Absolutely - Absolutely Everything [DVD]

Without doubt, the third series of Absolutely is the most consistently funny season of any television sketch show. The other series have great moments but they are patchier, hence the 4 stars here. That said, and as I think another reviewer touched upon, it still ranks above modern day contemporaries like Little Britain which, with half of the output, was faltering and rehashing old jokes.
I was involved with the company that was originally negotiating with Channel 4 four years ago to get the series released on DVD. Rather than release all the episodes as they are doing now, we were planning to do a "best of" to dip the toes of interest and follow-up with the complete episodes if the groundswell warranted it. As a precursor to this, Channel 4 converted some of the 1" masters for us to view to select the material that we wanted and I was given the task of picking suitable sketches from Season 2. It was good but not as good as I remembered it and when the shortlist for the 'best of' was drawn up, over half of the content was from the third series. Unfortunately for us, Channel 4 procrastinated for a further two years with changes of personnel and direction. When they became worried that the distributors of the original compilation, The Vido, still had rights over series 1 to 3, we dropped out. Good to see that it is finally going to get a release from the production company that actually made it.
When viewing Absolutely as it ran on TV nearly twenty years ago, I had a gang of people round watching it and we used to memorise the words, especially to Denzyl/Gwynedd sketches and Frank Hovis monologues. Most of them stuck with me, something which disconcerted John Sparkes at Edinburgh a few years back when, whilst he was reprising Frank Hovis in Filth!, I was mouthing the words to "Taxi" idly before I caught his eye and realised what I was doing. Not sure if he was annoyed or pleased but I stopped anyway.
There were only ten people in the audience that night and that kind of exemplifies that despite being a great piece of television, Absolutely somehow missed the real mainstream in its day. Hopefully the DVD release will give an audience size that the programme deserves.

Like a lot of the reviewers, I had fond memories of this programme. Occasionally seeing the Stoneybridge Town Council appearing in 100 best comedy moments (or something like that) whetted my appetite and I decided to invest. My conclusion, like that of a few others, is that it's not quite as good as I remembered. On a positive note, just about everything that features Morwenna Banks is very funny (I can't believe that she didn't become a big name in TV comedy). And to a lesser extent the same can be said of John Sparkes, who had some marvellous comic creations. The sketches and characters that I remembered well (Stoneybridge Town Council, Denzil and Gwynedd, The Nice Family, Bert Bastard), are still very funny. However, there is lots of material that isn't, particularly their more pythonesque attempts, and some of it drags on much too long. I even found myself using the fast forward at times, particularly during the musical numbers.

So, I guess I'm just a bit disappointed overall. I feel bad giving it just three stars as the good stuff is very, very good. But there's a lot of stuff here that isn't. Oh, and I can't agree with the comments regarding the quality of the DVD transfer. It looked absolutely fine to me, and I think we have to remember this is a 20 year old comedy sketch show, not some cimematic epic.

Absolutely was the sketch show like few others, a sort of William Burroughs-like stream of dark absurdity that got lost on Channel 4. The Stoneybridge Town Council meetings stick in the mind. Magret, Magret, Magret! Dougie, Dougie, Dougie! Disturbing, funny, and what happened to the talent behind this gem?