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18 out of 25 people found the following comment useful :-
Am I bovvered....??, 26 August 2005
Author: jstallick from United Kingdom

I totally disagree with the previous reviewer's comments, although obviously it all comes down to taste in the end.

Catherine Tate is a brilliant comedian. Some of the characters are so spot on it's spooky. Who can believe that the elderly character Nan is being portrayed by the same actress who portrays the sullen schoolgirl Lauren? OK, not all the sketches are as funny but it is worth watching for the absolutely hysterical moments that punctuate this show. Timing is brilliant and some of the characters will I am sure become classics. In the new series the hit rate is even better!

I think Catherine Tate deserves to be called the new Queen of Comedy!

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18 out of 26 people found the following comment useful :-
No! This was hilarious!, 23 February 2005
Author: Sunah from Berkeley, California

I laughed all the way through the one show I saw. Catherine Tate sets up several situations...in this case a housewife who jumps at the slightest noise, a new mother who will do anything to keep from waking the baby while people try to give her a birthday party, a hateful grandmother being visited by her grandson, and several others, and revisits their scenes in turn throughout the show. The premises are skimpy, it is true, but I didn't notice that until this other reviewer pointed it out because her characterizations were hilarious. I'm a Californian so I really had to focus to make out what some of the characters were saying as she uses various accents from all over England. I would be very pleased to see more of Catherine Tate.

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15 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
This woman is a comic genius!, 18 March 2005
Author: Greg Couture from Portland, Oregon

I beg to differ with the other IMDb-er who finds this show, and Catherine Tate, unfunny, trite, and so forth.

Her show comes through on BBC America on my TV cable service and I only recently discovered it. It might help if I had a slightly sharper ear for British accents, especially those of the "lower classes" (no offense intended), but I have no doubt that this lady is an extremely gifted comic actress, a virtual chameleon (assisted by some extraordinarily talented makeup artists), who has provided some of the most solid laughs I've enjoyed in some time.

In my book she's right up there with her fellow Brits, Mollie Sugden, Paricia Routledge, et al. and her Canadian counterparts, Andrea Martin and Catherine O'Hara. And let's not forget an American, the inimitable Joan Cusack, who deserves her place right alongside her peers from outside our borders. My enthusiastic compliments to you all, ladies!

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9 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
The Catherine Tate Show and Little Britain are in different Leagues, 2 October 2005
Author: aidious from United Kingdom

Little Britain is a very funny sketch show but it is nowhere near as well observed as Catherine's masterpiece. Compare Vicky Pollard and Lauren. Many assume that Lauren is Catherine's attempt to imitate and cash in on Lucas's Pollard. But the character of Lauren was invented long before that of Pollard and is a far richer observation of today's inarticulate, low-aspiring youth. Pollard is a much more surreal character, someone who wouldn't be of place in Royston Vasey. Lauren however is scarily real.

Also the 'Nan' is possibly the second funniest 'Nan' creation in recent times, second only to the slightly more sublimity that is 'Nanna' in The Royle Family.

In fact, the majority of sketches on the Catherine Tate Show are very strong. It is just that people assume that a show that has so many different sketches with such a limited number of performers will be stale, but it's not. In fact, it's fantastic.

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9 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
I'm glad it's not just me, 20 June 2006
1/10
Author: Enoch Sneed from United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Having heard about this "prize-winning comedy" (a description the BBC seems unable to separate from the show's title) I tuned to see what it was all about.

I'm no curmudgeon. I love to laugh as much as anyone. I just found myself asking why I was being asked to find this funny. An old lady who swears like a truck driver, a snob who tells everyone off for their lack of manners then breaks wind at a funeral, a couple who are disgusted at finding "dried shitache(sic) mushrooms" in the soup at a restaurant. Just to take the last example, what am I supposed to laugh at here: the couple's ignorance of new food fads, the mispronunciation of 'shitake', or am I just supposed to feel smug because I know what is really meant by 'shitache'?

