This week, I have been mostly... laughing my arse off. (Fast Show, The)

Member Name: Sam H

Product:	Fast Show, The
Date:	08/01/01 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very, very funny

Disadvantages: It's all over

The Fast Show is essentially our generation's Monty Python. In a way that defies explanation, it captured something about the 1990s when nothing else quite could. Even if its progenitors are in their thirties and forties, it speaks to the younger generation in a language that they have adopted and made their own. The Fast Show, not Ali G or Harry Enfield's Kevin or Friends, is the real voice of contemporary youth.

Perhaps that makes heavy weather of a light subject, and it certainly isn't necessary to intellectualise the Fast Show to such a degree in order to appreciate it. I do find it interesting, though, that it is so quintessentially of its time and so unerringly keeps its finger on the pulse of people's way of thinking, so all I'm really doing is giving a little bandwidth to a subject a few other people may find diverting.

The essence of the Fast Show is of course its sketches and catchphrases, and herein may lie at least some of the secret to its success. It gives my friends and me great satisfaction to absorb one-liners like "Suits you, sir!" and "There's someone sitting there, mate" and use them frequently. Now it has got the stage where one can use these quotes and be fairly sure that nine times out of ten the person you are talking to will know where it comes from, the temptation is even greater.

I guess that the demise of the show will mean a slow death of the incorporation into everyday life of its phrases and mannerisms. I don't regret the show stopping now, because I feel it has said what it needed to say and it should quit while it's ahead. It has certainly done that. But there is something about the show that has penetrated the depths of my generation's psyche, and for many of us it is impossible to hear two people conversing in a foriegn language with occasional exclamations of broken English without immediately thinking, "The the the - the the the - Chrith Waddl
e".

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