Comedy for the very young.  It’s not as easy as it sounds.  They’re unforgiving.  They don’t laugh politely.  There is no hiding place.  If you’re not getting it right, you will know .

Last time, we looked at Something Special, a robustly cheering exercise in good-naturedness, inclusiveness and communication.  But that’s just part of the empire of Justin Fletcher.  Aside from his voice acting work, he has two other shows in permanent rotation on CBeebies which are pure comedy: the sketch show Gigglebiz and the sitcom Justin’s House.

Gigglebiz is basically the Fast Show and Little Britain format, adapted for the very young.  Which is less modification than you might think.  Yes, you’ve got to make sure that all the material is kiddie-suitable – and that isn’t just a matter of being pre-watershed, it also means avoiding reference points that won’t mean anything to them.  But Gigglebiz is pitching itself at the older end of CBeebies’ age range, so it’s assuming that the kids at least know some of the basic tropes.  And if they don’t, they will by episode six.

In fact, the format lends itself to children’s TV.  Recurring characters, each with endless variations on a central gag – that’s what British weeklies like the Beano were built on.  It also means you get to re-use loads of sets and locations, which is no doubt great news for the production accountant.   I suspect the show still has a problem that’s common with low-budget sketch shows, namely that it has to use pretty much everything it films – it can be patchy, and every so often something really dodgy makes air.  But the general hit rate is respectable.

What there isn’t, oddly enough, is much in the way of children.  There are cut-ins of children telling jokes, but that’s usually about a minute per episode.  The actual sketches avoid anything based on school, playground or family.  Instead, like most adult sketch shows, Gigglebiz goes with adults, mostly either childlike or incompetent.   So D.I.Y. Dan’s enthusiasm is undimmed by his failure to carry out any of the narrator’s instructions properly.  Captain Adorable is a quixotic superhero whose butler and sidekick quietly humour him as he “battles” mundane situations which he mis-reads as dangerous threats.   Robin Hood’s attempts to romance Maid Marian are perpetually sabotaged by the sodding minstrel who insists on providing a running commentary in song.

Ann Teak is an Antiques Roadshow expert who knows nothing, destroys everything she touches, and cruises obliviously through life as if she was doing a brilliant job.  (There’s also another element with her sketches, which is that despite her dangerous ineptitude being plain to everyone, the British won’t challenge her – or if anyone does, nobody will back them up – preferring to shuffle meekly forward to succumb to her “advice” while she retains her unearned authority through sheer force of personality.)  There’s some surreal stuff too, like a pantomime dame who wanders around the real world trying to react to everything as if it were a stock pantomime plot.  What’s most striking about Gigglebiz, though, is that Justin Fletcher really does have tremendous range as a sketch comedian.  The guy is a chameleon – he really does have the skill of defining his characters in voice and body language, and keeping them all distinct, even as the numbers proliferate through the series.

Justin’s House is a rather different beast – a full fledged sitcom, but one for a live studio audience of children.  And that studio audience is important, because it’s essentially a stage show on camera, with singalongs, performers wandering into the audience (or entering through it), kids in the front row being enlisted to help people clamber onto the stage, and so forth.  This sort of thing isn’t completely unprecedented in sitcoms – see It’s Garry Shandling’s Show or Sean’s Show – but Justin’s House isn’t doing it to be meta, it’s doing it because that’s how kids’ stage shows work.  Audience participation.  With a real audience.

The Justin of Justin’s House is a cheerful, occasionally self-centred child-man who (as is standard operating procedure) tends to leave a trail of disaster in his wake.  He shares his house with a robot butler called Robert (a parent figure, in other words) and a puppet thing called Little Monster who’s basically there as a force of anarchy to either screw up or advance the plot as required.   Depending on which series you’re watching, there’s also an explorer neighbour who’s invariably just come back from an adventure with a fresh macguffin in her rucksack, or a delivery girl who they quietly wrote out after series 2.  Plots typically involve things like Justin spontaneously deciding to take up mountain climbing, or everyone attempting to build a beach in the living room, or a guest star from another CBeebies show enlisting their help.

That last point makes Justin’s House the nexus of the wider CBeebies universe, because, as I think I’ve mentioned a while back, CBeebies can be a bit pantheistic, with a core of presenters from in-house shows making guest appearances in one another’s programmes and getting together periodically to put on the annual pantomime.  Get to host a show on CBeebies and you can pretty much guarantee a guest appearance on Justin’s House will be thrown in as a bonus.  Mr Bloom, the pirates from Swashbuckle, Nina from Nina and the Neurons, they’ve all wandered through the door.  In return, Robert the Robot – who really is excellent in his own right – serves as Justin’s House‘s ambassador to the rest of CBeebies, representing the show in things like the aforementioned pantomimes, the CBeebies prom, and astronomy week.

It’s an ensemble show, but it’s anchored by the charisma of Justin Fletcher as its frontman.  From time to time there’s the occasional gag targeted at parents (they surely don’t think four year olds are going to recognise an Ian McCaskill impression), or a scene that misses the mark, but the vast majority of it is precisely tooled children’s entertainment, honed by people who obviously know how a live show works and have figured out how to translate that to television without just pointing a camera at a stage.  It’s got a bit of anarchy, it’s got the slapstick, it’s got the characters, but there’s also just something loveable about Justin as an entertainer.  The kids are thrilled by him.  You can’t teach that.

Plenty of successful kids presenters have tried to make the transition to adult TV, with varying degrees of success.  Justin Fletcher, by all accounts, has no interest in that.  This is his thing.  It’s his calling.  He’s the biggest star in his field, and even in a multi-channel era, he’s going to wind up as a shared reference point for a generation.  Who wouldn’t be happy with that?

 

Next time: Katie Morag.