Among the new comedy talent being showcased in the latest run is Liam Hourican, an Irish writer and performer who’s the brains behind a new sketch show, iCandy. iCandy is neatly structured around the menu system of an Apple Mac operating system, and thus there’s some cycling through various options – which Hourican has a lot of fun with (particularly those that prove not to be available!) – before settling on the next sketch. It’s a wide-ranging selection of characters that Hourican has put on the screen, and iCandy does manage to raise a few chuckles. The sketch we warmed to the most was his take on Peter Stringfellow doing his bit in the community. Hourican does a mean Stringfellow, and as with most of the sketches here, he moves on before he overeggs it. That said, though, iCandy does have its problems. And the main one is that too many of the sketches simply don’t generate many laughs. The spoof Louis Theroux weird weekend, for instance, didn’t really gel for our money, and it was a case of a good idea that didn’t pan out as well as you might hope. The problem is that to get noticed with a sketch show, given how successful they’ve been over the past decade or so, you really need to come up with something special. iCandy, in spite of the computer menu glue that holds it together very effectively, isn’t funny enough to break out of the crowd. Hourican, however, may well prove to be. iCandy is on Channel 4 on Monday 19th April, at 11.05pm.
