Comedians: Home Alone review – sketchy laughs almost make lockdown bearable

Comedians: Home Alone (BBC Two) is a slight but winning pick’n’mix that could only be more “does what it says on the tin” if it were called Comedians Messing About in Their Living Rooms With Whatever They Have to Hand. It is a make-do sketch show with some of the biggest names in comedy and part of the fun is seeing who is next to attempt to film at an angle that does not show you the family photos in their living room.

It is all deliberately short and piecemeal, although, with such a range of talent involved, there should be something to suit most tastes. There are new ideas as well as familiar favourites, like the nonsense corporate-waffle of Bob Mortimer’s Train Guy and The Fast Show’s Swiss Toni, played by Charlie Higson, both brought to life again as animations. (This is a great time to be an animator; apparently, demand for their services is through the roof.)

I was so calmed by the slot in which Mortimer named cats that I immediately cancelled my Headspace subscription and started playing Mortimer’s soothing tones on repeat. I also made a mental note to call my next pet Cupboard of Vests.

Kerry Godliman’s sloshed mum is the epitome of an “It’s Wine O’Clock Somewhere” mug, as she tries to persuade her kids to pay her even the slightest bit of attention. It is far funnier than you would think a sketch knocked out at home could be.

Lockdown television has been a strange mix of the good, the bad and the better-left-unseen. Antiviral Wipe was a stroke of genius, spinning tragedy into the perfect balance of humour and outrage. Isolation Stories showed that decent drama could be created with a smartphone and a lot of willing. Magazine shows seem to be doing fine, once you get past the oddness of physical distancing on sofas. Other kinds of chatshows have fared less well: in losing the human connection of being in the same room as someone, interviews that take place online buffer and skip and delay their way into greater awkwardness than the format can cope with. But the sketch show should be made for this kind of thing.

When Comedians: Home Alone works best, it is the make-do-and-mend spirit that carries it. Kids and pets are roped into the fun. In later episodes, Sara Pascoe does yoga with a dog, an experience so tricky to navigate that you wonder where Adriene (of Yoga With Adriene fame) got a dog so placid as to not try to lick her face during every other move (and why on earth they are considered graceful enough to have moves named after them).

Adam Buxton writes a song about whether his dog is responsible for a certain mess being left inside. Rhys James simply moves around his flat, from kitchen to shower, sharing his profound thoughts; he could definitely get an hour out of this when the Edinburgh fringe returns. “If someone tells you they’ve set the bar high at limbo, it’s really hard to tell if they’re saying they’re good or bad,” got a genuine snort of approval.

The downside is that it will be airing weekly and the more time-sensitive jokes are rooted in early April: running from the police in fear of being caught sunbathing; playing tennis in the garden alone; pasta shortages. Time has both galloped and dragged during these bizarre days, which means some gags can feel out of date in this context. The Room Next Door’s Michael Spicer turns his adviser-in-the-earpiece act on Priti Patel, but it was evidently recorded when her inability to utter a coherent number or pronounce the word “Herculean” were still considered embarrassing to the government. Can that really only have been three hundred thousand and thirty four, nine hundred and seventy four thousand days ago? Great jokes transcend timeliness, of course, but it does occasionally give you the sensation of watching a historical re-enactment.

Perhaps this is a hint of what television will look like well into 2021, when nobody can afford their streaming subscriptions any more, the few dusty DVD box sets that survived the digital cull have been finished twice over and we have run out of everything that was filmed prior to lockdown and physical distancing, even pilots for dramas so bad that afternoons have rejected them.

What we will be left with is shows exactly like Comedians: Home Alone. Gussied-up home movies, made Blue Peter-style out of old toilet roll tubes – unless that has all run out again, in which case it will rely heavily on sock puppets. Still, this has plenty of funny moments and, if you can’t laugh, what else is there?