Never Mind The Buzzcocks (Never Mind the Buzzcocks)

Member Name: carlmcq

Product:	Never Mind the Buzzcocks
Date:	12/11/09 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny panel show based on music

Disadvantages: Some episodes are clearly better than others

The music lovers comedy panel show can simply be defined as Never Mind the Buzzcocks. And does the formula work? Of course!

First aired in 1996 and broadcast on BBC Two, the panel show uses the regular formula of other comedy panel shows and uses it in the music genre. At first, it was hosted by comedian Mark Lamarr along with team captains Phil Jupitus and Sean Hughes. Jupitus has stayed present ever since but Lamarr and Hughes are now long gone - at first Simon Amstell successfully replaced Lamarr, only to leave before the start of the latest series, and Hughes was replaced by Bill Bailey, who in turn had been replaced by Noel Fielding since 2008. So for those still keeping up, that leaves Jupitus and Fielding in charge of each team of two guest stars, and in the present series, a guest host appears each week...some being far better than others!

The show is broken down into sections, which can sometimes differ week by week but certain ones remain constant. The first one of these is guess the intro - where the team captain and one of his guests will play the intro to a popular song using only their mouth or hands to the other guest for them to try and work it out. Sounds basic and rather unfunny but trust me it can break into excellent spontaneous humour if the song sounds ridiculous, or if the guest's guess is just as bad. Points can be awarded to the other team if they're able to decipher it.

The third round of the show is the "Identity Parade", where us at home are shown a video of a band from a bygone age, and then a member of that band will appear in a line-up of five people which the team will have to select. They don't get the advantage of seeing the video, but often the guest are from the music genre, so may have a better inkling than the majority of us.

The final round is called 'Next Lines', where the host will read the line of a song and the teams will have to say the next one. Often the songs will have a reference to an artist mentioned previously in the show - or else with 50 years of popular music to chose from, it could be an extremely hard task! Whenever there's a music artist on the show, at least one of their songs will appear at some point during this which can often result in great embarrassment if they don't know the next line!

The show has sparked the odd bit of controversy over the years - most infamously the 'incident' between Simon Amstell and Preston from the Ordinary Boys, who at the time was married to Chantelle (the one from Celebrity Big Brother). Throughout the show, Amstell kept citing passages from Chantelle's autobiography, which eventually grated on Preston so much that he simply got up and left. Due to nature of the show, Amstell keeped the gag running throughout rather than apologising, which meant the incident could almost have been considered a great joke.

Amstell is often considered by many as being even better than Lamarr was, but since his departure, the guest hosts have differed in quality somewhat. Hosts such as Mark Watson and Rhod Gilbert have shone, but unfortunately the likes of James Corden made it look so apparent that he was merely reading from an autocue, that it became instantly unfunny.

You can get round to watching it on Wednesday nights at 10pm on BBC Two, or various archive episodes are shown in the evening most nights on Dave. Do yourself a favour and watch it. Comedy + music = success.

Summary: Watch it, and laugh. Simple.