My wife (a teacher) tells me Lauren the bored teenager is all too typical of her students, but she was truly offended by sketches showing a woman with red hair having to enter a 'ginger refuge' where she could be with similarly afflicted people and kept safe from the prejudices of the outside world. Our son has red hair and throughout his school life was a convenient scapegoat because he stood out in a crowd. If he was bullied on account of his colouring and stood up for himself it was always his fault because we 'know' redheads have bad tempers. This 'comic' scenario left a very nasty impression.

I think the trouble today is that humour has to be seen to be terribly 'clever' and 'ironic' - you have to be able to get the joke behind the joke. I prefer the days when comedians were funny just because they were funny: Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson and - if you wanted character comedy sketches - Dick Emery, whose characters were broad without being spiteful.

I won't be watching Ms Tate again.

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3 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Face? Bovverd? Look! Face? Bovverd?! Well, yes......, 31 July 2005
Author: newwavenewcraze from United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

.....however, mostly in my case, "bovvered" = "although slightly bewildered, rather impressed."

I saw my first proper episode of The Catherine Tate Show fairly recently and I too beg to differ with accusations of Ms Tate's comic writings being sloppy or unfunny. From the punchy satire on Middle England's housewives who consider nannies with a regional accent as their worst nightmare, to the downright bizarre (the food van woman's ruminations on Archbishop Desmond Tutu) via gags that are genuinely disarmingly coarse (lazy nurse Bernie's revelations on the medicinal properties of yoghurt). I had plenty to laugh about.

However, I also have my reservations, mainly to do with Lauren...although the character herself is extremely funny, I do worry about that joke being recycled again and again in every episode, a la Little Britain. Granted, that kind of thing is probably testament to a character's popularity, but this may well be a double-edged sword both to Tate and to Lucas/Walliams; while it creates favourites with an audience, I can understand why it could fuel some criticism of being a one-joke-pony. Nonetheless, Tate manages to give her audience a slice of life in exaggeration; a classic device, but no less relevant or entertaining.

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0 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Did you ever see a drawing of a muchness?, 28 October 2008
7/10
Author: galensaysyes

Catherine Tate's comedy ranges from amusing to hilarious. She can be brilliantly inventive, and is almost always highly likable. I regard her less as a comedian than as a comic actress, as indicated by her parody soap-opera characters on this show and her serious performances in other shows. For someone with such a wide range of characterizations, worked in such a broadly satirical vein, she isn't as physical as I would have expected. She seldom goes in for slapstick or pantomime, and evidences little interest in working out the details of her characters' movements. Indeed, she seems to look for occasions _not_ to use her body, so that most of her characters tend to lounge or slump. Her expressiveness lies almost wholly in her face and voice. But her versatility in using these is prodigious.

Her show is less enjoyable to me than she is. I first ran across segments of it as clips on YouTube, and I think that kind of venue offers the best way to see them--one at a time, or at least with a brief pause between each routine and the next. In parade one after another, as they are on the show, they don't seem nearly as funny.

The likeliest reason is that they're all much of a muchness, all pitched to the same key and played, as it were, on the same instrument; like the same sketch replayed over and over. (Some of the recurring routines aren't far from being that.) And most of Tate's characters, despite the diversity of faces and accents, are alike in haranguing people to the point of distraction. A show full of such characters, I find wearing.

This is the more true that few of the sketches on the show can properly be called sketches. Almost all of them are extended bits by Tate, with little dramatic structure to support them. They also have little humorous dialogue. The best of it comes with Tate's awful schoolgirl in her arguments with various adversaries. It's funny in part because in regional teen speech it finds a rhythm and a patois that are either inherently funny or lend themselves to being made funny by exaggeration. Regional speech gives the character a vehicle for progressing from tireless repetitions of her point ("But am oi bovvered, dough?") to ever more aggravated exchanges which she manages to blow to bits and, by continual interruption, to reduce to mere fragments of sentences, sometimes to one word ("Face! Bovvered!"). It's verbal terrorism (she might almost be Groucho Marx reincarnated as a puddingheaded teen). But in the end, it, too, is just a very long bit.

