(Roadshow)

You might think I’m a little strange when you hear me say that I felt a little twinge of nostalgia when I saw the cork being pulled from the horse’s bum in the opening credits of a DVD I watched recently, and rightly so, I guess. But I’m proud to admit that I really enjoyed the British sketch show Big Train the first time around, and I was just as happy as I sat down to watch Season Two on the weekend. Created by Brit-com veterans, Graham Linehan (who also wrote and directed much of Black Books and The IT Crowd) and Christopher Morris (whose very black comedy, Four Lions, about Al Qaeda terrorists in the UK starts this week), the sketch comedy show was one in a long line of very funny television series that occasionally pop up to delight and offend.

Watching the series, you’ll see familiar faces that have become synonymous with modern Brit-com, from the very versatile Simon Pegg (Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz) and Catherine Tate (actually, I can take or leave her) to Mark Heap (who perfected a vaguely psychopathic turn in another classic with Pegg - Spaced), and the sketches that the crew roll out are consistently very funny, off the wall, and often satisfyingly surreal.

Extras on the DVD include Cast & Crew Commentaries and Biographies, Deleted Scenes, and a snippet of material from the German version of Big Train.

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TIM MILFULL

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