Live from the BBC, review: Spectacularly misnomered, but the same old stuff

Up-and-coming talents Mae Martin and Nish Kumar were worth watching, and the format was simple and pure, and cheap

New talent: comedian Nish Kumar stars in BBC3’s ‘Live from the BBC’ (BBC)

I have read some disobliging and occasionally bitchy newspaper articles about BBC3 going digital-only (not unlike some I've seen about The Independent making a parallel move). As it happens, I read these pieces on websites, together with a few nicely written blogs, and of course glanced at some comments on Twitter, some incisive, others a waste of 140 characters and precious bandwidth. The future of TV discussed predominantly on digital forums. Which I suppose represents some sort of irony.

So I thought I might as well see what creative and cultural lows BBC3 has sunk to since it ceased to be a "proper" TV channel and became a "mere" (in the eyes of some) digital effort. What appalling denigration of the historic (13-year-old) values of BBC3 have I encountered? What happens when another chunk of masonry drops off the facade of British civilisation?

Not much, of course. The new comedy showcase Live from the BBC is, of course, spectacularly misnomered, but apart from that it's the same old BBC3 stuff, for good or ill – Canadian bisexual female comic Mae Martin and British-Asian male hetero Croydon comic Nish Kumar. Not that I want to label anyone, you understand, but what you might call identity comedy seems trendy at the minute, and the pair make a lot of it (even having the same line, "Anyone here from Canada/Croydon?")

As it happens, these are two up-and-coming talents worth watching (in all senses), and the format was as simple and pure, and frankly cheap, as needs be – what the BBC press office spins as "the intimate setting of the iconic Broadcasting House" (as opposed to the Palladium or something). It didn't make any difference, and if the BBC's PR machine hadn't made such a clumsy attempt at trying to make a virtue out of necessity I'd never have noticed.

Anyhow, Kumar is very funny indeed and is strongly reminiscent of David Baddiel – except Kumar is better and less affected. Something like that. He does the same sort of intellectualising observational personalised shtick as Baddiel but does so with a touch more self-awareness about his ego, as when he explains that he sometimes loses his train of thought in conversation because a voice in his head breaks in to tell him just how clever and interesting he is. And he is too.

He also had a nice surreal line about a terrorist bookcase, and about how tricky it is for a Hindu to make the case for Islam. Mae Martin wasn't such a hard act to follow but had some good lines about "relayshes" (short for relationships) including the notion that the loneliest thing about being single is having to put a duvet cover on a duvet on your own.

So, then, diverse, innovative, funny – but recorded in a theatre as a TV show and viewed on the web, and, in due course, "repeated", if that's the right expression, on a conventional digital TV channel, which is also available via satellite and catch-up on the BBC iPlayer. But who cares about all that? It works.