Whilst I’m on the topic of media - how the hell has Jon Stewart been on the air for ten years in the US, over a year on More4 in the UK and I only discover him four weeks ago because of some awesome Stephen Colbert clips on YouTube?
This is quite simply the best funny current affairs show on the TV globally. It makes “Bremner, Bird and Fortune” look like the repetitive snooze-fest that it became just after the era of TW3. As for “The Panel”, well to be fair, that is guest-based so the writing could never compare. But if you look at The Jon Stewart Show, this is cheap TV. Even RTE could afford to make something like this. It is nearly all studio based with lots of spoof location-based reports with blue-screens. It succeeds because of great writers.
I have never understood how a nation like ours which is supposedly bursting at the seams with literary geniuses has rarely been able to create well-written current affairs comedy. Maybe it’s not considered real writing by the numberati. Or maybe the breakthrough will come when a bunch of students with a digicam and a sense of humour start uploading self-written comedy onto YouTube?
Stewart rips everyone to shreds equally which is what makes it so watchable. All of the special correspondents are fantastic and I saw an old clip the other night with both Colbert and Steve Carell which was hysterically funny. Head over to YouTube and search for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert and you’ll see what I mean. Any chance More4 will start showing The Colbert Report now?
Some say that YouTube will be crushed by the big media companies due to the amount of copyrighted material on their site. I disagree - clips of Stewart and Colbert and others are just advertising gold. Every viewer of one of those clips is another potential viewer of the show. TV companies in particular would be nuts to go after YouTube, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot.
My discovery of this show probably means it’ll be canned next week.
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