The Unexpected Items come with great credentials: they are the team responsible for the famous ‘Gap Yah’ videos on YouTube and have a poster covered in recent reviews decrying them as the vanguard of a new generation of British sketch comedy and other such hyperbole. However, one has to therefore wonder if something just went a bit wrong when I went to go see them, because it was a show that lacked any sort of punch at all.The show contains a series of really great ideas that have potential: an indie kid whose love of the vintage leads to a fondness for geriatrics, a song about the utterly inexplicable adoration of Nandos and a brilliant parody of the fact the XX have become the BBC’s only background music.Yet whilst the ideas were there, the actual practice lacked finesse. There was often a lack of polish and overarching structure. The recurring gags were rarely used and the ends of sketches seemed to just shrivel into the next. Whilst individual jokes in sketches made people roar with laughter, the ends of sketches just never seemed to satisfy.There were some jokes that felt old and dry and some felt like they existed purely to shock, such as a sketch involving everybody honking horns whilst they swore ending with somebody forgetting to honk their horn on the worst profanity. It was a sketch anybody could do, it required no real skill, and did nothing clever at all. However, the new ‘gap yah’ sketch was brilliant.This is a sketch show with great ideas but failing to deliver them, forever sitting on the edge of funny without taking the crucial leap.
