18 Stone of Mediocrity

OK, so two weeks in to Johnny Vegas' new TV show and after the initial dissapointment has worn off...I'm still dissapointed. The show has some nice set pieces, namely Johnny jumping celebrities, Evel Knievel style, but as an hour long show it's a shambles. From the series first two hours you could happily edit out an hour and a half of flab without missing anything good. Johnny's interview technique is non-existant and most of the comedy boils down to an angry fat man shouting things that aren't very amusing.
The tone is set from the beginning when Johnny arrives and jumps onto a scale telling us his weight. "I'm johnny", he shouts, "I'm 18 stone and every one of them is Idiot!" It's the TV equivalent of your irritating colleague at work going "I'm dead wacky I am!" at the staff Christmas party.
The sad part about it is that in theory the show should be brilliant. Johhny is a mercurial comedy talent who deserves to soar. Anyone who saw him describing the internet chatroom hell of Beauty's Castle on Room 101 will tell you that. It's just that somehow this show plays up Johnny's drunken buffoonery at the expense of the wit, self awareness and pathos which is at the heart of his best work. The best bit in the series so far has seen Johnny appearing drunkenly on one of those bid TV selling channels on cable, moaning bitterly at his co-host, who repeatedly berates him "You promised to learn the number!" Apparently he was there all day, it would've been nice for channel four to let us know in advance so we could've tuned into that instead.