Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A Brilliant Conflict

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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.

What? This is a comedy? Oh, Okay. Catherine Tate COULD be entertaining and actually funny if she could think of some original and witty ideas. I have watched about 4 Catherine Tate shows (only because there was a show on after it that i wanted to see) and I just really cant find it funny at all. I myself am a great fan of British comedy (the witty ones I might add) and have watched nearly every one of em' but i just really, really can't stand this wretched excuse for a comedy. The sketches are so unoriginal and predictable its like watching the Benny Hill show over again. The characters in it are also the most predictable, boring, unintelligent and un-entertaining and the plot seems to have been written by some derolick 6th grader. I seriously cant understand how people can find this racist, sexist and unintelligent show actually funny. And of course this is the most obvious copy, inbred cousin of Little Britain. Please if your thinking of watching this, Don't. This is certainly the Bottom of the Barrel British comedy of the 21st century. Though this show does have one good purpose, if your going to make a show, don't do anything the Catherine Tate show does and you shall surely succeed.

Only online do I find anyone who will comment that they enjoy this show! I ask around with friends, at work or customers that I speak to daily - I have yet to find anyone who thinks Catherine Tate is anything special.I found myself watching several times in an attempt to determine the reason the BBC directs so much focus and promotion of this show. For a long time she has been a favourite of the BBC, evening appearing in an episode of Doctor Who to destroy that as well.I can sit and watch an entire episode without finding anything remotely interesting or funny. It'll take a lot for me not to laugh, I love comedies and this isn't comedy.Coining instantly recognisable phrases is about all this show is good for. "Am I bothered" or "How very dare you" repeated episode after episode is not funny. Little Britain started off well but eventually fell into the same trap and repeated material over and over.In recent years I can't think of any TV programme that has had me reaching for the remote as fast, as when this comes on. Maybe Big Brother comes a close second, more Junk Food TV for the generation that wouldn't understand talented television if it hit them twelve times in the face with a large cod or halibut.You needn't ask if I would recommend this to anyone.

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.