Luxury Comedy 2: Tales From Painted Hawaii

Luxury Comedy 2: Tales From Painted Hawaii

4 / 5

Channel: 4 and E4

Aired: 2012-2014

Cast: Noel Fielding, Michael Fielding, Dolly Wells, Tom Meeton et al

I'd describe it as the BBC 80s comedy The Young Ones meets a dodgy 80s B-Movie with a Cbeebies admiration of the wonders of life. It has small snapshots of talking objects that wouldn't normally talk, the same way The Youngs Ones did (I'm thinking specifically of SPG the Glaswegian hamster here) and the small-budget feel certainly has a B-Movie tone to it. My mother walked in on me watching it and thought I was still watching Cbeebies long after my nephews had left the room. It's that kind of psychedelic quirk.

Luxury Comedy 2: Tales From Painted Hawaii is the second series of Noel Field's Luxury Comedy, the first series of which I never watched, although I fully intended to now. For those who know who Noel Fielding is, you can probably grasp a small glimpse of what Luxury Comedy 2 is all about. I think the first word we need to use is Weird and then we can calmly saunter in to the realm of Fantasy.

"What do we want?"

"We want fantasy!"

"When do we want it?"

"Every now and then, just as a break from the mundane aspects of reality."

Appearing on the C4 programme The Last Leg, (after calmly coming from within a tent alá the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony) Noel admitted that the first series was very weird; probably too weird for the "mainstream", or even half-drunk bleary-eyed viewers. I accept this challenge and will be watching the first series with a good deal of enthusiasm but no great expectation. Weird is my jam. Whilst it hasn't made me laugh out loud or need to pause the TV because I can't breath, it's certainly given the promised break from the mundane aspects of reality. There's something about the setting and characters that lets you immerse yourself for 20 minutes. Plus, Richard Ayoade appears in several guises, not in the least as a hammerhead shark with a Tofu intolerance. What? Exactly.

I'll leave you with this thought in the same vain as Noel and his fantastical ideas: Imagine if every morning we had to actually put our face on like a mask, because underneath we all looked like Tony Blackburn?