BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: BBC Warner
MSRP: $129.98
RATED: Not Rated
RUNNING TIME: 1475 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Episode Commentaries

• Photo Gallery

The Pitch

The characters from the early days get their moment to shine.

The Humans

Steve Coogan and others

The Nutshell

The anthology is always a hard sell for most. When Steve Coogan decided to visit the little town of Ottle, we were treated to six episodes of uneven material. We get to meet Gareth Cheeseman and Ernest Moss. Plus, the Calf siblings are forced back into the limelight. They do the same shit as they did in their specials and shorts. Nothing really changes. It’s just lower-class people being themselves.

The Lowdown

I can’t say that I hate Coogan’s Run, since I enjoy the Crump brothers so much.  These two weirdo brothers in the 1970s blew their chance at winning the High School quiz show. So, they lost their damn minds and killed a few people. Twenty years later, they’re out of jail and desperately wanting to recreate that fateful day. Coogan and John Thomson spend so much time setting up these personalities that you stop seeing the actors behind the makeup and wigs.


I don’t even know where to begin.

Coogan’s Run is full of so many tiny moments. Gareth Cheeseman in his Willy Loman stature gets these bits of sad comedy that seemed to have impacted on a lot of fans. Outside of his inability to deal with defeat and death, I don’t quite the get appeal. The same goes for Mike Crystal and his manager Clint Stallone. Basically, you’re seeing the same setups over and over again.


Blurry PAL!

When you look at Coogan, you have to map out where the guy started. This series was created before the rise of Alan Partridge and the stabilization of what makes Coogan work. All six episodes work off the same formula of loser meets difficulty and fails to prosper. The formula doesn’t change and no one really goes out of their way to better themselves. It’s a sad little town of sad little Ottle people doing the shit that keeps them in their rut.



Bill Plympton and Bill Macy walked into a Telepod. This emerged.


When I first picked up this series, I started having trouble with Coogan. I spent most of the past few weeks jumping around his body of work, while trying to piece together where the man became a modern legend of British comedy. It’s just that when you look at his early work, he had so many missteps. They happened later in his career too, so you can’t fault the guy for experimenting. It’s just that there’s no rhyme or reason to his comedy. Maybe, I’m a fan of more traditional comedy, but I like to see the process onscreen.


It’s like looking in a mirror for some of you.

The Package

The
DVD
package comes with select commentaries and a photo gallery. The commentaries that actually try to explain away the episodes are more quick quips about the past. There’s not a whole lot of explaining behind which characters were used and what was the purpose. I wish there was some extra content to flesh out where it belongs in the Coogan library. Oh well, it works for what it is.

6.6 out of 10