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| A photo of the members of Jigsaw I copied from their website |
I don't know how these three came together - they each perform in their own right (Dan's been around for ages) but all three hail from the Avalon Management stable. Maybe that had something to do with it? If it did, it's almost as curious that the rather lovely 15 minutes of radio I listened to tonight didn't come from the mighty Avalon Productions - It's "in house", i.e. pulled together by that dwindling but talented band of merry makers beavering away a stone's throw of Broadcasting House.
Maybe they're all in the same Masonic Lodge*? Maybe they were just all sharing a damp flat in Upper Norwood and by some strange, possibly magical, happenstance realised they were all comedians with an Edinburgh show to fill.
Speculation like this will get us nowhere. Whatever it was that brought these three towering mini-beasts of the comedy undergrowth together ... IT WAS A VERY GOOD THING.
Sketch comedy - whether it's on TV or radio - tends to be cursed as the "curate's egg" of production. Consistency is incredibly hard to pull off. Take any number of examples with sketch shows of yore (you'll find plenty on Radio 4 Extra) with big names in their comedic infancy like Armstrong & Miller or other Footlights-types from whom we never quite heard again in this arena (... And Now In Colour) or other shouty young graduates who go on to great things in different directions, like The Cheese Shop.
Sketch shows have for a long time been the teenage of comedy writer/performers; much of their comedic maturity is ahead of them and many of their short-comings are all too obvious.
In basic terms, a 50/50 hit rate on sketches is pretty good.
In my opinion Jigsaw smash this target out of the ball park. Granted, it's a 15 minute programme - but it's packed with character, gags, set ups, runners, sound effects, funny voices - the lot. It uses radio properly. These are not just the best sketches from their Edinburgh show (OK, some of them might be) they really work on the listener's imagination. There are also a couple of shit puns - but I am prepared to forgive them almost anything for the blackest sketch I have heard in a LONG time about a life-support machine.
This is 15 minutes of energy from 3 relatively experienced stand-ups, honed with some imaginative and subtle production (purely from a budgetary perspective I'd like to know where this was recorded) and I highly recommend it to them-as-likes-laughing.
The series starts on 20th February at 11:15pm on BBC Radio 4, or click here to listen via the magic of the Internet. Catch it now, before there's another embarrassing incident with a TV chef.
Out of curiosity - what are your picks of the sketch show genre?
*This is unlikely
UPDATE: Twitter tells me that two of the three (Nat and Tom) were at one time linked, romantically, and they just got chatting to Dan and Jigsaw was born. So now we know...
