Join our campaign to bring BBC Three’s Impractical Jokers to the North East
Last week, BBC Three confirmed the return of hidden camera show Impractical Jokers. Giggle Beats’ Nic Wright reports on how a channel that communicates solely in hashtags has revived the prank show format – and why they should bring it to Tyneside.
The prank show; it’s a gift to television producers. Cheap and easy to produce, print off a few waiver forms and the public do most of the work for you. Not always to the greatest of ends, however, but it’s a format that has persisted since Candid Microphone first aired on American radio in 1947.
The Americans, that crazy, cocksure bunch, proved to be naturals at it. Over the years they’ve made huge successes of humiliating the general public, and across the pond, we were soon having a go ourselves. Jeremy James Stuart Anthony May-Gibson-Beadle MBE was at the forefront of the prank show craze, lurking in the hedges of Britain, convincing pensioners that aliens had landed in their front gardens.
At the turn of the century, the prank show format enjoyed a revival – with the arrival of Jackass. Invigorated with the reckless abandon of the MTV generation, it was obnoxious, bratty, and hazardous to the wellbeing of its audience.
At the same time, we Brits were having a bash at a new prank show of our own. Trigger Happy TV was a decidedly more British approximation of the format, with creator Dom Joly often poking fun at himself, relying on low-key observations of public reactions rather than trapping them into embarrassing situations.
Gaudy laugh-tracks were replaced with melancholy indie cuts, as grown men in animal costumes beat each senseless in the street, and unattended babies floated away attached balloons. All the while, polite and baffled members of the public looked on.
Once Joly’s initial flash of brilliance had faded, the format became something of a viciously-flogged dead horse. Though many, including Joly himself, attempted to establish the prank show as a consistently funny comedy format, they all fell short.
Scare Tactics, Punk’d and that timeless classic, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, followed in the reckless footsteps of Jackass, while British television were having their own stabs with Balls of Steel, Fonejacker, and whatever train wreck Olivia Lee was steering at the time.
They all seemed to be void of the cordial, childlike delight with which the hidden camera craze started out. Recently, Peter Funt, son of Candid Camera creator Allen Funt, said; “We’ve always come at it from the idea that we believe people are wonderful and we’re out to confirm it. Our imitators often seem to come at it from the opposite perspective.”
Considering their previous output, it was quite a shocker when a new contender emerged from the bowels of television programming; BBC Three. Usually content with trying to show how down they are with the yoof of today by giving shows to vacuous, hair-cut comedians and communicating only by hashtags, BBC Three commissioned Impractical Jokers last year.
Based on an American show of the same name, and shot in Brighton and Edinburgh, Impractical Jokers saw four comedians competing to humiliate each another in everyday situations.
Roisin Conaty, Marek Larwood, Joel Dommett and Paul McCaffrey take turns to guide each other through scenarios from interviewing members of the public and drawing caricatures, to teaching first aid and giving free massages. The comics are pushed to their limits by their gleeful colleagues; if their shame gets the better of them and they refuse a command, they fail the challenge.
The awkwardness is palpable; watch-through-your-fingers embarrassing scenes unfold as the comics feed each other instructions through an earpiece. You might think comedians have nerves have steel, getting up on stage night after night, attempting to hold the attention of judgmental punters and deflecting heckles, but wordlessly eating food from a stranger’s plate in a restaurant is another matter altogether.
The beauty of Impractical Jokers comes not only from having brilliant comedy brains pulling the strings in each scenario, but the absence of cruelty on the part of the comics. Here, they skewer each other, not the public, and they do so with an impish, but amiable glee; a glee that we in the North East would like to be party to.
As a show of support to the program, we’d like to extend an invitation, on behalf of the North East to BBC Three, to film the new series on our fair shores.
We would welcome you, Impractical Jokers, with open arms. Picture the scene; Marek Larwood trying to pick up women on the Quayside. Paul McCaffrey asking for directions outside St James’ Park dressed as a horse. Roisin Connaty reading fortunes in the Bigg Market. Joel Dommett… just being Joel Dommett.
So go on, help us bring Impractical Jokers to the North East. Tweet the show’s production company, @YalliProduction, and let them know you’re joining the @GiggleBeats campaign to bring the show to Tyneside.
