How Not To Create a Watchable Television Program

Okay, it’s our own fault: we shouldn’t have given How Not to Behave a second try. But after one of the most pointless opening episodes in recent memory, we assumed – foolishly, as it turned out – that the only way for things to go was up. Surely it couldn’t go on week in week out being nothing more than a clumsily thrown together collection of half-arsed sketches and awkward couch banter?

Well, yes it could.

In fact, it seems to have gotten worse. What we assumed was moderately warm and fun chemistry between the two hosts in episode one now simply seems like two decent comedy professionals doing their best despite only barely interacting with each other. And when they do, the painfully obvious editing makes sure to destroy any real interaction they might have going on.

Meanwhile, the sketches continue to be amongst the most bizarrely pointless things we’ve ever seen, and we watched at least two episodes of that ABC sports quiz show that Peter Helliar hosted. We’re usually somewhat wary of revealing the true depths of our ignorance, but help us out here: what exactly is the joke meant to be? That we, the audience, are so clueless we need this kind of ultra-basic advice on how to live our lives? Or that the advice being handed out is so rubbish no-one would follow it? We get that the “don’t do this” parts are meant to be funny – they’re not, but whatever – but what’s the point of the “good” advice?

As for the prank stuff… well, it’s prank stuff. So pretty much totally pointless once you get past “how embarrassment”. Remember Candid Camera? Of course not, you’re not a thousand years old. But at least Candid Camera would pretend that the idea of the show was to reveal how people act when they think they’re being unobserved: when you can tell from the set-up of a prank that the end result is going to be “they’re so embarrassed!”, you probably don’t need to bother doing the actual prank. Especially as the year is not currently 2007.

And then along comes an expert in stuff to tell us about stuff. In theory this could be interesting, only hello: we came here for the comedy. Are these people experts in making us laugh? Are they experts in a topic that will make us laugh? Are they even just wacky comedy experts we can laugh at because they’re obsessed with some obscure topic? And every episode to date the answer comes back: fuck no.

But what really got us about the whole “revisiting” situation was this: nothing at all had changed. There’s not the slightest sign that anyone had looked at the first episode and thought “hmm, maybe tighten this up a little”. It was as if the cast & crew had looked at the first episode, said “perfect, fourteen more just like that and we’re done”.

Well, they got the “we’re done” part right.

Behaving Badly

Hey, so you know that moment eleven minutes or so into the first episode of How Not to Behave when in the middle of a bit about how annoying charity collectors are Gretel Killeen suddenly gave us a bunch of stats about how effective they are in collecting funds for charity? Um… what the hell was that about?

Not that the show had been a barrel of laughs up to that point, what with kicking things off with a quote from Winnie the Pooh and then going on to re-introduce us to former cast members from The Ronnie Johns Half Hour and Double the Fist. Because when your comedy show contains the line “let’s start with queuing”, it’s not like you need a top-level cast to sell the jokes to come.

Wait, did we say “jokes”? We meant to say “[incoherent strangled vomiting noise]”, because while the banter between hosts Killeen and Matt Okine was passable – in that it seemed at least slightly improvised and there was some rapport between them – the sketches themselves were about as funny as a pointless instructional video. Because that’s exactly what they were.

If you’re going to make comedy about queuing, maybe “cutting into a coffee shop queue is ok, cutting into a supermarket queue is not” should be the point you start with, not your punchline. Normally at this point we’d ramble on a whole lot more, because the show sure did: stats about queues! Wacky ways people queue in other countries! This is the first segment in the first episode of a 15-part series and they’ve decided to go with the queue material! Seriously, do they even want people to stick around for the rest of the episode, let alone the series?

But let’s cut short our ramblings for this week, because to our eyes the big problem with How Not to Behave was obvious: it’s not finished. Well, it was finished in terms of being an actual television show with opening and closing credits, but the comedy? Still got the scaffolding up.

What they’ve done here is collect a bunch of observations that they could base a handful of moderately funny sketches on – how to get into the fastest queue at a supermarket, ways to dodge charity muggers, people who are too protective (or not protective enough) of their personal space – and then just patiently explained the concepts to us. The result? This is a show based on the idea of explaining jokes.

Smarter people than us have explained that jokes work by presenting someone with first one idea then another and then allowing them to make the leap to connect those ideas. This didn’t just build a bridge between its ideas, it put the audience in the back of a bus and drove them over it at five miles an hour. Seriously, after the personal space prank stuff they even brought in an expert on personal space to explain the concept in depth. Remember how Monty Python followed up the Parrot Sketch by bringing on an expert in retail sales to explain the concept of customer service?

There are funny ways to talk about cinema etiquette. Simply describing behaviour and labelling it is not one of them. Worse, what little comedy there is in these moments relies entirely on recognition – the “joke” is that we go “ahh, I’ve been there”. So if the joke is that you’re telling people something THEY ALREADY KNOW, maybe you need to come up with a heightened framework that will make that information funny. Protip: simply explaining this information in a blandly generic style is not that framework.

Oh wait, sorry, we forgot it’s 2015. The whole point of this stuff isn’t to create something funny, it’s to create a short clip that can be shared online with a tagline like “Last night How Not to Behave totally nailed it when it comes to cinema armrest hogs.” Only no-one is going to be doing that, because these short clips were bland, dull, and stating the obvious in a totally unsurprising fashion.

Then again, this is the show that told us “There are serious rules for walking on the street”. If an idiot said that in a sitcom, you’d probably laugh; when it leads onto a segment that semi-seriously explains what those rules are, you’re fully entitled to look around to see if you’ve become part of some candid camera show.

Because what are the alternatives here? Either this is a comedy show that fails pretty much completely from the ground up, or it’s an educational show that really is trying to explain to people how to queue in supermarkets or walk down the street. Either it’s a show made by people that think calling someone who uses their mobile phone in a cinema “a glow worm” is funny, or it’s a show that thinks its audience doesn’t know how personal space works.

Either way, it’s doing a great job of insulting its audience.