If you like your comedy to be so cringey and squirmy you want to melt into the very fabric of your sofa only to emerge when several thousand years have passed, then Ellie & Natasia is the show for you. The Stath Lets Flats stars are very funny, in a Hogarth-and-Gillray-for-our-grotesque-times kind of way. Strangely, in a world of ceaseless culture wars, incipient fascism, turbulence, deadly mutant viruses, war crimes and imminent economic collapse, a pair of pals making us laugh may not actually be “the answer”, but their gallows humour certainly helps.
Ellie White and Natasia Demetriou’s new BBC Three comedy series marks the revival of the sketch show – a genre that has to be reinvented by every generation – but also the arrival in earnest of a formidable new double act. To those with longer memories, there are echoes of Smack the Pony, Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, and French & Saunders in their material, which is a very good thing.
