The opening skit of The Pink Bear Club set a tone that the rest of the show lived up to: a tremulous man, wearing only a pair of briefs and mouse ears, smeared honey on his bare chest at the bidding of an unseen master named “Mister Bear.” Despite what you might think, this was not in fact, sexy. The rest of the show took it from there, alternating frighteningly manic live sketches with irreverent short films.
As is bound to be the case in any sketch comedy show, the results were mixed. The more successful sketches were the ones that required a little more thought on the part of the audience and a little less crazed mugging from the performers. The best bits were the simplest, like the video diaries of “Terry Bunt,” who complained about Liverpool failing to acknowledge its “favourite son”- The Hulk, and the Fry-and-Laurie style job interview in which a man seeking a zoo-keeping position was asked to wring the neck of a baby penguin.
The theme of murder and pink bears continued off and on, although the appearance of Mister Bear himself turned out to be something of a shrieking anticlimax after the wry humour of tabloid news-style interviews with jaded woodland creatures. It was hard to find a baseline for a show that veered so rapidly between satire, dementia, and deliberate ‘Office’-style awkwardness, but it was still more entertaining than your average episode of Saturday Night Live.