"But Kate, you know very well that ot's illegal for girls to do anything interesting."
Ok, now this isn't me making a habit of blogging sitcoms- there are all sorts of reasons why they don't lend themselves as well to a proper episodic blog post, at least for me. So this is just a few brief witterings per episode, rather less content than usual, but we'll see how it goes.
Essentially, this is bloody brilliant. Yes, it's basically the world of Shakespeare in the style of Black Adder II, with the lines very Blackadderish indeed and with Will Shakespeare (a perfectly cast David Mitchell) performing the same narrative function as good old Edmund. But this is by Ben Elton, someone who has every right to do this. There's something to be said for getting a writer to do what he's good at. Sometimes it's good to be in one's comfort zone.
The cast is superb, and the assortment of regular characters introduced here are at once redolent of Blackadder (aspiring actress Kate is quite deliberately based on "Bob") and based on Shakespeare's real family and regular actors- I love how Will Kemp is used to take the piss out of Ricky Gervais. This is roughly based on the young-ish Shakespeare of the 1590s, but let's not be too fixated on historical accuracy. Let's just say that, as someone who sees Romeo and Juliet being, in large part, the still young-ish Shakespeare, whose earlier work consisted of such violent crowd pleasers as Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI trilogy, taking the piss out of Italian romances by having a deliberately bathetic ending, I enjoyed this immensely.
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