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While his new series might lack the surrealness of TV Burp, Hill is always great fun when poking fun at television – first stop, the Queen Vic
Viewers worried that Harry Hill had been trapped in a vortex of You’ve Been Framed reruns on ITV2, rejoice: he’s back, and this time he is not constrained by the need to make drunken nanas falling over at weddings sound funny (the key is not to try: it’s always funny). Harry Hill’s World of TV (BBC Two) is an archive-plundering, TV Burp-style show, with each episode themed around a specific genre. This week it’s soaps; later episodes will go after medical dramas, cop shows and home improvements, which, judging by the viral Changing Rooms clip of disastrous shelving that did the rounds recently, is much missed.
As with much of Hill’s work, this is an absurdist collage of clips taken out of context and smooshed together for comic effect. Soaps are already absurd, even without a new interpretation of their most absurd moments, but still, they provide fertile ground. Hill promises to take us from the earliest days of soap, when a discussion about how a mortice lock works counted as a dramatic scene, to the infamous Corrie crash, still such a jump-the-shark moment for the genre that it is wonder we haven’t replaced the very notion of jumping the shark with a tram falling on top of Rita. Continue reading...