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Bernard’s Working Comics is a bewilderingly unfunny enterprise as RTÉ insists on shoving O’Shea in our faces at every opportunity

Pat Stacey

Bernard O'Shea

March 23 2021 08:20 AM

SHOWS that push people outside their comfort zones by making them do things they’d never dreamed of doing before can, when they’re put together with wit and imagination, make for hugely entertaining television.

Take the celebrity charity editions of MasterChef and The Great British Bake Off, for instance.

The regular versions, featuring competitors who actually know what they’re doing, don’t hold any interest for me whatsoever.

Sprinkle in some celebrities who’d struggle to tell the difference between an egg whisk and a broken umbrella, however, and I’m 100pc sold.

Let’s face it: we don’t watch these shows to see an actor, comedian, singer or TV presenter display a hitherto unsuspected genius for whipping up culinary masterpieces.

We tune in to see Joanna Lumley accidentally putting coffee instead of cocoa powder into her chocolate sponge, or Dame Edna Everage over-baking a giant cookie so much, it had to be prised from a baking tin with pliers.

Both of these really happened, by the way.

Conversely, Channel 4’s excellent recent two-parter Stand Up & Deliver was all about wanting well-known faces to succeed at something that would scare the wits out of most of us, never mind someone used to public attention: performing an original stand-up comedy routine in front of a live audience.

Five professional comedians mentored five non-comedy celebrities, and the unlikely winner was Conservative Baroness Sayeed Warsi.

Comedian Bernard O’Shea’s new three-part series Bernard’s Working Comics (RTÉ2, last night) works off a vaguely similar idea to Stand Up & Deliver, but fails to achieve similarly entertaining results.

O’Shea convinces ordinary people with a natural gift for being funny in the workplace to prepare and perform, with his professional guidance, a short stand-up set in front of an audience made up of their colleagues.

Hilarity ensues — except for when it doesn’t, which is all the time.

For a series presented and co-created by a man who makes a generous living making people laugh, Bernard’s Working Comics is a bewilderingly unfunny enterprise.

It fails to raise as much as a smile. As a production, it’s shockingly sloppy, shapeless, half-baked and half-hearted.

In the first episode, O’Shea went sniffing for funnybones among gardaí in Portlaoise and Mountrath.

He eventually persuaded two of them, Garda Joe Fahy and Garda Sarah McInerney, to give it a go.

The trouble with the series is that’s it’s not really about Joe, Sarah or any of the other gardaí O’Shea met.

It’s not all that interested in them as anything other than sidekicks off which the presenter can bounce a few lame jokes.

It’s not really about finding hidden comedy talent, either.

For much of the 45-minute running time, this element of the show — the very reason, supposedly, that it exists — was pretty much forgotten about.

There were a few cursory scenes showing O’Shea dispensing advice, and it was only in the final 10 minutes that we actually got to see the gardaí’s brief performances.

Well done if you managed to stick around that long, because Bernard’s Working Comics had run out of steam long before then.

The bottom line is it’s all about O’Shea, the latest in a long line of anointed performers (see also Amy Huberman and O’Shea’s Bridget & Eamon partner Jennifer Zamparelli) RTÉ insists on shoving in our faces at every opportunity.

God alone knows why, because this was dire stuff.

In order to get to the payoff — and with respect to Joe and Sarah, don’t give up the day job just yet — we had to endure a half-hour or so of O’Shea tiresomely clowning around.

He went on the beat around streets deserted in lockdown.

He hung out at a checkpoint, cracking jokes at motorists.

While being shown around the station with four rookies, he pretended to get locked in a cell.

He got involved in a mock argument with a garda over his repeated inability to blow into a breathalyser.

I’ve known rainy days that seemed to pass faster than this one interminable skit.

Apparently, Covid-19 caused so much disruption to the production that it took a year to complete. Not enough disruption for my liking.

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