Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: David Mitchell, Liza Tarbuck, Paula Wilcox, Harry Enfield, Helen Monks, Gemma Whelen, Tim Downie, Rob Rouse, Mark Heap, Dominic Coleman, Steve Spiers, Spencer Jones, Jocelyn Jee Esien, Adrian Edmondson, Rosanna Beacock, Joe Willis, Beattie Edmondson, Brandon Fellows, Ben Miller, Peter Hamilton Dyer, Ken Nwosu, Nigel Planer.

If there is one thing an audience can count on with Ben Elton, aside from being involved in some of television’s most iconic comedies in the last thirty years, it is his unequalled ability to take a moment and turn it completely on its head and leave you with the feeling of being driven over the edge emotionally, of having the laughter pulled from underneath you and understanding that with great comedy must come empathy and grief in equal measure.

There are none perhaps who have managed to portray this balancing of human nature as Ben Elton, once proved in the final moments of Blackadder Goes Fourth, where the characters the audience had loved and seen evolve, were shot down in their prime in yet another unsuccessful attempt to over-run the German lines during the fighting of World War One; and built upon in the climax of the third series of the tremendously enjoyable Upstart Crow.

It is in the foundation of laughter that we find a common bond and no matter what some may suggest about students and the public understanding the world of Elizabethan England, or even that of William Shakespeare’s writing, it cannot be denied that the man’s worth to English literature is, like Ben Elton’s to comedy, without equal.

Upstart Crow twists this perfectly and the third series sees the writer inject a larger sense of the modern world issues into the days which saw the greater English Renaissance flourish. It would not be a Ben Elton comedy if it didn’t touch upon social issues wrapped up in the conflab of verbal conquest and the stroke of genius in which an aside can bring. It is in the social issues of racism, of women’s rights, of transgender issues, portrayed with brilliance in Beattie Edmondson’s portrayal of what was once called an hermaphrodite and the person’s will to be an actor; most of all it is the shadow of grief which captures the moment and makes the audience consider what was to come in the Bard’s life and writing, as Ben Elton and the cast tackle with great justice and sincerity the death of Hamnet, William and Anne’s only son.

Upstart Crow has had its detractors, but this comedy is one of the finest on television, especially in a time when certain subjects seem to have become taboo, in the world of comedy, the best way to eradicate the wickedness in the hearts of some, is to mock it and make it small, tiny, unfashionable; it is in this that Upstart Crow continues to be a star of comedy and television.

Ian D. Hall