Catherine Tate's comedy ranges from amusing to hilarious. She can be brilliantly inventive, and is almost always highly likable. I regard her less as a comedian than as a comic actress, as indicated by her parody soap-opera characters on this show and her serious performances in other shows. For someone with such a wide range of characterizations, worked in such a broadly satirical vein, she isn't as physical as I would have expected. She seldom goes in for slapstick or pantomime, and evidences little interest in working out the details of her characters' movements. Indeed, she seems to look for occasions _not_ to use her body, so that most of her characters tend to lounge or slump. Her expressiveness lies almost wholly in her face and voice. But her versatility in using these is prodigious.Her show is less enjoyable to me than she is. I first ran across segments of it as clips on YouTube, and I think that kind of venue offers the best way to see them--one at a time, or at least with a brief pause between each routine and the next. In parade one after another, as they are on the show, they don't seem nearly as funny. The likeliest reason is that they're all much of a muchness, all pitched to the same key and played, as it were, on the same instrument; like the same sketch replayed over and over. (Some of the recurring routines aren't far from being that.) And most of Tate's characters, despite the diversity of faces and accents, are alike in haranguing people to the point of distraction. A show full of such characters, I find wearing.This is the more true that few of the sketches on the show can properly be called sketches. Almost all of them are extended bits by Tate, with little dramatic structure to support them. They also have little humorous dialogue. The best of it comes with Tate's awful schoolgirl in her arguments with various adversaries. It's funny in part because in regional teen speech it finds a rhythm and a patois that are either inherently funny or lend themselves to being made funny by exaggeration. Regional speech gives the character a vehicle for progressing from tireless repetitions of her point ("But am oi bovvered, dough?") to ever more aggravated exchanges which she manages to blow to bits and, by continual interruption, to reduce to mere fragments of sentences, sometimes to one word ("Face! Bovvered!"). It's verbal terrorism (she might almost be Groucho Marx reincarnated as a puddingheaded teen). But in the end, it, too, is just a very long bit.Comparing this show with the old Carol Burnett Show, I recognized for the first time the value of the interludes between sketches on that show, and others in the traditional variety format. I was always impatient of the monologues, musical numbers, and so forth: I always wanted to be getting back to the sketches. I see now that the interludes set those off to best advantage. And anyhow they were more varied in tone than those on Tate's show, and the best of them were better developed. Burnett was a great clown; Tate, as a real actress, would have benefited all the more from greater attention to workmanship in her scripts. Her talent is a live wire that needs grounding.

For anyone thinking of watching the Catherine Tate show who hasn't already my advice to you would to not watch it, go for a walk instead, in fact you could spend your time better doing pretty much anything, listening to half an hour of MIka's album would even be a better use of your time.The point is, the Catherine Tate show is a complete and utter waste of time. It is, simply put, rubbish. The show is made up of all sort of really unfunny characters who say the same stupid things over and over and over again. Until you just want to get a shot gun and either shoot the t.v ,yourself, or better yet shoot miss Tate.It's amazing to think that the show was ever commisoned in the first place, as a couple of five year olds stuck in a room with a box of crayons could write a more sophisticated and amusing piece of television.I pity people who actually like this garbage, let alone waste hours of their lives soaking it up. Who ever thinks that Catherine Tate is funny needs a head butt. If I ever laughed at one of her "jokes" I would seriously re-evaluate my life, in fact I would probably cease to see the point in living anymore and crawl away into a dark corner and kill myself.To sum up, the Catherine Tate show is quite possibly the worst comedy I have ever had the miss fortune of flicking past. I've seen documentaries about people dying that were funnier than this complete and utter shambles. Rubbish.

Many people don't find Catherine Tate funny. They can't see what is funny about her sketches, but the humour really comes from how absolutely spot on real they are. Lauren Cooper is a classic example- so many people find seeing a girl say 'Am I Bovvered?' a lot boring, but it is a classic representation of the chav subculture and it is dead on.I read one comment that said offense was taken in a sketch where there was a 'ginger retreat' for redheads who were being outcast by society. As a redhead herself, I'm sure Catherine Tate didn't mean to offend anybody in this sketch- and indeed involve an ending where the redheads protested about their rejection from society.The real humour in Catherine Tate is to be able to laugh at yourself, something a lot of people can't do.The CTS is often compared to Little Britain- something that strikes me by surprise as I find them very different. Little Britain relies on rude, unbelievable jokes to make things work- The Catherine Tate Show's funniest sketches are often her tamest, such as the Aga Saga Woman who stops an egg-and-spoon race in disgust because "The Eggs aren't organic"- hilarious.The Catherine Tate Show is one of the funniest shows on TV, and Catherine Tate is very talented.

This was one of the least funny comedies I ever saw. It was entirely copied off Little Britain, the sketches were not even vaguely funny and it has an unoriginal title. Ms. Tate deserves to be shot for making this pile of rubbish. The "Christmas Special" was so rubbish that I almost fell asleep. Avoid this at all costs! It is about as funny as taking an arrow through your neck. Why people find this funny is beyond me. It isn't funny - it's just boring, unoriginal and weak. It's hardly offensive at all. Stay away from this and other rubbish like "Extras" and "The Office" (both made by Ricky Gervais), and buy some decent comedy like "Little Britain". GOODBYEEEE!