A Comedy On This Day: The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer - Flight 709 (9 June 1995)

How nice to have your garments removed by a bird of prey these days.

 The final episode, and there's an end of term, exhausted, feel to this one. There's more corpsing than usual, which reminds you just what a fine line there is between it being a charming glimpse of the real friends behind the personae and the point where it becomes annoyingly amateurish. If they were small children, this would be the point where you'd say, "I think they're getting over-tired now".

 I'd forgotten that Charlie Higson's Swiss Toni first appeared here, almost fully formed, years before The Fast Show. He attempts to sell the bra men a convertible - "You know, I can picture you now, driving along in the summer with your top down."

A Comedy On This Day: The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer - Muscles (2 June 1995)

MORTIMER: Hey, Vic! 'Footloose' - What a lovely song.

REEVES. Yes, it was a great pleasure to sing 'Footloose' but remember, ladies and gentlemen, loose feet are a very REAL problem and it does affect people in older age. And that's why us, as performers, donate all our money to the rectification of loose and missing feet.

 This one is a perhaps a little overbalanced by a special guest appearance from Sting. While its interesting to watch the very famous man corpse when asked personal question by Donald and Davey Stott, I think I'd prefer to have seen Charlie Higson or Matt Lucas in grotesque and outlandish prosthetics as 'Sting'.

 There's an infestation of singing owls in the studio this week. They pop up from under the desk and get squashed back, Whac-A-Mole style, during Reeves and Mortimer's hammer and frying pan Tom and Jerry scrap. This confusing new random element of pushing owls - on top of the rhythm of alternately giving and receiving blows - is clearly too much for Vic and Bob to follow, and provides an little moment of insight into just what a high-level performance skill comedy can be.

A Comedy On This Day: The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer - Hang-Dry Clothes (26 May 1995)

 For me, The Smell is probably the peak of Reeves & Mortimer's comedy. The humour of Shooting Stars was much easier for a wider audience to assimilate, but its thrown-together charms have often worn thin as they've milked it over the years.

 It’s probably their most crafted series, and it certainly had more resources put into it than Big Night Out ever did (filmed inserts! great big sets!). You can see the value of this investment in this episode's opening musical number, a medley of 'Never Let Her Slip Away', 'Without You' and 'I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts' (the song selection funny in itself), a sequence of clever visual perspectival jokes given the same care and craft as a big 'shiny floor' Light Entertainment spectacular musical routine.

 There's an acute choice of supporting guest artistes, always adding something distinctive without taking anything away from the leads. As well as Paul Whitehouse and Mark Williams in Slade in Residence, this week's grotesque parody (Masterchef with Reeves as Lloyd Grossman with huge bulbous head levitating around the studio) is elevated by a very early appearance of Matt Lucas (as toff cannibal chef Quentin Mint) and - especially - a terrifying Morwenna Banks as Christian martyr Joan Baptiste serving her own severed ears to complete a portrait of Christ in food.

 Peculiar Wikipedia fact: "As a result of his appearances, Paul McCartney became a fan and invited Charlie Chuck to perform at one of his birthday parties". I saw his act at the time and it was quite intimidating ("Charlie, Charlie, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck went to bed with five young ducks. One DIED! Charlie CRIED!", attacks drum kit and repeat with four ducks, etc). I'd have played safe with a conjurer, I think...

A Comedy on This Day: Vic Reeves Big Night Out (25 May 1990)

Its Spandau Ballet, and they're laughing at an orphan who's fallen off his bicycle

 And this is where it begins... Watching this is funnier now than it seemed at the time. The strain of having to establish a raft of characters, situations, rituals - and an unfamiliar ramshackle comic idiom - made it quite an effortful 25 minutes to view. In retrospect, now that I know how each episode was structured, I can pick up on the amusing ideas and variations without the initial "What is this and how does it work?" reaction.

 The audience reaction is fascinating, especially as we get to see them several times, including some hostile and bewildered faces amongst the crowd. Although some have come from the old New Cross Albany Empire audience and are primed to know what to expect, a lot of them don't know what they've let themselves in for. There's a quality of hesitancy and not knowing where the jokes are to their collective responses, and you can sense a greater uncertainty in Reeves' performance because of this. This went after the first few episodes, after which presumably everyone who went to the recordings had already seen them on television. I think that I actually prefer this to the response to what happens by the second series, when the audience seems full of Wonder Stuff fans, cheering every catchphrase and encouraging rather shouty performances from the stars.

A Comedy On This Day: Vic Reeves Big Night Out (10 April 1991)

 This is one series that does seriously benefit from being watched sequentially. Much of what I found funny about it at the time was the pleasure of close viewing, recognising an idea or character from a previous show, and seeing how it gets inverted or developed. Its something that gets a bit lost when you watch an edition cold.

 Watching this again in middle age, it’s exhausting just how shouty they were at this stage, something I had a higher tolerance for when I was young.

 This week's opening song is 'The Grand Old Duke Of York', performed with a mini brass band. I'd forgotten how grim the travails of the Man with the Stick become in the second series, once he loans out his children to Reeves. This week he gets momentary access, when a cage containing three children in miniature paper helmets is wheeled out, before Reeves sends them back for "shark testing".

 I've always liked cockney Labrador Greg Mitchell, who this week appears three times, sharing his enthusiasm for Mike Harding, Max Boyce and Barbara Dickson, before each time regretting his confidence. You can also see him behind the desk, dancing to 'Oh Mr Songwriter' at the end, a counterpoint of puppet canine fragile cheerfulness against the monster egotism of Britain's top light entertainer and singer.