I'll get you, Phil Cornwell

As I've used its most recognizable in-joke even more often than normal recently, I should mention that recently I've been listening to loads of Dead Ringers. I found a whole lot of it on BitTorrent a couple of months ago and have been listening to the first six series of the radio programme (which is fantastic, by the way) at work. That in turn reminded me that someone had decided to bring it to TV a while ago, after the days where I forgot about television as any sort of significant entity in my life - is it still on? - and even though TV-Links doesn't have any of it, I've been able to watch bits of it on Youtube instead.

And I'm unsure whether to love or hate it as a whole now. I wouldn't go so far as to say that having visuals actually spoils the main purpose of the programme, but it definitely takes something away from it - no matter how good an impression is, you can't get around the way that Mark Perry, Jon Culshaw and the others don't really look like the people that they're impersonating. But the whole sort of mood of it seems a little different, too. It might be the different cast of characters that does it. In around series four of the radio version, it had evolved into something that was almost a regular sketch programme with an only gradually changing cast of impersonated characters - John Humphrys and Sue MacGregor, Brian Perkins, Martin Jarvis, Robin Cook, the entire cast of The Archers, Matt Smith (whose sketches were all exactly the same joke but still managed to be hysterical) and so on. The TV version seems a little more haphazard even though it keeps a few of the same people - Anne Robinson, Nick Ross and the Tom Baker version of Doctor Who, to name a few - and it's less interesting for it. And on the whole it seems to be written in a more dumbed-down way, somehow.

They do come up with some gems occasionally ("Now I'm Gandalf the Tartan!", etc), but some of the standout ones are lifted off the radio version and done slightly less well - see the classic "Alan Rickman plays the token baddie in Hollywood films" sketch, for example. I would give a link to the better radio version too, but I can't find it anywhere - the collection I downloaded is hopelessly badly labelled by filename.

In fact, one of the TV version's best efforts was the impression of House, where they got the formula of the programme and Hugh Laurie's invented mannerisms perfectly. However, because Jon Culshaw doesn't look remotely like him (and that goes for the rest of them, too), people think it's dreadful, and someone commenting on the video clip I watched was saying that a sketch done by something called "madTV" was better. With the convenience of the Internet I had a look at this parody as well, and like most of American TV output it was blatant garbage - they seem to have gone for the complete package and chosen someone who doesn't look, sound or behave like Gregory House, so things must be bad if people are recommending things like that over it. But then, he was posting on Youtube so it's probably safe to assume that he was fairly stupid.

There's another thing that gets to me - I never noticed it before the_twilighted pointed it out, but once he mentioned it it started to drive me mad. They always introduce themselves by name rather than relying on the impression being good enough to be recognizable in itself. They do this occasionally on the radio version too, but it's marginally better worked into the script so that it's less noticeable.

So in the meantime, I'm going to be listening to Radio For Old People and forget about this television nonsense once again. But I'll quickly have to make an exception to that as Top Gear has a special on tonight. I've been missing my Britishness rations.