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Comedy Showcase - Campus

Friday 06 November
10:00pm - 10:40pm
Channel 4

This is Channel 4's try-out zone for comedy pilots, a playpen for ideas that might, with the right encouragement, turn into fully-fledged IT Crowds or Green Wings. We start with Campus, and if there were a quicker way to describe it than "Green Wing in a university", I'd use it. Luckily, this isn't some low-grade knock off: it comes from the Green Wing team themselves, so expectations may be unreasonably high for Campus and it may not quite live up to them. Nothing could. But that doesn't mean it isn't very funny and enjoyably strange. The characters feel fully formed and ready for a series: vice-chancellor Jonty de Wolfe is the most extreme, a power-crazed bully with a megaphone somewhere between David Brent and 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy, but with worse hair. In his sights is lazy English lecturer Matt Beer, who in turn is pursuing bespectacled maths star Imogen Moffat. There are brilliant moments and lovely sight gags: the scene with a clapping mechanical monkey just before the first ad break is a cracker.

Nyman plays Jonty de Wolfe.

So how did he make the cymbaling rabbit appear in the fellow's sock?

Jesus Christ on a bike deck! Can the fashionable moron of a director not keep the damned camera still! I felt seasick already trying to see what was going on!

Tomo wrote:Jesus Christ on a bike deck! Can the fashionable moron of a director not keep the damned camera still! I felt seasick already trying to see what was going on!

This is what ruined the recent C4 Big Brother zombie thing (can't remember its name) for me.

As Andy Nyman was heavily involved in both, I can only assume that he had a (shaky) hand in it all. Somebody should tell him it's a rubbish idea.

I lost my recorder's timers when I retuned my box for digital switchover and forgot to put this back in. bu**er. Watching the repeat it is then!

themagicwand wrote:This is what ruined the recent C4 Big Brother zombie thing (can't remember its name) for me.

As Andy Nyman was heavily involved in both, I can only assume that he had a (shaky) hand in it all. Somebody should tell him it's a rubbish idea.

Apparently, The Thick Of It is really good, but the camera work made it a job just to see what the hell was going on so I didn't watch it.

Dead Set's shake-cam was a budgetary measure, I'm sure. You don't have to do as much detail on the actors' makeup if you can barely make them out.

I think on Dead Set, the shakey camera work was to emulate the similar style found in the modern fast -moving Zombie films like 28 days Later and the remakes of Romero's films. I think it's to add tension and create a feeling of claustophobia and panic in the viewer like you'd have if you were really being attacked by running zombies. I think it's a matter of personal taste as to whether or not you feel it adds to the film or if it makes you feel motion sickness and ruin the film.

As for the shakes in Campus, I'm pretty sure it has the same production crew as the Green Wing and there are definite similarities in the script and characters. Green Wing had a very improvised and one-shot feel to it with scenes often being filmed in one long take and any accidents or messing up of lines was covered by either speeding up or slowing down the tape giving an out of worldly feel to it. I'm guessing Campus probably has a very similar shooting style using digital handheld cameras, hence the shakes. If the series does get commisioned, my suspiscion is that the quivering format will stay.

i just hated this.Not because of Andy's performance.. i just thought that the writing, camera work, and some of teh supporting performances were absolutly dreadfull.

I know the writer delivered a sixty minute script, so not sure what happened between then and now. Also, he didn't see it 'til it went out.

Tomo wrote:Jesus Christ on a bike deck! Can the fashionable moron of a director not keep the damned camera still! I felt seasick already trying to see what was going on!

This made the potentially awesome Bourne Ultimatum virtually unwatchable.

I do not want my films to look "amateur". If you spent £600m on the film the least you can do is keep the camera still enough for me to see what the money was spent on.

Decent tripods aren't all that expensive....

Mandrake wrote:Decent tripods aren't all that expensive....

I am sure there is a bingo in there somewhere... Cannot immediately place it though so perhaps I just have a twisted mind!

I used to work with a guy who was referred to as 'Tripod'. [innocent mode on] Never figured out why..... [innocent mode off]

Mandrake wrote:I used to work with a guy who was referred to as 'Tripod'. [innocent mode on] Never figured out why..... [innocent mode off]

do you think it was anything to do with his large phallus?