Come with us now, on a journey that was two series longer than it should have been

Or: Christ, The Mighty Boosh Is Fucking Shit, How Did We Ever Say This Was Good

Look, I get it, sometimes you just remember an old TV show you used to really enjoy. You decide, perhaps, to look up some clips of it on YouTube and have a good ol’ giggle at them. And sometimes you make the grave error of deciding to revisit that show, including watching that one series that happened after you dropped off of watching it. As someone who went through that entire process this month with 2000s “classic” The Mighty Boosh, I’m here to tell you: No! No!! Don’t do that!!!

Right, bollocks to history lessons, I’m just going to assume you already know about this show as it is and dive right into it. If you want to know more details about it then you can go use a Wikipedia.

Let’s make one thing clear immediately: Series 1 is the show at its peak. Admittedly, this peak is about as high as one gets when you make whipped cream, but it’s the best it gets. It has two episodes in total that I think are consistently good throughout – E01 “Killeroo” and E08 “Hitcher”. The remaining episodes don’t fare nearly as well, in that they all vary in quality throughout. “But Avery, that’s pretty harsh! Surely there’s more good episodes than just two?” No. No there is not. And if you think that’s bad, Series 2 has about one good episode and Series 3 has zero. Let’s dig into why.

The Setting

For some baffling reason, Boosh could never settle into having one specific location to be its core location where stuff takes place. In Series 1, it’s at a dilapidated, underfunded zoo in London. In Series 2, it’s in Naboo’s apartment whilst Series 3 sets it in the new “we sell anything” type store underneath the apartment that Naboo apparently now runs. In much the same way, the stories contained in each series are told in equally inconsistent ways across the shows run. This problem creates a bizarre feeling of unrest for the show; it makes it feel like it never finds its footing and never fully figures out what exactly it wants the show to be. It only keeps a few consistencies with each subsequent series and continuity as a concept doesn’t exist unless its plot or joke relevant.

The reason why I set Series 1 as the shows entire peak is thanks to it’s setting of the zoo. Despite having such a specific place as the core location, it never actually stopped the characters from going elsewhere; at least three episodes have them wander outside of the zoo with two of those episodes explaining such travel with cutaway gags without further questioning. Above all else, it works so well because it’s a very open set. In addition to the main “plaza” of the zoo, there’s the staff room the duo mooch about in, the animal cages, behind Naboo’s little gift shop, Bob Fossil’s office and the Reptile House. Hell, they’ll straight up invent a new location within the zoo if its plot relevant as seen in E02 “Mutants” where there’s a convenient “Secret Lab” room located just next to Naboo’s shop. I’ve always felt this not only allowed for lot of fun plot concepts and ideas, but the way we follow Vince and Howard around their day job and what they get up to makes it feel almost like an episode of Peep Show at times.

Series 2 and 3 meanwhile have far more mundane and dull core locations. By having such small and boring locations as the main set, it pretty much requires the cast to always leave said set just to have an episode happen in the first place. It’s much more throwaway and just kind of there to be a place for the gang to pop off a few jokes before the show actually starts. Granted, this is more of an issue in Series 2 than it is in Series 3, which actually manages to make semi decent use of the shop interior set for plot things. Regardless, it by and large feels very phoned in. The apartment in Series 2 is super cramped and has virtually nothing interesting going on by nature of it being just a regular apartment (and frankly there is no way you would get four people living in there, much less one person and his gorilla familiar.) To prove a point, I’ve counted the episodes in which they don’t leave the core location –

Series 1: 3 [E02 “Mutants”, E05 “Jungle”, E06 “Charlie”] Series 2: 1 [E02 “The Priest & The Beast” – story is a flashback] Series 3: 1 [E05 “Party”]

Again, these are relatively low numbers, but it proves a point considerably. If in Series 1, they can handle three episodes entirely within the setting but can barely manage one episode in the later 2 seasons that actually involves the main cast and not side characters, then it shows a lack of confidence in their own writing and worldbuilding. And even though the remaining five episodes of Series 1 have the characters leave the zoo, they still spend at least a good chunk of said episode there regardless. By contrast, a lot of what they do in the other seasons takes almost any excuse it can get to not stay in the apartment or shop sets. Speaking of those excuses…

The Writing

There’s not really any other way to put this, so I’ll just tell it to you straight: The Mighty Boosh is poorly written. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be taking the dada seriously, but stay with me here.

Let’s start at the plotlines. Boosh has a serious issue of not really knowing how to pace its own show. In Series 1, this was less of an issue since they had dedicated transition animations if they needed to cut to another thing for any reason, or to pass time. But it becomes markedly more noticeable with S2 and 3 as those animations are thrown out. For some reason, and this includes Series 1 as well, Boosh seems to have been very content with spending more than half of each 30-minute episode just setting up the plotline and then tie absolutely everything up in the last 5-10 minutes. It then has the gall to barely go past the basic concept for said plot, often throwing a lot of the potential away for the sake of making shrug worthy gags. It revels in the inexplicable but in the most awkward and boring ways possible. The moment a character or plot becomes remotely interesting, it gets resolved 5 minutes later and the show ends.

