Sky Max has aired four seasons of Rob & Romesh Vs, the comedy entertainment series in which comedian friends Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan take on challenges to which they are not naturally suited. You might not have seen it: although almost all telly now is sorted into subscribers-only silos, somehow Sky manages to feel like a particularly isolated ecosystem. Anyway, you haven’t missed much. Rob is the upbeat one, Romesh is the cynical one, and they are both generally inept at the things they attempt but good at finding the obvious jokes to make about how it went wrong. It’s quite funny! It’s fine.
This year’s Christmas special is Rob and Romesh Vs Lapland, in which Rob and Romesh visit the official home of Santa Claus to train as elves. Replacing the celebrities who have given the comics someone to bounce off in previous episodes – Anthony Joshua, Andy Murray, Shania Twain, Jude Bellingham – is the sparkling weirdness of a place dedicated to the idea that Father Christmas is real. To be awarded elf status, R&R are set a series of tasks by their main sparring partner, a professional elf named Vanille.
Vanille is a decent foil for Beckett and Ranganathan, with her jaunty hat and her chirpy pronouncements about remaining positive at all times. Almost immediately she tells Rob off for swearing, adding to the impression that the two coarse Brits have charged into a delicate wonderland they will, hilariously, befoul.
But the resulting laughs have to be forced. Rob and Romesh fall flat on their faces, in suspicious unison, when asked to run in snow shoes. They ask Vanille to come up with reindeer-style nicknames for them, then pretend that one of the names is accidentally a bit racist. At Vanille’s urging, they hug a tree. Rob loses his balance while walking and topples into the snow, then pretends to slightly lose his temper with Vanille so that Romesh can tell him to calm down. “I had to step in,” says Romesh, in one of the postmortem cutaway interviews where he has a chance to deliver a juicily phrased line, “because Rob was about to punch an elf”.
The antics become a bit more convincing in a reindeer enclosure, where Rob sits on a sled feeding lichen to the animals, while being pulled around by Romesh on a snowmobile. Rob is supposedly afraid of being gored by the reindeer’s pointy antlers, so Romesh deliberately goes too slowly, then deliberately gets stuck in a corner. The scene ends with spooked reindeer fighting and Rob diving headfirst over a fence to escape what he has identified as the most dangerous member of the herd: “His head’s bleeding and he’s staring at me!” When the livestock and the comedians have settled down, Rob and Romesh have a reindeer race so slow that Romesh refers to it as “no octane”.
On autopilot, Rob and Romesh retire indoors, where they must write replies to some of the thousands of handwritten wishlists Santa receives from the world’s children every year. Romesh jokes that a letter from an obviously very young kid has actually been written by Rob; then he pretends to write back to a lad who has requested football stickers and magazines by asking if he’s tried WH Smith.
It all has that panel-game feeling where everyone has to do the best joke they can with whatever setup they’ve been given, but the setup’s never great, so the punchline can’t possibly be that funny. The climax is a meeting with “Santa” that doesn’t work at all – the guy behind the beard understandably is not sure how seriously to take the conversation, and the comics never find anything they can latch on to. It’s a bit painful.
The highlight of the hour is when Vanille oversees an “elf baptism”, which means taking off the padded jackets and gloves, putting on trunks and plunging into an icy pool. As Rob and Romesh engage in sly sabotage, each trying to make the other’s turn as long and as cold as possible, it’s an easy comic win. “Do I feel more like an elf? Well, my dick’s tiny,” says Romesh. “That feels elfish.” Their debrief afterwards, where they muse on having participated in an activity that holidaymakers pay to do despite it being physically unpleasant, leads to a good riff about whether a future special might involve them hiring a dominatrix to kick them in the balls.
When Rob observes that this would probably have to be a self-funded YouTube project, Romesh’s laughter is authentic and they finally have a moment where contrived capering is converted into a good gag. But in the barren cold of the Arctic Circle, there aren’t many chances for two comedians to get warmed up.
