Dead Cat Bounce... Wired

To tenuously paraphrase Shakespeare, this is a tale of two productions. On the one hand, we have a musical comedy of almost stellar proportions; on the other we have a sketch comedy of near-uniform banality.

Sketch shows are often hit and miss affairs... famously so. In their latest BBC television series, David Mitchell and Robert Webb parodied the variability of the sketch format in what was, ironically, one of their weaker skits. However, Dead Cat Bounce... Wired bucks the trend here; none of the show's sketches succeeds in raising anything more than a smattering of sympathetic laughter.

But to dismiss Dead Count Bounce at this juncture would be to do them a huge disservice, for the bulk of the show is superb. Essentially a showcase of excellent musical comedy, from the opening tune—a song about a particularly ill-executed driving lesson—they harness a heady combination of Tim Minchin's exuberance, Tom Lehrer's twisted wordplay and Billy Connolly's folk-song storytelling. The results are often electrifying.

Particular highlights include Rugby (a song about forbidden love) and Overenthusiastic Contraceptive Lady (which extols the virtues of riding bareback). Indeed, only one song (a parody of naff American RnB artists) feels a little off, but only because it feels far too heavily influenced by Flight of the Conchords and lacks the bombastic silliness of the rest of their material.

If Dead Cat Bounce were to drop the deadweight sketch sections and just, y'know, really concentrate on their music, man, then we'd be looking at a top notch comedy troupe.