Bubble Uk Review: Teen Puppet Tribulations in Fuzzbox

Last week, as part of their Comedy Feeds season of potential new shows, BBC 3 aired a pilot of puppet comedy, Fuzzbox. Was it any good? Find out what I thought below.

Comedy Feeds is a season of pilots made by newcomers and well known comedians alike, made to test the potential of each show and gauge public reaction. It has an unfortunate, almost hidden timeslot on BBC3 ( 11 O’Clock) but the shows will stay available on the BBC iPlayer for up to two years, so don’t worry if you miss any of them, you can find them quite easily.

On to last week’s offering then, a puppet comedy show called Fuzzbox. Made by the award winning team My Pockets, Fuzzboz is a 23 minute show using puppets to deliver the conversations of real teenagers who have been removed from the mainstream school system and are now at referral units. (What used to be called remedial units in a harsher age, like when I was at school!). Directed by Peter Schnelling the show purports to represent real conversations from delinquent teens, but I’m not so sure how real most of it was.

The puppets on Fuzzbox were hideous characricatures of stereotypical teens, all furrowed brows and tracksuit tops on the boys and scraped back croydon facelift hairdos on the girls. The banter was fairly standard teen stuff, how to get rid of STD’s and how to woo the girl of your dreams but none of it was completely delinquent. Teens I knew who got sent to referral units were never as polite as this and although some might have considered the conversations in Fuzzbox edgy, I didn’t. I found the look of the puppets so off putting that for a while, I  closed my eyes and listened to the kids dialogue and to my surprise, what they said and how the said it was totally at odds with the general ugliness of the puppets. Maybe the makers at Pocket were expecting something a little more shocking but the language in this episode was a little tame, typical teen speak sure, but very little to justify the hideous caricature nature of  the puppets. Indeed, if you close your eyes as I did they sound like perfectly pleasant and normal kids.

I wasn’t overly impressed with Fuzzbox, whilst My Pockets do a great deal of good work with teens, this fell short of the mark by a long way. It wasn’t particularly funny and whilst it was a good premise I just couldn’t get past how unnecessarily ugly the puppets were. I can’t see this being made into a series, but then I have been wrong about this sort of thing before…

Fuzzbox is on again on BBC 3, Friday at 3.35 and also on the iPlayer for the next year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I heard nade