talent is more used than most to touring around the country for gigs, and we see how Strictly picks itself up for it's annual trip out to Blackpool and feels like an event too.   I think perhaps the issue is that for a period the sketches were really working and capturing the imagination of the public so the studio stuff was scaled back - but now the sketches seem to be few and far between it's left them without much.    Flo and Joan, two relative unknowns, added so much being in the studio (I'm not 100% convinced they were live) so just a couple more routines bringing that energy would have lifted things no end.