Take S01E06 “Charlie”, for example. The main gist is that Howard is trying to pass himself off as a writer as yet another effort to impress and get into bed with the hopelessly underdeveloped character known as Ms. Gideon. Meanwhile, we learn that Vince writes picture books with a character he made up called “Charlie” and places said books in cereal boxes at the supermarket, whilst also mentioning that the character is apparently real. Whilst trying to write, Howard brings up a character who is notorious for being able to tell if he wishes to publish a story within one sentence, who naturally appears the following day to offer Vince a publishing contract for his Charlie books. This results in a party being held at the zoo where its revealed that Dixon Bainbridge, the owner of the zoo, knows this publisher and has persuaded him to publish the Charlie books under his name instead. Vince is appalled by this decision and tries to stop it happening to no avail. Before leaving in a huff, he claims that Charlie won’t be happy and will get them for such an action. After laughing at Vince for thinking he’s real, Charlie then appears at the gates of the zoo, chases after Bainbridge and the publisher and ties them both up. The show then transitions away on their screams, leaving the entire situation that unfolded unexplained and with no further details as to what happened to them.

Of course, I don’t expect everything in this show to have a reasonable explanation since it’s meant to be random and Dadaist. But I still can’t help but feel that you need to set some kind of ground rules for how the universe works. I also feel that you should probably not have one off the cuff joke that barely reads as a joke be the actual conclusion of the story, which fails to actually conclude anything. End your stories on a joke all you want but if you’re going to have an actual plotline with those jokes, you need to at least make sure that it all scans and makes relative sense within the show’s rules and lore. But the thing is…it gets worse.

Series 2

The very first episode of Series 2 is, and I am not joking about this, a 30-minute long rape joke. The gist is that the gang go out on vacation to a cabin in the woods, meet the owner of said cabin who tries making sexual advances on Vince (who visibly wants nothing to do with him) before the cabin owner sends Howard off to an area of the woods that is currently unsafe due to it being mating season for Yetis, who have sex with humans. To do that, they hypnotise them into thinking everything is okay, safe and happy. So yeah, not only is the gimmick of this cabin owner character a rape joke in himself, but also the crux of the episode is too. Lovely! Thanks lads! Series 2 really likes to go in on this character archetype too; the cabin owner is played by Rich Fulcher, and his role throughout the second season seems to just be “character who wants to sexually harass Vince.” Because you know, the joke that runs through every season of Vince being referred to as Howard’s wife just wasn’t enough, we gotta have him be actively preyed on now.

Of course, this is the ideal time to bring up the 5th episode of Series 2, “The Legend of Old Gregg”. A character oft referred to as being transphobic due to them being written very badly as gender confused and calling their genitals a “mangina”. If anything, their writing phobic of intersex people rather than trans folk, but it’s not great either way. Personally speaking though, I take more umbrage with the pacing of this episode. This one is a star example of the show having a 20 minute introduction and a 10 minute conclusion. The main chunk is taken up by the actual plot where Howard and Vince go to a random fishing town after a bad gig. They go fishing together but because Vince is unnaturally good at it, Howard forces him to go back to the pub alone. After telling the fishermen there that they were fishing on the lake, he gets warned to never do such a thing because of Old Gregg. Subsequently, Howard hooks them in and is taken to Gregg’s home. We’re then treated to 15 minutes of Gregg being manipulative with Howard to get him to stay in various ways, including showing him a creature called “The Funk” which supposedly shot Bootsy Collins to fame. Soon as Gregg leaves the room after telling the story, Vince & the rest of the gang appear in a submarine, and Howard escapes with the “Funk” creature. After a short musical interlude in the pub, they’re shown to be travelling back home in the van, which pans up slowly and shows Old Gregg standing on the roof of it. Episode ends.

Old Gregg appears about 12 minutes into the 27 minute episode. Vince saves Howard another 12 minutes later. The episode ends 3 minutes after that. This kind of pacing not only makes me think that this show might’ve benefitted from being a little bit longer, but also that it doesn’t quite understand how to make snappy set ups for a plot, revelling too long in random jokes and side bits before it actually gets to the point of the episode. As a result, it leaves little time for actually spending time developing the core plotline, and the entire thing ends almost as quickly as it started. Also, this is one of the episodes that commits the occasionally recurring crime of having a cliffhanger ending despite the show not containing any continuity between episodes at all. I can understand the option of not wanting to provide continuity since it allows them to include jokes right at the end of episodes that would otherwise break the world of the show (e.g. Bollo dying at the end of S01E03), but when you’re doing that just to have a one off character say their rubbish catchphrase of “I’m Old Gregg, I have a mangina”, it becomes one of the most throwaway jokes you could possibly do.

