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One of the U.K.’s best comedy shows is coming back as a webseries

The Internet has saved another comedy treasure.

 

Tom Harrington

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Posted on May 27, 2015   Updated on May 28, 2021, 6:05 pm CDT

British comedy nerds rejoice! Trigger Happy TV, Dom Joly’s surreal early-2000s hidden-camera show, will reportedly be resurrected in the form of a webseries.

The show’s original broadcaster, Channel 4, is in talks with Joly to create a “series of online shorts…for when you only have time for a five minute fix.”

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It’s about time Joly started to create again. Ever since he disowned Comedy Central’s U.S. version of the show and talk of a Trigger Happy TV film subsided, it seemed as if he had slid into the irredeemable life of the professional C-lister: content as a talking head on retrospective clip shows and appearing in guff like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, Celebrity Total Wipeout, Pointless Celebrities and Splash! (in which, I assume, “celebrity” is implied).

The webseries format seems like a perfect fit for Trigger, which stuffed its episodes with a succession of snappy, minute-long scenarios, always featuring Joly. But it seems that the creator has greater plans for the series: He wants to introduce mostly fresh characters and make some of the new sketches in a “cinematic-style.”

The idea sounds promising, but whether the already-complex comedic essence of the returning “massive phone guy” will be improved with a character arc and an unreliable narrator remains to be seen. 

Screengrab via Channel 4/YouTube

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*First Published: May 27, 2015, 12:45 pm CDT