Sitcom beating about the Bush

By GREG DIXON

What a curious relic Sky TV is screening right now.

Yes, yes, you might say that there are many on the pay-TV network, but Sky 1's new comedy - a very old, new comedy as it turns out - is more curious than most. And That's My Bush! (10.30 tonight) is a sitcom that is rather funny, as in funny peculiar, for a number of reasons.

First, this comedy about a moronic American President called George Bush, made for the American cable channel Comedy Central, must surely be the first to make a sitting President the central butt of a sitcom's joke.

Second, it began screening in America in early 2001, just months after Bush came to power.

Sure, it was already clear to many when Bush was elected that he was going to be easy meat for comics, but having a TV show up and running fewer than three months after the man's inauguration is something approaching astounding.

Third, this comedy from South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker lasted just eight episodes, ending its original run in May 2001. The show was cancelled just a month before September 11, 2001. The reason, according to Variety was cost, though its rating were nothing special.

But the most curious thing about That's My Bush! is that it is not really about George Bush - this is more a parody of the sitcom genre than a satire on a president.

Stone and Parker do, of course, know a thing or two about subverting formulas. It was something many would argue they perfected in their animated, poo-obsessed sitcom South Park, a show I never much liked.

But here, as in South Park, they strain too much for effect.

And in attempting to mock the sitcom formula - a laudable idea - this comedy finds itself in the tricky position of seeking laughs in much the same way as the thing that it is scorning, despite the intension of irony.

The similarities in last week's first episode to Married With Children, a better sitcom attempting much the same thing, are compelling, too.

The father of the house, in this case the President Of the United States, is an idiot, his wife is smarter but over-sexed and the neighbour Larry - he arrived with the line, "Hey George, it's your favourite neighbour!" - is wacky.

There are plenty of other sitcom standbys in the characters, such as the cheeky, wise-cracking servant (as seen in comedies Benson and The Nanny), and the dialogue, plotting and the hug-and-learn ending.

In classic, cliched sitcom land - going back to the 50s - the pivotal comic character, too, must always have a signature line. In the first episode we heard it twice: "One of these days, Laura, I'm going to punch you in the face."

Whether any or all of this is actually funny is, inevitably, a matter of taste. Certainly the (intentional) use of the hackneyed plot of having to be in two places at once (Bush was supposed to be having dinner Laura and hosting an abortion summit on the same night) was given a sharp twist with the South Park-ish inclusion of a foetus that had survived termination ("He's bitter, he's angry, he hates to be cancelled").

But for my moolah, That's My Bush!, just as South Park before it, is so busy being self-consciously daring and subversive that it can't see that its own puerile jokes are as lame as the next sitcoms.

Comedy's Central's ironic tagline for this show was "a brilliant man deserves a brilliant sitcom". The trouble is that That's My Bush!, despite its satirical intentions, is about as clever as the man himself.