Behold, the promised Telly Addict: Zen Roundup of The Year! Officially Telly Addict #26, the 26th Telly Addict of my half-year contract with UKTV, who resurrected the show and treated it with care, attention, love, personnel, marketing and doughnuts during that allotted time – so a big thanks to all who sailed in her, not least Dave, Joel, Matt, Cherish and Justine (upstairs). It’s not over yet, but there will be a hiatus, during which I shall endeavour to maintain the blog, and with a prevailing wind and a bit of luck, the Telly Addict brand will continue in a modified form. You watch this space, and I’ll keep watching the glowing box in the corner of the room.
Rather than spoil the show, here are a few screengrabs in the traditional style that, I think, cumulatively say “the second half of 2016 in televisual terms”. If you want to ease our passage into the New Year, all comments, views, thumbs-ups, “likes” and shares either here, on YouTube, or on Twitter, will help make the case for its free-to-air return. There will be no crowdsourcing – I don’t feel comfortable begging for money – but where there’s an audience, there’s a way. If you haven’t watched all the 25 previous Telly Addicts yet, why not go back and do so: every hit helps. If you find a TA with a lowly view-total of around a thousand to 1,500 , give the runt a glance.
Thanks for watching thus far. See you on the other side.
New Telly Addict. Number #23 (if that’s not a tautology). I hope that it goes on forever, but let’s nurture it, just in case. If you are one of the regular followers of the show, and this blog, I would gently urge you to do things like click on “like” on YouTube, and “share ” the link to the blog and the show itself via social media. Everything can be instantly quantified in this transparent age, so give Telly Addict a thumb. It could make a difference. Right, to business. Look who’s back.
My observation is this: in 2016, the BBC lost the format to The Great British Bake Off, but retained its three key presenters. The exact opposite happened in 2015, when the BBC lost the three presenters but kept the format to Top Gear. Well, as you can’t have failed to notice, the three presenters are back. And this time they’re on Amazon. The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime Video) is not Top Gear. Yes, it’s about cars and engines and wheels and driving, and it has the three men in stone-washed jeans, but for contractual reasons, it’s in a tent instead of an aerodrome and it’s in different places, as they pitch up every week in a different country. They can do this because they’re funded to the tune of a Hollywood blockbuster by their new patrons.
The money, as they say, is all up there on the screen. The production values seem designed to make the old BBC show look like a wet weekend. (It even began with a scene where Clarkson left the BBC building in the rain.) It’s not aimed at me. It never has been. I regard a car as a mode of transport. I don’t care what anyone thinks of the car I drive. And I don’t care what car other people drive. It’s a car. As long as it passes the MOT every year, I’m happy. But I have always respected the connection these three unreasonably-priced stars make with their target audience. I would make a special effort not to be in a tent with men who literally “boo” a photo of a Toyota Prius, but if that’s your thing, this will be your thing with knobs on.
If not, this is still on the BBC: Strictly Come Dancing (BBC One).
And this bad dancer is still in what is technically a competition based on dancing skill.
It seems pertinent that the BBC’s biggest hit in 2016 is adapted from a competitive format launched in the 1950s. And it’s also pertinent that the 2004 reboot, at which Come Dancing had a Strictly put on the end of it, the amateurs were cleansed and replaced by celebrities. This is what the cosy primetime audience want. I hate the stilted scripted-reality bits, but there’s little to argue with in terms of the contest, and the quaint adherence to 1970s variety. Somebody should have told a cameo-ing Peter Kay that it wasn’t actually 1974, when a gag based on the reductive notion that gay men are predatory was acceptable.
I’m late reviewing NW (BBC Two), the one-off adaptation of the Zadie Smith novel, but I wanted to savour it in one sitting, so I waited, and did just that. It’s superb, and well worth catching on iPlayer. (You have just over two weeks.) Its tale of two cities, both of them London, was subtly evoked, and despite the concertinaed length Rachel Bennette’s precis, directed without artifice by Saul Dibb, packed in a lot of interactive detail, and mood. Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox were particularly good as two schoolfriends who’ve drifted unequally away from the estate-of-mind where they grew up. And it was not Poliakoffian.
A quick nod to the second season of frantic, homily-driven medical soap Code Black (CBS over there and W over here), which has a hot new star, Rob Lowe, with hair up to the ceiling, a replacement for Raza Jaffrey. If you still miss ER, Code Black will go some way to filling the void
I was alerted to this new, semi-autobiographical comedy created and produced by star Donald Glover, Atlanta (Fox) by Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker. I trust her recommendations. Glover – whom I only really recognise from The Martian, although I read he was in Community – plays Earn, a Princeton dropout with a girlfriend and daughter but no job. The predominantly black cast deliver the dialogue almost as if they’re improvising lyrics and although it might take those of us outside of the demographic Venn diagram a while to tune in, the rewards are substantial.
There is a moment of Zen is from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO/Sky Atlantic), whose latest season ended on a downbeat, post-Trump, post-truth, post-satire note but went out with a bang nonetheless.
Oh, and it’s my one and only swimming certificate, from school. Sixty metres. Aged 14.
You know what? It’s only me talking about some telly. It doesn’t matter in a global sense.
