Madcap comedy Vic and Bob’s House of Fools is no more.


The surreal Reeves and Mortimer sitcom ran for two series and a Christmas special and represented a welcome return to mainstream television for the duo behind 1990s TV classics such as The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and Shooting Stars.

However this will be the last of their latest venture, RadioTimes.com can exclusively reveal.

“BBC2 and BBC Comedy would like to thank Vic, Bob, [producer] Lisa Clark and everyone else involved in making House of Fools, but after two fantastically inventive series the show won’t be returning,” a BBC spokeswoman tells us.

House of Fools was a studio comedy which saw the duo share a house in to which various bizarre personalities – such as Bob’s surly son Erik (Daniel Simonsen) and Morgana Robinson as the sexually voracious next door neighbour Julie – would visit. Toast of London star Matt Berry’s flamboyant Beef was another character in the comedy.

The show was commissioned for a second series despite a disappointing ratings performance for series one which began its run with an audience of 1.27 million according to the overnight ratings, but finished with 700,000 by the end of the series.

Following this, the show was subject to inaccurate speculation that it had been axed, prompting an online campaign supported by a range of celebrities including artist Damien Hirst and Stephen Fry who tweeted that the supposed decision was “insane”.

Fry wrote: “The BBC I thought, can’t go more insane: now I hear they planning to axe Vic and Bob’s House of Fools. What? Tell them they’re mad. #saveHoF”.

The show was recommissioned in the end, but it is not to be second time lucky for the comedy. Series two averaged one million viewers overall which wasn’t quite enough for the BBC, RadioTimes.com understands.

Still the good news for Lisa Clark – who was the House of Fools producer – is that she’s going to be the new boss of Chris Evans and co as executive producer of the revamped Top Gear….

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