TV review: Current affairs game show's laugh-out-loud funny

Talk, the raw commodity, is cheap. The challenge is to turn it into a value-added product.

New show 7 Days (TV3, Fridays, 10.05pm) has come up with some creative strategies to succeed where many other local attempts at witty chit-chat have failed.

It has taken the panel format and shaken it up into a game show, where the scores don't matter, but the one-liners do. It employs six stand-up comedians, rather than the usual round of media commentators: if anyone can deliver a lightning-fast witticism or comeback, surely these people can, with the bonus that they are trained not to laugh at their own jokes.

The result is a show rich in improv, a kind of Whose Line Is It Anyway meets A Week Of It.

I have to admit the heart lost a bit of altitude earlier in the evening with all those promos insisting this was a show for a mature audience - a warning, usually, of an excess of foul-mouthed and scatological juvenility. But it proved a pleasant surprise: so far the dumb and dumber humour was confined to, well, its forerunner in the schedules, Pulp Sport with Bill and Ben.

Rather than talk as gladiatorial combat and brawling shout-fests, this show uses games to focus the mind and turns the talk into a team sport. The comedians spark off one another and inspire each other to new heights. The happy result is that the jokes keep getting better.

So does the show as a whole. The first game - guessing the question to a one-word answer, related to a story in the headlines - got the teams well and truly warmed up.

This segment produced some early gems, such as, "What does Satan's cousin drive?" as the question to the answer "a Mazda 626". And a riff which moved from the observation: "If you can make a class A drug from pseudoephedrine, imagine what you could do with actual ephedrine" to a lament that while international celebs do glamour drugs such as cocaine, Kiwi celebs smoke Sudafed from a light-bulb.

The next game, "My kid could draw that", was a genuinely quirky concept, with the teams having to guess the news event portrayed in a primary school child's drawing.

The "guess what the taxi-driver's banging on about" was also an inspired challenge.

By the third and final segment, a simple game of coming up with a caption for a news picture from the week, the wit was at its peak.

"Drag queens and daylight - never a good mix"; "Wizard turns Helen Clark Chinese". Yes, you really had to be there.

Be warned: there certainly is some adult content and a bit of vile, but most of this was laugh-out-loud funny in its context. You wish Dai Henwood would get over his cracked-record expletives, especially as in non-profane mode he delivered some of the best schtick of the night. And it would be nice to see the show able to muster up more than one lonely funny-woman.

That said, 7 Days shows that Kiwi stand-ups can hold their own, especially in comparison to their Aussie counterparts earlier in the evening on Rove. And if it has begun as it intends to carry on, this current affairs comedic carry-on deserves to become a fixture on a Friday night.