Speaking of rubbish catchphrases, we have inconsistency with how Bollo is written. In series 1, they’re clearly trying to figure out if he’s going to be a main character or just a character who occasionally appears to do funny things with Vince. As a result, his ability to speak flicks back and forth between actually speaking and just grunting. But by Series 2, he gains a more important role due to becoming Naboo’s familiar and being part of the main gang. And yet, he still barely speaks unless he absolutely needs to, and largely he pipes up purely to say his catchphrase of “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” right before something bad happens. I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.

Series 3

Series 3 takes the slow decline of quality happening with Series 2 and slams it face first into the ground. By this point, Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding seem to have let the fame go to their head slightly, as it becomes increasingly self-obsessed and the plots become even more thin and bland, with one of the two getting side plots that are shrugged away to get out of them quicker. There’s an episode which is focused on how they apparently gain imitators who beat them to popularizing everything and steal their thunder, because now they’re minor celebrities I guess? Which all leads to them having a Crimp Battle, with a set of Crimps that are all incredibly rubbish compared to ones from the previous two series (apart from the “Crimpety Crimpety / Now, now / Crimpety Crimpety / Ask me how” line which is genuinely quite catchy.) The only other times crimps appear in this season are the 2nd and 5th episodes, and whilst they’re different ones, the second halves share an incredibly similar structure to the point that it feels like they didn’t really bother. Also, people tend to mention E04 “The Strange Tale of the Crack Fox” as the core highlight of this season but frankly that one is just as nothing as the rest of it. Hell, they’re so utterly unremarkable and nothing that I’ve forgotten core plot points in them not even a couple hours after watching them. It’s just the absolute bottom of the barrel stuff. Add in the fact that the final episode, “The Chokes”, has possibly the weakest joke ever (Howard trying to get an acting role with a famous avant garde film director which eventually results in him getting it only for it to turn out to be for a trapped wind medication advert) that not only ends the episode but also the entire series and you have the show at its most pathetic.

Perhaps the biggest blow to the humour of the show in Series 3 is the fact that The Moon is still here. Now, The Moon was a joke character introduced in Series 2 who pops in at least twice an episode to give some completely inane speech that was completely unrelated to the actual plot. In that context, he was a welcome appearance to help break up and/or pad out the episode a bit and genuinely had some good moments. In Series 3, however, he seems to exist purely because the world of the show hasn’t radically changed much since 2 – and they have absolutely no idea how to write him anymore. As a result, he now seems to randomly pop in to say about a sentence worth of plot related crap before leaving again.

And now, a friendly reminder

This show, on multiple occasions, had blackface characters. S01E05, S01E07, S02E02 and S03E02 all feature one of the two characters which is just Julian Barratt in blackface; S01E05 and S02E02 having Rudi whilst S01E07 and S03E02 has The Spirit of Jazz. Rudi in Series 1 is some kind of shaman type figure who Vince comes across in the Jungle Room, and apparently has many names he goes by. He’s also inexplicably trapped in a moving cardboard stage. In Series 2, he’s just a dude (though still with spiritual stuff going on) and is in a band with a Mexican stereotype called Spider. The Spirit of Jazz meanwhile remains relatively consistent across both seasons (the core difference being that he appears as some kind of hair beast in S03.) They try to excuse the make up with SoJ by providing a backstory for him and showing that, when he was alive, he looked pretty much the same and so It’s Definitely Totally Not Racist, Guys! Yeah, no, it’s still blackface lads, doesn’t matter which way you cut it.

Extra bits I want to bring up but can’t be bothered trying to jam it under a heading

As close to a conclusion as I can get

Ultimately speaking, there’s one core phrase that floats around my mind as I reflect on all three seasons and that is “missed opportunity”. This show leaves itself open to so many different jokes, plot developments, character developments, you name it….and refuses to take any of them. It’s content for the episodes to be the bare minimum, stretched as far as they’ll go before ending. It’s content to peter out quietly on a rubbish joke. It’s content to have frequent one note characters that serve no real purpose. It’s content to not try. To hammer this point home, the show frequently relies on just casual ableism (specifically calling people a ret*rd) for the sake of a joke. If it’s not that it’s “haha, isn’t sexual abuse funny?” It’s hard to really say the show’s surreal humour was ever that good when it frequently gave it up just to be crass for no reason.

In short: The 2000s were a mistake and never under any circumstances should you revisit any comedy show from that time period. Except for That Mitchell & Webb Look. That one actually holds up relatively well despite also having moments of blackface.