Peter Pan Goes Wrong

I won't go and see either TPTGW or PPGW these days because the Mischief originators aren't in the cast (but am hoping to book for when they return to TPTGW in Feb)... Isn't it funny how we get attached to the first cast we see?!

You can usually get great reductions for Bank Robbery on the day - decent enough seats for about £13 at Tkts some days...and you can maybe do a crafty self-upgrade at the interval. ;-)

Staggeringly unoriginal

Like BurlyBear I watched this on iplayer yesterday since my husband refused to have it on -[*******!] I have always loved farces & have read all the good reviews so was expecting to enjoy it. I must admit I didn't find the extract of "The Play That Goes Wrong" that was on the Royal Variety show a while back funny but thought that was as it was taken out of context. Having watched it I can only say I thought it was a let down. I didn't laugh at all. The best bits were David Suchet. It seemed juvenile.- My grandkids probably would have enjoyed it.

The current Peter Pan Goes Wrong cast is "mine" www.peterpangoeswrong.com/ but saying that I saw completely different people (apart from Kershaw) as those characters in Play That Goes Wrong and still loved it so my problem is very much with the TV production, plus seeing it so recently on stage rather than the cast.

I'm afraid I abandoned ship after 10 minutes. Maybe it worked better on stage but the massive OTT performances really put me off and got on my nerves. Didn't work for me at all. And I'd really been looking forward to it as I've yet to see any of their productions.

I don't think thinking of TPTGW and PPGW as farce is particularly helpful. Sure, they fit the dictionary definition, but I feel like farce has a lot of rules that the Goes Wrongs just don't follow. Most farces aren't quite so metatheatrical, for one thing, and even ones that are - like Noises Off - are much more structured than simply "everything goes wrong". They're less sophisticated, and I don't mean that as a negative, but if you're expecting something like farces you've seen before, you're maybe not viewing it with the right mindset.

Though that said, I do remember what I said the other day about sometimes people just don't like things and their dislike doesn't always have to be examined and/or explained, honest!

And I know I'm being pedantic here, but polytechnics haven't actually existed for years, have they?

As our resident "Academic" I concur. 

What was Polys are now *technically* 'Post 1992 Universities' (try saying that after a few at the Student's Union) as opposed to the older 'Redbrick' and more specifc (read posh) 'Russell Group'. 

Most of these now have 'Metropolitan' or the like in their title so 'London Metropolitian University' or some other suffix like 'Nottingham Trent'

And in some circles some people have even stopped refering to others as 'The proper one' haha (I say this all with love, I went to a Posh one but worked at an old Poly for many happy years...and some not so happy years) 

There weren't masses of substitutions, mostly it was just cuts, but I did find it jarring that the scenes with Chris on a lake & at a swimming pool were added. As it's supposed to be a play of Peter Pan sudden VT intrusions seem odd. I likewise am not mad about the ship careering through other TV studios at the end, though this may be partly due to my detestation of the Teletubbies! (I was also surprised that the BBC hadn't improved the CGI a bit. It looked to still be the same as what we were shown at Pinewood, which at the time I'd assumed was a rough cut.)

Yes, I think I might have preferred it if they had totally re-written it like that than the rather rushed, slightly hybrid production we actually got. I'm wondering if the brief behind-the-scenes bit at the beginning was a later addition since they tweeted something about doing extra filming a month or two after the main filming. If they had intended it to be like that from the beginning then I can't imagine they would have bothered filming Chris & Robert's opening speech, with only small changes from the stage version, which they did, twice. I thought the behind-the-scenes bit was good & would have liked to have seen more of it (if it could have been done without cutting even more from the main show).

Oh so would I but I can't see it happening.

I feel guilty for criticising a version of one of my favourite shows but I guess it's because it's one of my favourite shows that I care. I've loved it onstage ever since I first saw it, 3 years & 2 days ago, and I was so excited when it was announced it was being filmed because I thought it would preserve it as I love it on stage. Sadly it hasn't.

I've been to many sitcom recordings in the past and this always happens. A lot of things which work extremely well on TV fall very flat in the room, and you are very conscious about "having" to laugh.

I still stick by what I previously said - farces do not translate well onto TV, and the "put elements in which are appropriate to the medium" stuff was the best thing they could do. It was either that or record the theatre show in its entirety - but cutting the theatre show to a hour and not doing anything TV related would have seemed very strange I imagine.