Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy @10pm, Thursdays, E4- 5 out of 10

Finally, a show that has lived up to the promise of the Channel 4 comedy sponsors’ Fosters’; “original comedy”. Let’s face it, there are very few places where you might find a Miami-based drug dealer character with a sword and shield (and a bug face) and a man with a seashell as a head dancing to a radio broadcast of a Sherlock Holmes novel.

However, the apt catchline of the sponsor is one of the few positives to come out of Noel Fielding’s latest creation, a surrealist part live-action, part animation half hour romp that even seems to be seeping into the adverts on 4OD, if Gail Porter emerging from portable toilet in Cardiff that had been dropped in by a helicopter is anything to go by.

“Luxury Comedy” brings together the cast of BBC3’s The Mighty Boosh (let the inevitable comparisons begin early), minus Julian Barratt, for a sketch show with a  slight difference as characters from each sketch glide into one another’s segments, each battling for “look at me, aren’t I bizarrely unique and weird” screen time presumably.

The trademark left-Fielding (ha! Word play) ideas are in evidence from the start with outrageous concepts for sketches like a cookery show cum space mission starring Rennie and Gaviscon (who I cannot even begin to describe just exactly how they look) and Roy Circles, the teacher with a military history but happens to have the body of a chocolate finger. Clearly, no expense has been spared on the clothing and make-up departments of “Luxury Comedy”; it would appear blue or yellow are the standard colour faces for the occupants of the “Luxury Comedy” universe.

The seamless transition from live action shots to the oddly beautiful animation of Nigel Coan works a treat but, with this being surrealist comedy, inevitably, the sketches are particularly hit and miss. The Boosh worked, for me, because it had some semblance with reality (identifiable job locations of the main characters for example) and a linear structure. And having Barratt around to reign in Fielding’s wackiest ideas and to provide identifiable character traits for the audience; a middle-aged man not really going anywhere despite (and probably because of) his passions in life.

The best parts of Luxury Comedy are the pieces with the aforementioned semblance to reality. Dondylion, trapped in a zoo with nothing but a tyre on a rope, some Hula Hoops and a picture of David Lee Roth (“King of the lions”) jabbering to himself and slowly going mad is a lovely a oasis of satire about animals caged in zoos in a desert of surrealism.

Elsewhere, against the odds somewhat, Sergeant Raymond Boombox’s tales work as they also have this basis in reality (a cop doing a job) that can be subverted to add the bizarre dialogue of his talking knife wounds and the drug dealer mentioned way back in the intro (well done if you’ve stuck with me this far, incidentally).

However, elsewhere, one just got the sense that the show needed reigning in. It wasn’t a sense of surrealism for the sake of surrealism on the part of Fielding (an outstanding comedic writer and actor in the right dosage and setting) but a lack of input from the producers to keep the show just about enough on the straight and narrow.

Or my descent into premature aging has begun, coupled with not being a resident of or regular visitor to the independent Republic of Camden, and I just didn’t get “it”.