Next Week’s News is RTÉ’s fresh new comedy show, a blend of sparkling new ideas, interesting and famous guests and exciting footage from Youtube, all packaged together in an inventively constructed panel show pitting two fantastically talented comedian captains against eachother.
The show opens with a monologue from host Bernard O’Shea who rambles on about events of the past week, throwing in the odd “zany” topic to help the viewer understand this is an off-beat look at the world. Watching O’Shea’s endearingly smug presentation, you have to occasionally pinch yourself to remember that this actually scripted.
O’Shea smoothly introduces the panellists: team captains are the criminally underused Neil Delamare and PJ Gallagher who just can’t seem to get a break with RTÉ for some reason. The guests are people you won’t generally have heard of but will be wondering why for days afterwards.
The show then moves on to a terrific idea that must have taken the comedians involved an age to come up with. We are blessed with creative talent in this country, but the imaginative thinking that was required to invent a round of guess the missing word from the newspaper headline is something we should treasure as a nation. It might seem broadly similar to the guess the missing word game on Have I Got News For You but the twist here is that the headlines involved (or the suggested answers) don’t actually need to be funny or even mildly humorous.
Last week the first headline up was _____ Doesn’t Have That Presidential Look. Guesses of Dana and Obama proved incorrect (but rib-achingly funny for everyone involved). The real answer turned out to be Ronald Reagan. What a hoot.
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The order of rounds appears to have changed over the first two weeks but the real jewel in the crown thus far has been the What Will Future Historians Make Of This Next Clip Round. It’s wonderfully titled and the concept is every bit as daring as that name suggests. We’re once again treated to a youtube clip and the panellists are then invited to speculate what on earth it’s all about. Fantastic.
Words can’t really do justice to the subtle, yet savage humour on show so here’s a clip of the panel discussing a parade. Note the modern references to selfies and smart phones costing a lot of money, but there’s a bit of old school humour there with the gag about round things looking like balls. How on earth do they come up with this stuff?
The gentleman telling the story about the phone is Al Porter. He had some magnificent banter earlier in the show with Neil Delamare where, for what I believe is a television first, two comedians were brave enough to rib on the fact that Uranus is a rude sounding planet. People talk about Brass Eye and similar shows pushing boundaries but this is really at the cutting edge of satire.
The beauty of the show is the indulgences allowed to comedians to tell humorous and humourless tales as the mood takes them. In another segment of the same round from a different episode, here’s Phil Jupitus with an articulate, evocative and downright hilarious story about a hamster. Note the pantomime efforts of Delamare alongside him. Multi-talented or what?
Next Week’s News is a magnificent response form RTÉ to those who dare question the value of their license fee. 55 minutes of groundbreaking, important and unforgettably funny comedy.