We are only a couple of years away from the centenary of the moment when Scottish inventor John Logie Baird broadcast live television for the first time via the BBC. For the first two decades of TV’s existence, the technology to pre-record shows didn’t exist, and so comedy was dominated by revues and variety hours, sketches and songs. With the dawn of the sitcom, however, live telly became largely the preserve of rolling news and breakfast chat shows. Recently, British comedy has started to return to its own live roots, with SNL UK a surprise hit, and now Joe Lycett embracing the spontaneity with his new Friday night variety hour, Live from The Lycett Arms.
Looking like a traditional boozer – albeit one with studio lighting and an unusually photogenic cast of regulars – the Lycett Arms, the comedian Joe Lycett announced last night, is “your favourite local pub”. He twirled onto the stage with a gloriously camp musical number, introducing his first guest, comedian Guz Khan, as well as his “actual biological aunties Margaret and Pauline” who would be tending bar for the evening. From there, the Lycett Arms became a venue for bawdy, music hall comedy, japes with comedians like Mark Silcox and Jake Bhardwaj, and celebrity cameos by everyone from DJ Spoony, Prue Leith and Ross Kemp, to Big John and Stephen from The Traitors. There was a mackerel in a hat, a dragooned toast to Priti Patel, and an interview conducted via a gloryhole (Michael Parkinson could never).
If that sounds like a lot to squeeze into an hour, you’re half right. Live from The Lycett Arms is undoubtedly trying to push the comic envelope, knowing that not every joke will land. “I do like to run quite a loose ship,” Lycett informed viewers. That laxness was typified by a sequence in which Lycett appeared genuinely unaware that his guest, Khan, had just starred in the Netflix hit, The Gentlemen. That was quite a jolly detour from the usual PR schtick, but the interviews conducted with both the main guests – Khan and radio DJ Sara Cox – felt perfunctory and pointless. As an interviewer, Lycett seems desperate to move on to the next question, the next skit. He is transparently more at ease with the rambunctious shambles of moving through an audience that looks “like a Met gala for people who get their clothes from TK Maxx”. The whole evening was both tightly choreographed – Cox, presumably roped in because of her experience as a live broadcaster, seemed encumbered by the script – and determinedly slapdash.
It left Lycett with a lot to get through. There was a sort-of pub quiz, a toast battle, sword swallowing (no euphemism), and a Dolly Parton drag act. Not to mention a live connection to a real pub, which would be “twinned” with the Lycett Arms. In his previous show, Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back, Lycett flirted with performance pranking as a mode of satire (in the mould of Chris Morris or Nathan Fielder). Given the strain that the UK’s hospitality sector has been under, and Lycett’s social media commentary about his struggles with the licensing exam (he conceded, in the show, that he failed and required a third-party licensee), I had hoped that Live from The Lycett Arms might be more political. The pub is a complex symbol of Britishness: a rare community “third space” that is, depressingly often, seen as a vector for nativism. Beloved, yet broken.
Yet Live from The Lycett Arms eschews social commentary in favour of daft games and innuendo. It feels like a missed opportunity to take the format somewhere more interesting. The few political moments – swipes at JK Rowling and Jimmy Carr – leave the criticism subtextual, a joke for the in-crowd. Perhaps this is what Channel 4 demands from a primetime slot, but it feels a shame to employ a comedian whose previous targets have included Hugo Boss and the Qatari state, and then confine him to dick jokes. Equally, it feels a missed opportunity that the show is filmed in London rather than Lycett’s native Birmingham (especially if your first guest is going to be Coventry-born Guz Khan).
Lycett is talented and live telly always introduces a frisson of chaos. But Live from The Lycett Arms feels not only messy in its delivery, but messy in its conception. The premise is never explained nor justified: why is a light comedy variety show being set in a fictional pub at all? At the very least, Lycett should use this platform to give local landlords 30 seconds to moan about business rates and rising energy costs. What, after all, is the point of harking back to Britain’s sacred tradition of live TV, if you’re just going to play it safe?