Crudi Dench: Someone Help Her! ★★★

Crudi Dench has finally got her own television show. Sort of. Someone Help Her! takes the form of a budget live light-entertainment broadcast, with the bearded diva answering calls from troubled viewers and enlisting her celebrity friends – or, more accurately, audience members who vaguely resemble them – to help solve their problems. There’s a deliberately low-rent whiff of Cilla Black about proceedings, albeit one considerably more preoccupied with dick jokes, gay saunas and the prospect of naked crowd-surfing.

Dench herself is a natural communicator and very good with an audience. There’s an easy confidence to the crowd work and some sharp-witted responses, while the conceit of selecting audience members according to their supposed resemblance to celebrities is a decent one. Unfortunately, what happens once they reach the stage is somewhat more variable. The interactions follow a largely pre-determined format and aren’t always particularly engaging (one scripted routine, in particular, barely raises a titter). That unevenness extends to the material more generally. There are some arresting lines, and the writing frequently lands on the clever side of crude, but unfortunately too many gags simply aren’t funny.

Yet there is considerably more going on here than the relentless filth initially suggests. What looks like an excuse for an hour of drag, dick jokes, celebrity mockery and audience humiliation gradually reveals itself to have been telling one coherent, decidedly more thoughtful, story all along.

That becomes increasingly apparent as Someone Help Her! moves towards an ending that is likely to divide audiences. The tonal gear-change is considerable and, although undeniably poignant, some may find the switch from gleefully puerile comedy to something much more vulnerable a difficult one to make. Yet there is something rather lovely in its suggestion that creative endeavour needn’t continually provide proof of one’s worth; sometimes doing something simply for the joy of it is enough. Dench has the charisma, presence and audience skills to make Someone Help Her! work. What this hour needs now is material consistently strong enough to match its star.