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Clowns: An excuse to wear massive trousers

I AM in the process of buying a pair of those multi-coloured trousers and matching bandanas worn by annoying people who claim to be eco-warriors but drive fume-spewing heaps of junk to festivals.

And I'm also considering changing my name to something really funny like Lorri Laughter or Gibbo McGiggle.

Well, why knock your pan out doing normal work (are you sure about that? - Ed.) when you can become a clown and earn £1,000 in a single weekend?

Until I watched Clowns (Monday, BBC2, 9pm), I never realised how lucrative it was to play the fool, and how easy.

This fly-on-the-wall documentary featured three professional party clowns, who were all fairly unfunny and fairly unhappy blokes who pulled on what they considered hilarious items of clothing, such as stripy tights and pirate hats, and went by the side-splitting names of Tommy Tickle, Mr Pumpkin and Potty the Pirate.

This appeared to be all that was required to get them instantly booked by an endless stream of parents to entertain their little darlings and their chums at birthday parties.

Few of these parents had seen their acts and even fewer enquired as to whether they had been vetted for their suitability to work with children.

Most surprising of all was that all three seemed to have little affection for their mini-audiences.

Tickle had a brood of kids of his own and yet found it difficult to connect with any of them, especially his wayward teenage daughter who he referred to as "vile" but whom I suspect he was just annoyed with because she was much better at doing the outrageous clothes and make-up thing than he was.

Potty was just that. In his forties and a bit too wild of eye for my liking, he took his elderly mother along to gigs for support and was ferociously single ("all women want to do is get drunk," his mummy told us on his behalf - well, on a date with him, who could blame them?).

And Pumpkin, despite being with his girlfriend for more than 20 years, was very in touch with his feminine side, liked to dress as a lady and was also ever-so, ever-so close to his mummy.

So, there you have it. Slap on a bit of dodgy make-up, wiggle a moth-eaten ventriloquist dummy about, shout a lot and you've got your act. The kids will love it, even if you don't love them, and you only work weekends, for a few hours.

So next time someone calls me a clown, I'll have the last laugh, for it will be in their cake-splattered lounge as they hand over my £250 fee!

Clowning around of a different kind was promised in Headcases (Sunday, ITV1, 10pm), a new satirical comedy show that many pundits were praising and some even called the Spitting Image for the noughties.

It wished.

This was about as funny as an unexpected joint gas and electricity bill two days after Christmas.

Spitting Image lambasted the great and good - everyone, not just the easy targets - of the time, and it did so using killer wit and brilliant scripts.

More importantly, the often grotesque, caricature-style puppets uncannily resembled the real-life victims and the voices were virtually perfect.

Headcases on the other hand used an embarrassingly weak script to pick on the likes of Jordan, Posh and Clarkson; it had no original jokes (it had no jokes for that matter), only half the CGI characters looked remotely like who they were supposed to be and the voices were unrecognisable.

But apart from that, it was as rib-crackingly funny as Tommy Tickle's Robert Mugabe gag.

And speaking of dodgy scripts, hopefully the first episode of Doctor Who (BBC1, 6.45pm), was just a bit of televisual teething trouble that the Doctor will have fixed with a twiddle of his sonic-screwdriver by Saturday night.

As a big fan, I'm sad to say this, but the first episode was quite rubbish.

David Tennant was faultless, Sarah Lancashire played a good baddie, but apart from that, it was all a big disappointment.

Catherine Tate as the single "girl" living with her mum just didn't work. Billie Piper created the benchmark for the modern-day assistant with her perfectly-played Rose, all wide-eyed wonder and street savvy girl-next-door. Tate was more like his mum and I kept expecting her to ask: "Does my face look bovvered..?" at any given moment.

But it's not all her fault.

The whole thing was just too childish, as though it was being aimed at a much younger audience this time round - a bad idea, considering it was the scary, menacing atmosphere of the last few series that appealed to the younger viewers in the first place and it was exactly what made me run for cover behind the sofa every Saturday when I was little, yet still race to see the next episode the following week.

1:46pm Friday 11th April 2008

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