BEN ELTON - LIVE FROM PLANET EARTH POST MORTEM AND EPISODE THREE REVIEW

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT FROM THE BEN ELTON EXPERIMENT?

Channel Nine has been rebranding itself as the home of comedy this year – with such comic treats as %&*# My Dad Says and Mike and Molly to offer up to a comedy-hungry TV audience. Part of that rebranding was Ben Elton: Live at Planet Earth, which when all is said and done was a commercial and critical failure.

TV REVIEW - BEN ELTON: LIVE FROM PLANET EARTH EP 2

Ben Elton started out the second episode of Live from Planet Earth by apologizing for the first one. Youch. I always think it’s a better option, if your show has been hammered in the press, to just ignore that and do a better show the next time around. Actions speak louder than words and all that. The show rated shockingly last time, but I wanted to give it a chance, so I'm back for round two and hoping for improvement.

The main criticism of the show last week that Elton responded to was that there was a prevalence of knob and vagina jokes that bordered on the pathological.

That was not what I saw the main criticism to be. The main criticism of the show, from myself and all the other reviewers I read, was that Ben Elton: Live from Planet Earth wasn’t funny. Knob and vagina jokes are fine if they’re funny – but improving the show isn’t about making it less crude, it’s about making it wittier and less obvious.

TV REVIEW – BEN ELTON: LIVE FROM PLANET EARTH

OR AS IT MIGHT BE KNOWN FROM NOW ON – BEN ELTON, VAGINA JOKES FROM PLANET EARTH

(Channel Nine, Tuesday night, 9:30pm)

The first ten minutes of Ben Elton: Live from Planet Earth must have contained at least 2000 words, two comedy monologues and three character sketches. Between Elton’s fast-paced stand-up delivery and the sheer velocity of the first two sketches, it was like walking into comedy machine-gun fire.

(If I was a harsher critic, I would follow that sentence with ‘but more painful’. But I won’t.)