Harry’s Back in October!

[singlepic=13,320,240,,right]Only one man can make sense of the countless hours of television that grace our screens on a daily basis, and in October Harry Hill is back with his much missed TV Burp!

If you’ve never seen the show, you probably wonder what all the fuss is about. Basically, Hill takes the mickey – in a very gentle, inoffensive way – out of events in soaps, dramas and documentary programs, to side-splittingly funny degree. Examples include:

Emmerdale character Val’s cataracts have become a recurring joke, based on a scene in which she questions “Cataracts?” after a diagnosis. The scene was spoofed with Harry repeating the surprised declaration then passing the news onto a chain of various celebrities (mainly those under contract with ITV) and the show’s own history of highlighted extras who respond “Cataracts?” one after another. A passing tongue-in-cheek mention of ‘ear cataracts?’ a few weeks later was spoofed on the 1st March, 2008 edition of the show in exactly the same way, lasting almost a minute and a half and featuring cameo appearances from comedians Al Murray, Jimmy Carr, Ricky Gervais, Jeremy Kyle and Noel Fielding.

Pre-advertisement ‘fights’ that attempt to determine which of two people or things from a scene are “best”, such as “babies or cats” (from an episode of The Apprentice), “chicken or turkey”, “White Rat or Brown Rat” (from a nature documentary), “Mars or meat” (from Life on Mars) or even “Jesus or Hitler”. After making the comparison, Hill’s signature tagline follows: “But which is better? (A) or (B)? There’s only one way to find out… FIGHT!”, at which point two actors representing the characters of the comparison appear from either side and engage in a wrestling match while Hill goads them on.

Almost every episode of series 7 contained a segment looking at that week’s episode of the BBC Three lifestyle documentary programme Freaky Eaters, about people with strange eating habits. After a clip showing the particular food the ‘Freaky Eater’ is either addicted to or repulsed by, Harry will repeat them in a loud, moronic, toothless gurn (e.g. “beans!”, “chippy chips!”, “sausages!”, “hoopy hoops!”, “sweet snicknoin!” (sirloin). When collecting his BAFTA in 2008, Harry used this voice again, and jokingly said that Freaky Eaters should have received the award because it’s the “best show on telly”.