To celebrate the end of the year, I thought it would be interesting to spend the end of the year looking at back at some of the articles that I have written. One of my favourite topics this year is talking about improv in the media so over the next month we will looking at some of the highlights in this topic. In June we decided to take inspiration for improv from a very random part of a television show….

Name of Article: Improv Corner – Improv In The Media – Rob & Romesh VS
Original Publish Date: 6 JUNE 2022

There is one thing that fascinates me about improv and that is how it is portrayed in Television and Film. This is becoming more and more apparent in recent years because the comedy art form is sort of in fashion. There are some interesting topics that we can gain from these ways they are displayed so every so often we are going to look at different scenes from different shows and films.

I love watching television shows and coming across scenarios that may be great for improv or just something you could look at to get inspiration for a scene. I am not really sure where this would fit into but I still think this is a fun one so I wanted to discuss it.

A new season of Rob vs Romesh has recently been airing and one of the episodes focuses on the duo learning how to run a restaurant. In this first part of the show they head to a hotel in London which is where the Tom Kerridge franchise is located to learn about how to deal with customers. In this section of the show they do scenarios that they may be faced with when they are dealing with customers.

Both Rob and Romesh take it in turns to act as the customer whilst the other deals with it and the outcomes are hilarious. So this is sort of improv as they are reacting naturally to a scene but the reason I wanted to highlight this was because I thought it was pretty funny and it in some ways makes a good point about improv.

One of the things that we discuss a lot about on this site is the fact that you do not have to try and be the funny person in a scene or that sometimes playing the scene true will make the scene stand out and the funny will naturally come. However today we are going to talk about the completely opposite end of the scale.

The thing that makes this section of the show so hilarious is that both Rob and Romesh completely over react and take their character of ‘customer’ to the extreme.

Sometimes in improv, it is really fun to play as a character as a really heightened version – if both players in the scene mirror one another and do the same thing it can be absolutely fantastic.

The thing with heightening a character’s personality is that you don’t want to have them through the whole show as that will be intense and it will become too much for the audience. However the odd one here and there can be really effective and make a really random surreal section for the audience.