Out of Order feels like the sort of energetic, Friday night, post-pub series that television commissioners have been trying to claw back since the pre-streaming days, so I’m not sure why it is coming out on a Monday evening, second only to Sunday evening in the gloom stakes. It assembles Rosie Jones, Judi Love and Katherine Ryan, three of the biggest women in British comedy, into a Boygenius-style panel show supergroup. Trickily, it tasks them with making a brand-new format work, which is never easy; impressively, they pretty much pull it off.
Jones hosts, while Love and Ryan are the team captains, and the trio provide the raucous engine for the premise, which is all about testing whether first impressions and preconceptions are ever accurate. In this first episode, Ryan is paired with Chris McCausland, who makes the very funny and extremely valid point that they are getting a blind man in to judge people on how they look. Love is joined by Richard Osman, who, perhaps unexpectedly, proves the pepper to her salt, the cheese to her onion. If they don’t get their own chatshow on the back of this, Comedy Central isn’t doing its job.
After a lot of horsing around and feeling each other’s faces – this is a tactile sort of show – we get to the poor ordinary people, “the regulars”, who have volunteered to be judged by five comedians. For many, including myself, the idea of sitting anywhere near the front of a comedy show is akin to one of those naked-in-public dreams, so I can only salute the volunteers who have asked to be picked on by people who are funny for a living. I say picked on, but the mood is jovial rather than spiky, and the teasing isn’t really at anyone’s expense, except maybe the person with four nipples.
The show is broken up into rounds. The first, “Get In Line”, involves placing the regulars in order of most-to-least on a given topic. It’s an intriguing idea when you get into it. Who looks like they have been married most often and what does that say about them – and us? I would argue that, curiously, mostly the first impressions are fairly accurate, at least in this opener, though the comedians are sometimes too nice to follow up on their initial suspicions. I am not sure that any of them would do well on The Traitors.
Among other things, they have to work out who has pulled the most sickies; again, I wouldn’t say that there is much of a challenge involved, although the stories that we hear from the regulars remind me of the audience members who have a go on Graham Norton’s red chair. (Also, who keeps count of how many sickies they have pulled? Is this quantifiable for anyone, other than the person who has never pulled one, and the person who has been sacked repeatedly for doing it?) There’s a question about collecting memorabilia, and a round called “Snap Judgments”, in which yes/no questions are fired at the regulars, who start to resemble rabbits in the headlights. Do they own a sex toy? Do they fart in public? Do they have a roast on Sundays?
It mixes the smutty and the mundane, and rarely feels overly polished. Mostly that works in its favour and speaks to the strengths of the three principal characters. They are allowed to go off on tangents, to be silly, to play off each other. At the end, the tables are turned and the comedians are judged by one of the regulars, who has the chance to win £1,000, for a fairly difficult challenge; I would argue that this should be trebled, because surely nobody is going to manage it.
The running time could be shorter – without that post-pub atmosphere, shall we say, a full hour is a lot to ask. Still, I enjoyed the Love-Jones-Ryan triumvirate and it feels like something different, rather than a rehashed general knowledge pub quiz. And the regulars’ stories, which prove the old saying “There’s nowt so queer as folk”, give it an edge. I laughed, I was entertained and I might save future episodes to stream at 11pm on a Friday night.
• Out of Order is on Comedy Central
