Endgame Viable

Push The Roll

I started listening to the Push the Roll Podcast with Ross Bryant. If you have any knowledge of the TTRPG Actual Play space, you know who Ross Bryant is, but if not, he’s an improviser who appears on Dropout.tv now and then. He’s unofficially known as The Greatest Role-Player In The World. Or something like that.

Anyway he started a kind of horror anthology podcast where he assembles a group of mid-tier TTRPG player staples and a special guest to play a Call of Cthulu one-shot where they improvise the whole scenario based on a random title submitted by listeners. (Actually I don’t know if he started it, or if an already-established podcast brand started it and recruited him to headline it. I think probably the latter.) It’s a lot like that old HBO series Tales From The Crypt, except it’s an improvised podcast.

Anyway, it’s fun. If you like improvised horror stories where the Cthulu mythos ruins lives in demented ways. They all end pretty much the same way: Everyone dies, goes insane, or some combination thereof. And there’s lots of laughs along the way.

The Sketch Show

Recently I discovered an old ITV show called The Sketch Show, which has fundamentally changed my opinion of UK comedy.

I used to think that all comedy that came out of the UK was the best kind of comedy, created by intelligent people for intelligent audiences. Particularly sketch comedy shows. Your Monty Pythons, your Mitchells and Webbs. The kind of comedy that proves the theory that comedians are the smartest people in society.

Then I saw The Sketch Show, which features much younger versions of Lee Mack and Tim Vine. I don’t know where this show fits in the pantheon of UK comedy television history, or what the people of Britannia think of it, but it’s the most unapologetically low-brow sketch comedy I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s just a rapid fire succession of bad puns and visual gags, over and over and over again, seemingly 100 different little scenes per episode.

It’s impossible to imagine that somebody convinced television executives that it made financial sense to build complete sets for 30-second gags. It’s no wonder it only lasted for two series.

I’ll give it credit for being a different kind of sketch comedy, but oh man, it’s a train wreck of non-stop groaners. It’s so much of a train wreck that I couldn’t stop watching it, and have devoured every episode of both series.