Not enough stings

Introduction

From the production company behind award-winning series The Catherine Tate Show and Benidorm comes Beehive, a brand new all-female sketch show written by and starring Sarah Kendall (first female performer to receive a nomination for Perrier Award), Alice Lowe (Garth Marenghi's Dark Place), Barunka O'Shaughnessy (Bo! In the USA and Respectable) and Clare Thomson (The Omid Djalli's show and Hyperdrive).

This five part E4 series has just been airing on TV (why only five parts and not six?) and now arrives on DVD.

Video and Audio

We only got a DVD-R to review, and someone forgot to encode the video stream properly. There is an 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, as first broadcast (it's just not encoded to automatically display as widescreen, hence the odd looking screenshots).

As for the audio, we get Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, again very much as broadcast. but the video and audio are probably very similar to the final disc, and there's nothing to complain about here.

Extras

There are supposed to be some extras, but once again we reviewers just got sent a pair of DVD-Rs which contained none of them.

Conclusion

A very hit and miss sketch show. The obvious comparison is with Smack The Pony, and whilst the four performers here are talented (Sarah Kendall is a brilliant stand up comedian), the difference is that Beehive is purely written by the main chatracters. Pony was written and produced by Victoria Pile, who had a team of writers including Robert Harley, Gary Howe, Stuart Kenworthy, Oriane Messina, Richard Preddy, Fay Rusling and James Henry.



There are other parallels here in the choice of material - the YouTube spoof videos are also very similar to the vox-pop style videos seen on Pony. There are some good film spoofs, some weak film spoofs, a day in the woods with Abba, the "Russells Brand". Possibly my favourite was Queen Elizabeth, who is continuously mocked for being a virgin.

Perhaps it doesn't help watching the series in one go as opposed to once a week, but that really highlights the weaknesses in the writing and the sketches that keep coming back despite you wishing them not to. If you enjoyed the show then the DVD will probably suit you, but you might want to catch it on TV, either as a repeat or via an on-demand type service before splashing out on something with more misses than hits.