The Comedy Vault – The Fast Show Live.

This is the comedy sketch show that soon became very popular with viewers, so at some point, it was decided, why not go on a stage tour across the country. This might not be as simple as it first seemed though, because the large amount of characters were played by a not-as large amount of people, so there were always several costume changes taking place behind the scenes, the all the wigs had better be where they were supposed to be.

There have been a few The Fast Show tours over the years, and a show from this one was released on VHS in the late-90s, not long after the third series was on BBC2. The main cast took part, including Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, and it was no surprise that a huge amount of people were eager to take the chance of seeing their favourite character doing their thing right in front of them, if you get what I mean.

So whether your favourites were the rude tailors, or maybe Ted and Ralph, everyone would be pleased, as they all featured. And this wasn’t just a case of “come on stage, do catchphrase, go off again”, as there was a lot of new material prepared, and all of this seemed to go down rather well, which was nice (well I had to do one of the catchphrases somewhere in this piece didn’t I).

The show was about 80 minutes long, and featured plenty of jokes, and it really does remind you just how popular this was for a while. Not long after this, The Fast Show went on tour again, this time along with the cast of Shooting Stars, which was another great comedy show that was on BBC2 around the same time, I imagine that was a lot of great fun to work on (and indeed watch).

A few years on from this, there was another stage tour, which was described as a farewell to The Fast Show, a statement which is always fraught with danger, because every time that the cast insist that they finally want to leave these characters behind and have no plans to do them again, they do always end up returning somewhere. And indeed, since this, they have appeared in adverts, spin-off sitcoms, and lots more.