Go forth

Watching late night Pet Rescue as an excuse to avoid going to sleep, I was struck by the beginning moments of one episode.

They started off by releasing a couple of wild animals that had been rescued and brought back to the peak of fitness. The first animal was a common toad (Bufo bufo, for all you binomial nomenclature fans) of the type that are sadly often found in a rather flattened form on our roads.

However, what had this particular Mr Toad been rescued from? It had been attacked by a grass snake. Would it be churlish for me to suggest that this is because grass snakes have evolved to eat toads? That’s how animals work - they all need to eat something, apart possibly from supermodels (homo anorexus) who seem able to subsist on nitrogen alone. It’s nature, innit. I hope the people who found the toad are now going to assiduously chase after it to rescue any slugs and snails it may try to eat - after all, we can’t be speciesist here.

Furthermore, in the Top Trumps of conservation, grass snakes score rather more highly than toads. The common toad is, as its name may just suggest, pretty common. Grass snakes, on the other hand, are a protected species so the toad-fanciers have managed to deprive an endangered animal of its dinner.

Next week, perhaps they could nurse back to health a mouse saved from the claws of a barn owl by a member of the public who daringly managed to effect the rescue by smacking the bird with a shovel.

The second animal release was even more odd. It was a duck that had been found, and I quote, “completely covered in cooking oil.” 

Basically, they’d rescued someone’s Sunday lunch.

Flight of the Conchords has been my televisual choice of late, albeit through the collected first series on lovely shiny DVDs. It’s a comedy stuffed full of running jokes about a pair of New Zealanders in America trying to make a success of their novelty band, aided and abetted by their useless manager as he moonlights from his job in the New Zealand consulate. It’s unusual in that the music escapes from the band and into the plot, turning the series into a kind of musical sitcom. And considering that I would generally prefer to have my feet sliced off and fed to me rather than watch a musical, it does a pretty good job. So certainly recommended then. My feet do look so very tasty though, so we might be onto a winner on both counts.

The program is illustrative of a bit of a trend I’ve noticed in US television of late (while written and acted primarily by New Zealanders, Flight of the Conchords is very much an American HBO series). There seems to be an increase in more naturalistic and subtle comedy, creating humour through embarrassment just as much as jokes.

The quintessentially successful US comedies have been the likes of Cheers and Friends and Frasier, shows packed full of set-ups and punchlines meticulously honed by a team of writers to garner as many laughs as possible in a short space of time. Yet recently we’ve seen the likes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the US version of The Office (which has become really rather good after a shaky start when it emulated the Gervais creation too much.) Both are grounded in a type of comedy that has been traditionally, although not necessarily correctly, seen as more British.

Of course, there are still many of the old-style comedies out there, such as Scrubs and the like, and long may they continue. But variety can only be a good thing.