YMMV / The Goes Wrong Show

• Accidental Aesop: Don't overcomplicate things. It's better to have something small done well than it is to have something huge done poorly.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • In the Bear/Beer gag in "90 Degrees"; was it Dennis' usual brand of stupidity, his genuinely being unable to understand Vanessa's accent, or was he employing a bit of Obfuscating Stupidity in order to keep the beer for himself? Or was it a bit of all three?
  • Just how much of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander Max actually is when he's performing. Sometimes he's as clueless and unable to draw the line between the play and reality as Dennis; other times he's clearly being a jokester and having fun to get a rise out of the audience, and particularly out of Chris.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The switchblade spoons used in "There is No Escape" sound like props Cornley would make themselves solely to circumvent the BBC's anti-knife crime policy. In reality, Royal Imperial Automatics actually does make switchblade spoons, as well as forks, clips, combs, and bottle openers.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The full title of the faux-Shakespeare play is The Most Lamentable Tragedy of the Prince of England and His Long Lost Twin Brother, Prince Regent of France, and the Problems Therein Experienced by All When They Came to Know of One Another after a Battle. This is obviously played for laughs, what with it being so long, but it's also a nod to how long official play titles of the period could get. Witness "The Chronicle Historie of Henry the fift: with his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auncient Pistoll."
  • In The Spirit of Christmas, a freshly-drunk Robert forces the audience to participate in his musical number and has them go over the final note, saying they aren't singing a D flat. Anyone paying attention to the pitch of that note can tell that it's a B, rather than a D flat. No wonder Rob's singing had to be dubbed.
  • The many deaths from typhoid in "Summer, Once Again" are another example of Cornley's magnetism for badly-researched scripts. The writer evidently thought typhoid was interchangeable with tuberculosis (and other lingering Victorian Novel Diseases) in its effect—in actuality, if someone is going to die of typhoid it will happen within about a month.
  • Annie’s contribution in Cornley Drama Festival Part 2 is a political satire from the 1970s, in which Vanessa portrays the Leader of the Opposition with a very stereotypically “posh” accent. This fits with a satire of Margaret Thatcher, who was Leader of the Opposition from 1975 until she won power in 1979. That said, Vanessa’s character is married to Annie’s, the Chief Whip, while Thatcher’s husband Denis was neither the Chief Whip nor even a Member of Parliament at any time of his life.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During The Cornley Drama Festival Part 2, Robert half-accidently shoots Chris with a revolver on stage. Chris is fine in time for the next sketch, but Henry Lewis vaguely resembles Alec Baldwin, who would accidently shoot and kill a crewmember on a movie set with a revolver not long afterwards.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the lines in Robert's drunken Christmas rant is "Who's the real winner at Christmas? I'll tell you who; Amazon!", and he goes on to rant about its drone pilot delivery program. Amazon Prime Video would later pick the show up for streaming.
• Jerkass Woobie: The Christmas episode reveals that Robert's hurting more than he initially seems to be. After the faulty set causes him to get completely wasted, he reveals that his wife has left him, so with his revelation causing him to quickly turn quite depressed. Not only that, but he goes on to say that he's currently living in his car. He tries to deflect pity, but it's clear Robert's not doing well right now.
• Narm Charm: Very occasionally, nothing goes wrong with the dialogue, stage design, or acting… and the production still ends up hilarious because of its World of Ham and (in-universe) Took the Bad Film Seriously nature. This is brilliantly invoked to further increase the humor of the show.
• Special Effect Failure: There are rare non-intentional errors in the show:
  • In A Spirit Of Christmas, a stocking falls off the mantle into the fire. It's very obvious that the stocking doesn't actually catch fire and the gas on the fireplace just got turned up, especially as the intensified flames come from next to the stocking, not on or under it.
  • In the last shot of Season 2, where the effect of Jonathan being crushed by the piano he requested earlier is brought down by the fact Greg Tannahil dissapears right before the piano impacts.
  • The horse that runs behind the window is clearly CGI.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The reaction to Season 1 not focusing on the cast's personal troubles, aside from Max and Sandra having had a falling out and Robert drunkenly moaning about his woes in the Christmas episode. Fortunately for those disappointed, Season 2 picks up the slack with a Robert/Chris power struggle and the Cornley Drama Festival letting everyone's personalities come to the fore.