Something to crow about

There’s no way of saying this without shredding the last vestiges of my critical credibility, but this new Ben Elton comedy series, Upstart Crow (BBC2, Mondays), about William Shakespeare: I’m loving it and think it’s really, really funny.

Yes, all right, it’s very like season two of Blackadder — which Elton co-wrote with Richard Curtis. But that, believe it or not, was more than 30 years ago — I know it was because I remember going to watch an episode with friends in the Brasenose college JCR, one of whom, three decades later, would become the butt of a joke in Upstart Crow on the subject of entitled young toffs at Oxbridge inserting their members into dead farmyard animals — and I’m not sure that Elton has done anything nearly as brilliant since.

Upstart Crow, though, is up there with Elton’s very best stuff — cleverly milking every last cliché about the life, works and myth of William Shakespeare to create gags which, though often broad and obvious, flatter your intelligence even as they give you glorious, cheap belly laughs.