The Boosh is tosh

I'm doing it for charity" is the all-purpose excuse proffered each year by millions of overgrown attention-seekers to justify their participation in such asinine fund-raising events as kissing contests, sitting in baths of custard, or shaving off their moustaches (and that's just the women).

The same plea is trotted out by members of historical reenactment societies, those chain-mail clad exhibitionists who dress in period costumes to restage the Battle of Naseby, while carrying an invisible shield ("we're raising money for good causes") that they believe will protect them from all criticism.

People who walk slowly from Land's End to John O'Groats instead of catching the bus offer a similar defence, and so do those well-heeled toffs like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, as they periodically set off on grim and joyless sponsored expeditions to the South Pole.

But while raising money for the disabled may seem to be a laudable enterprise at the outset, what's the point of doing it if you get frostbite, gangrene and crutch rot, and end up having to have your own extremities amputated?

Sir Ranulph's pointless and expensive expeditions came to mind last night while watching the pilot episode of The Boosh (BBC3). Most of this "surreal comedy adventure" took place within the Arctic Circle, and while I'd like to be charitable to writer-performers Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, their polar trek ultimately seemed to be equally pointless and expensive.

Superficially, their bizarre style of humour belonged to a tradition that began with the Hope and Crosby Road movies, continued through the Goons and the Pythons (especially Ripping Yarns), and has found its most recent practitioners in Reeves and Mortimer.

But there was one crucial difference. Unlike their progenitors, and despite the addition of a dubbed audience that was apparently in the throes of collective acute hysteria, this show contained barely a single genuine laugh from start to finish. Unless, that is, you share my God-given rare and precious gift: the ability to laugh at the misfortune of others.

The Boosh is the joint stage name of Barratt and Fielding (the latter looking as though he'd just been to see the lions of Longleat, but had forgotten to go by car), and it was soon clear that we were in the presence of our old friend, a double act with two straight men. As employees in "Zoo-niverse" (an animal-deficient theme park), they were forced to don ape costumes and monkey about for the benefit of visitors, while delivering a series of gags so feeble that even Don Maclean would have demanded a rewrite. Lines like "do not give cigarettes to the lion, he's trying to quit" or "I circumcised a Jewish leopard for the King of Spain" do not a comedy make, nor does reciting the lyrics of old Gary Numan and Bonnie Tyler tracks. And as for the contents of the "plot", that seems a particularly apposite noun here, because what they offered us was little more than a hole into which was thrown all manner of dead and decaying matter.

Suddenly vowing (for no particular reason) to go in search of the ancient fabled Egg of Montumbi, the duo headed north to the Arctic tundra, where they encountered the ice-covered body of Shackleton. Releasing the explorer's last words by dropping shards of his frozen breath into boiling water was the one decent laugh in the programme, but that one short sequence consequently shone out like a single pearl submerged in a bucket of crap.

After the duo had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Parka People (who looked and behaved uncannily like the cast of South Park), the closing credits revealed that Steve Coogan was the executive producer, and I wondered about the reports in Monday's newspapers, stating that "Coogan has been called in to try to rescue BBC3" from its low ratings. There's no doubting the man's genius (and pulling power) as a performer, but it's hard to see how he'll improve BBC3's fortunes by presiding over a show like The Boosh, which turned out to be that most unfortunate of vehicles, a pilot that crashed.