Every episode of The Goes Wrong Show is a brand-new play, staged by an amateur company that has never once got to the curtain call without something collapsing. The 2021 British comedy series, directed by Jim Poyser, runs about twenty-nine minutes per instalment.
What is The Goes Wrong Show about?
The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society has ambitions far larger than its budget, its rehearsal time or its talent. Each week the troupe mounts a different production, from period melodrama to courtroom thriller to festive family fare, and each week the performance is broadcast as if it were a serious television play. The joke is that nothing survives contact with the stage. A set built on the wrong scale forces actors to crawl through rooms designed for children. Props go missing at the exact moment the script calls for them, lines are forgotten and improvised into nonsense, and cast members who are meant to be dead keep breathing far too visibly. Through it all the company presses on, convinced that the show must go on, and the audience watches the gap between what was intended and what is actually happening grow wider by the minute.
About the cast
The ensemble is the show's engine, with Henry Shields, Nancy Zamit, Dave Hearn, Henry Lewis, Charlie Russell and Jonathan Sayer forming the core company that recurs across every episode. Bryony Corrigan and Greg Tannahill round out the troupe. Much of the comedy rests on the performers playing earnest amateurs who are visibly terrified, wildly overconfident or both at once.
Context & significance
British television has a long affection for comedy built on incompetence, and The Goes Wrong Show pushes that tradition to its most literal form: the failures are the show. Jim Poyser directs the series so that each episode mimics the look and manner of the genre being parodied, whether a wartime drama or a soapy hospital serial, which means the disasters land harder because the framing pretends to take everything seriously. Since its 2021 run the series has become one of the more warmly received comedies in the K-Time catalogue, praised for the density of its gags and for the way small mistakes in the first minutes pay off in far larger ones later.
Watching The Goes Wrong Show on Ktime
The Goes Wrong Show is available on K-Time in its original English; this title does not currently carry Persian subtitles or a Persian dub, so it suits viewers comfortable following British comedy in English. Browsing this page costs nothing; watching requires signing in with a K-Time account. The Persian-language interface makes it simple to find the series under comedy and move between episodes.