Comparing this show with the old Carol Burnett Show, I recognized for the first time the value of the interludes between sketches on that show, and others in the traditional variety format. I was always impatient of the monologues, musical numbers, and so forth: I always wanted to be getting back to the sketches. I see now that the interludes set those off to best advantage. And anyhow they were more varied in tone than those on Tate's show, and the best of them were better developed. Burnett was a great clown; Tate, as a real actress, would have benefited all the more from greater attention to workmanship in her scripts. Her talent is a live wire that needs grounding.

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0 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Grows on you, 16 October 2008
6/10
Author: Chris Collingwood (cpthollywood) from Canada

Though I'll admit and agree with some of the negative comments that some of the skits are a little repetitive and not as funny as others (like the grandmother skit who curses on everyone after they leave the room), there are many funny or at least classic characters.

The excitable couple who tell boring stories but get excited about them is good...not so much in the content of what they say, but in there execution of it. The same with "Gingers" and a few others.

Though the show might not have the funniest dialogue, it is presented with such confidence and brilliance that that in itself makes many of the skits funnier than they should be.

It is definitely an acquired taste. I do enjoy the show, though I'll admit its not drop dead funny or anything, but does have an endearing quality that makes it fun to watch. It grows on you if you give a few episodes a chance...but don't expect to be rolling on the floor trying to keep your gut intact.

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1 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Despite the bad feedback...., 11 March 2009
10/10
Author: ellieloves from Australia

Catherine Tate is a comedy genius!

You may think that a girl, at the ripe old age of 15, may have no taste in comedy or movies ... or well... anything. But Catherine Tate has a sparkle in her that is different to all the other comediennes out there. I mean: COME ON! SHE HAS RED HAIR! :D

Sure, her dialogue is repetitive and sometimes predictable, but remember: this is just comedy. I could say the same about: Black Books (which is the greatest show on earth) I mean what, man owns a bookshop, gets drunk - whats more to the story?

You must remember that everyone has different tastes, just because it doesn't suit your taste doesn't mean you need to "shoot miss Tate" (as one charming IMDb user so kindly put it), she's a human being and she's doing what she loves, making people laugh. And most of this is Catherine's own humour. so DUDE. SRSLY. I'm 15 years old and I'm talking like a friggin' adult here all mature and stuff!

But seriously, I'm not saying "WATCH IT! OMG YOU'LL LUV IT SUUU MUCH YOU'LL CUM!!!" because most likely, you wont. I'm saying "Try it out - you might like it. You might not."

Thanks.

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2 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Not Better than Little Britain? HOW VERY DARE YOU!, 23 October 2006
10/10
Author: James Morris (jwm@a101.org.uk) from Newcastle, England

To be honest this show seemed to come out of no where. It was given very little press for its first series and unless you know who Catherine was and what she had done in the past, you would never have fallen across it by accident. However even this couldn't stop the first series becoming a great success and achieving cult status.

Series 2 was very much more hyped up, sometimes this can spoil a show but The Catherine Tate Show - Series 2 (Out on DVD 30th October) was nothing less than pure comedy genius. The new characters just topped this show off and made it even better than series one. Catherine's 2nd series was on at the same time as Little Britain Series 3 and to be blunt, Catherine's show was everything Little Britain 3 wasn't, consistently funny, brilliantly observed and stuck to the short sketch format. Although a die hard Little Britain Fan, I have to be realistic and say Catherine's show is now simply better than Lucas and Walliams.

Why the third series of this great show (Which starts on 26th October at 9.30pm) is still on BBC2 is beyond me. This show is great viewing and would not be out of place in any prime time slot on BBC1. LB made the transission why cant this? Favouritism maybe? So to sum up if you haven't seen this show, buy the DVD of Series' 1 and 2 and Cancel any plans you have for the next 6 Thursday nights. This is a amazing show, one viewing and you will be hooked. There is speculation this is the last. I hope not but I have to agree that its right to go out on top, but this show will be a great miss.

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