Paul Merton, The Series: Episode 1.1

Paul Merton, The Series: Episode 1.1
Channel Four
September 25, 1991
Sketch Comedy
DVD
B

Not long after his frequent costar Josie Lawrence got her eponymous series, Merton got his, on the same channel and with the same director (and such familiar to WLIIA-viewers names as Mykola Pawluk and Denise O'Donoghue behind the scenes).  It's a definite improvement, and in fact did well enough with viewers and critics to return in '93.  Short absurd comedy sketches are loosely tied together with scenes of Paul running a newstand.  Sometimes he's interacting with customers and sometimes he's doing routines from his stand-up.  (In fact, three routines would pop up, more or less intact, on London Underground, more on that in its place.)  I laughed out loud several times and the pace, unlike on Josie, kept my mind from wandering.

Of Paul's supporting cast, Geoffrey McGivern was Ivor Biggun on the "Dish and Dishonesty" episode of Blackadder the Third and would return for the fourth episode of this series, while Roger Walker was Robert Leaven in the 1983 Timothy Dalton adaptation of Jane Eyre, and Colin Higgins (no, not the director of Foul Play) and Lou Hirsch would respectively be Comrade Butt and Jimmy Mundy on Jeeves and Wooster the following year.  I'm tagging Paul's cowriter John Irwin, who appears in this and most of the other episodes as "various characters."  Robert Harley also plays "various characters," although mostly in the second series.