The Goes Wrong Show, episode 1 review: a great theatre show that just doesn't translate to TV

Sometimes it feels as if the panel show has taken over TV comedy. It’s a knowing, aren’t-we-ironic, smug sort of comedy, which mostly involves comedians laughing at each other’s jokes. It’s Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats and Have I Got News For You. Give it a year and A Question of Sport will probably consist of Nish Kumar and Katherine Ryan competing to say how much they hate sport.

The Goes Wrong Show (BBC One) contains none of the above, so by rights I should like it. A spin-off from the wildly popular West End and Broadway show The Play That Goes Wrong, it is an unashamedly old-fashioned farce – the debt to Morecambe and Wise is obvious. The premise is that an am-dram theatre company stages plays, extremely badly. The production is beset by disasters both on screen and off. This week the company attempted to perform Summer Once Again, a Downton-esque tale of a son returning from the Great War. It featured creaky sets, collapsing props, an actor forever confused by his lines, and a director (Henry Lewis) drunk on power after his predecessor was ousted from the job in disgrace and reduced to appearing in this production as an oik shovelling manure.

The cast’s comic timing is impeccable and impressive – a scene in which a character narrowly avoided being whacked in the head with a shutter, but was then whacked in the head with a door, was perfectly executed. But the whole thing left me cold. I can imagine this working a treat in the theatre, and feeling a communal sense of joy when sitting in the audience, but television puts viewers at a remove. Shots taken from the back of the studio, showing the cameras pointed at the stage, only served to underline that point. And there was genuine audience laughter, but also canned laughter as part of the script, which felt weird.

Some reviews have suggested that the only other show currently providing this kind of slapstick is Mrs Brown’s Boys. But as a parent of young children I can tell you that it’s alive and well on kids’ TV – Horrible Histories, Danny and Mick, Crackerjack – and actually done rather better than this.