TV Eye: Exclaiming our comedy virtues

Brendhan Lovegrove on stage at the Classic comedy club. Photo / Supplied

What a wonderful week! Two new New Zealand comedies! And both of them funny! And both of them on TV2!

Sorry. You really must indulge me on the exclamation marks. It's just that the first of these two local comedies seems to talk exclusively in sentences ending with exclamation marks. Know what I mean?!

The first, called Crash Course (distressingly the title doesn't have an exclamation mark; it really should), stars, in rather interesting casting, a fellow not known for his broad comedic range. Rather Mr Greg Murphy - or "The Mighty Murph" as I believe he is usually referred to - is a professional driver of a type of high-speed motor vehicle that I understand is usually referred to as a "V8". Having never seen, or wanted to see, anything involving "V8s", I have to confess I know The Mighty Murph only by his irregular appearances in the news pages of this newspaper and his ongoing commercial relationship with a particularly vile brand of pie. In any case Crash Course! (that's better!) showcases a whole new side of The Mighty Murph.

Ostensibly this half-hour programme (Thursdays, 7.30pm) is devoted to the education of a person who history teaches us is beyond education - the New Zealand driver. In reality it seems to be a series of stupid stunts and stupid police footage which surely have no other purpose than to give the old funny bone a particularly vigorous tickle.

In the show's first episode the featured stunt ran to dropping three cars from a helicopter. Quite why, I couldn't work out, though The Mighty Murph informed us that the three vehicles were dropped from a helicopter at various heights to demonstrate the sort of damage done by crashes at various speeds (including 105km/h, the speed of the crash that killed Princess Diana!).

It is quite beyond me why anyone in the country would be ignorant of the damage done by crashes at various speeds, given the frequency of both car crashes and media coverage of car crashes in this here Demolition Derby that we call New Zealand.

But how funny it is to see a car dropped from a helicopter! Particularly when you're apparently attempting to show the impact of a front-on car crash and you manage to drop one car on its side and another on its roof! I'd have thought this just showed that trying to drop a car from helicopter so that it lands front-first is only possible in one-out-of-three attempts!

In tonight's second episode the featured stunt runs to immersing The Mighty Murph and a car in a pool of water. This is apparently to test the widely held theory that one should wait until a car is submerged before trying to open the door to escape. Evidently - well, on the evidence presented by The Mighty Murph - one should get the hell out as soon as possible.

But as a scientific experiment - and, like the helicopter business, why should we take any notice if wasn't supposed to be? - this stunt was laugh-out-loud laughable. It's all very well to advise people do this or that, but surely being slowly lowered into a pool while divers wait to rescue you is as close to a real life crash-and-splash as yelling "bang" is to war?

A Night at the Classic (Wednesdays, 10.30pm) provided a more honest and agreeable laugh, though it too appears to be trading, well, dishonestly. At least it was for me. Because I'm of a lazy disposition, I'd not bothered to read any advance publicity on this, so I wasn't quite sure what to make of it initially.

Ostensibly it is a fly-on-the-wall doco about the Classic comedy bar, generally, and, in particular, the apparent career-in-stall of award-winning local comedian Brendhan Lovegrove. Actually, it soon became clear, it is something like a Ricky Gervais-style docu-drama.

The on-stage performances from the comedians - in the first episode from Andre King, Irene Pink, Ben Hurley and Lovegrove - are real enough. The backstage stuff is not. Instead it's a nicely scripted riff on the manky, down-at-heel existence of New Zealand comedians in general, and Mr Lovegrove in particularly.

While there's probably a little too much of the Gervais-style embarrassed-pause-then-turn-to-camera stuff, it has the potential to do something new in New Zealand TV comedy: to embrace and reflect the local stand-up scene (and who isn't feeling good about it these days?), while at the same time taking the piss out of the pretensions and rivalries - whether real or imagined - of our comedians.

All of which make it a welcome addition to local comedy TV. And there's not an exclamation mark in sight!

-TimeOut