Warning! Not many laughs at the top of this week’s NEW! IMPROVED! Telly Addict (we have a new crew and we’ve changed the lighting to a more complimentary hue, as well as bringing the caption style in line, and making the first, “wide” shot a little longer, so that you get longer to gaze in awe at the object on the coffee table). That’s because the lead show is National Treasure (Channel 4), an “issue”-led drama from the unstoppable Jack Thorne, which reunites director Marc Munden and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer from the mighty Utopia. It’s about a beloved entertainer, bulked out in every single way, including emotionally, by the great Robbie Coltrane, accused of “historic” rape, at which his life begins to fall apart.
I can’t fault it. It’s a fictionalised tale but all too raw, played with sensitivity and ambiguity by a cast led by Tim McInnerny as Coltrane’s comedy partner, Julie Walters as his loyal wife, Andrea Riseborough as his damaged daughter, and Jeremy Swift as a showbiz manager, and pitched at a world that has long since been tarnished by its collective past (whether physical, mental and sexual abuse, abuse of power/celebrity, or the crime of looking the other way). It begins at an awards ceremony – where else? – where Coltrane’s veteran, walking with a stick, is greeted with the respect of his younger peers, represented by Frank Skinner, Robert Webb and Alan Carr, playing “themselves”. A bold move. As was the decision to mic Robbie up so that we could hear his laboured breathing – which reminded me of our intimate relationship with Tony Soprano. Brave, too, to have his character take the name of Savile in vain.
For laughs, we must turn to an even more distant past.
Richard E Grant on Ealing Comedies (Gold – Gold! – a channel whose name should always be sung in the voice of Tony Hadley) is a three-parter designed to tell you again, and again, and again (because it’s true), that the classic comedies made by Ealing studios during and after the war, are quintessentially British. You might say quintessentially English if not for The Maggie and Whisky Galore!, which are quintessentially Scottish – actually, quintessentially Hebridean – but the pitch is usually the same: little people stand up to authority, whether in the form of bureaucrats or industrialists or Americans. The documentary is an excuse for Richard E Grant to have a marvellous time, whether operating a steam train’s whistle or thumbing through the archives at tins of film. He’s a superb guide. But the talking heads are of a top stripe, too – Paul Whitehouse, Celia Imrie, Matthew Sweet – and even though it lacks a certain depth of analysis thus far, there are two more episodes to go. Gold – Gold! – have also been showing some of the films, too. I hope you’ve taped them.
Dave, the channel, not the Dave who produces Telly Addict, although he also works for Dave, resurrected Red Dwarf for its tenth series, and the eleventh has begun, showing on UKTVPlay first, and Dave second. There are 51 episodes available on UKTV Play, which is handy for me, as when I sat down to review Red Dwarf XI, I checked my records and realised I hadn’t watched it since 1989, somewhere in the middle of series three. It looks amazing in its new incarnation, and draws a huge crowd, but then, reassuringly, it’s exactly the same.
I didn’t much care for Paranoid (ITV), the latest crime drama in which socially inept detectives must solve the grisly murder of a woman – in this case, stabbed horribly to death in broad daylight at a children’s playground in full view of other parents and toddlers – but I commend director Mark Tonderai, who staged the murder well, and who used to be a DJ on Radio 1 when I was, in the early 90s! Solidarity.
For supreme writing, may I again recommend Ripper Street (Amazon Prime/BBC Two), still hurtling eloquently towards its series-four conclusion, intertwining three series arcs with a case-of-the-week and never once dropping the ball, even during this football-themed episode. My favourite line? “You diagram fastidiously, Sir!”, uttered by Matthew Mcfadyen. No other shows speaks like this, so all hail its writing staff, especially creator Richard Warlow, who minted the technique, and my own personal favourite Toby Finlay, who leads a double life as a Nazi-hunter on Twitter.
This week’s object on the coffee table is an excellent new non-fiction book, The Bottom Corner, by my old Word magazine cohort Nige Tassell looking at non-league football. When the top of the game looks as dodgy and greed-riven as it does after the Allardyce sting, this book makes an even more pertinent case for those toiling nobly and for little more than a hot meal at the bottom.
Oh, and if you didn’t catch Keith Richards’ Lost Weekend (BBC Four) – three nights of Keef lustily and chalkily remembering his long life and honouring the films, cartoons, TV shows and footage that helped shape him, as directed by his new medium, Julien Temple, who collects musical icons like football cards – catch it while ti-i-i-ime is on your side. (Temple’s evocative, witty, thought-provoking feature-length doc, London Babylon, was among the delights curated by Mr Richards: a must-see for all Londoner either born, bred or adopted.) All 17 of the interlinking parts of varying length remain on iPlayer, if not the nuggets Keef selected. These three nights justified the £145.50 Licence Fee alone.
Since last week’s Telly Addict, the hoo-hah about the Bake Off hit the fan. And the fans. Actually, I liked the way its BBC audience grew as if in an act of defiance (“We are going to watch the show even more! That’ll show Channel 4 and Love Productions!”), but the outlook is still grim. (Oh, and check the caption on the grab below.)
It’s all over, too, except without manhandling, for Parks & Recreation (Dave), which also switched channels in the UK, but found a fond permanent home for its latter seasons at Dave, and even though I have to admit the final season was a bit soppy – loads of hugging, plenty of learning – I devoured it hungrily all the same, until the plate was empty. On this Telly Addict, I present a masterclass in glancing to camera.
Also on Dave, it’s Dara O Brain with his massive briain! This time hosting Go 8 Bit, which is a big-hearted videogame show based around the universally acknowledged truth that games were better in the old days. The first episode, authoritatively co-helmed by games journalist Ellie Gibson, saw Susan Calman and David James throwing themselves all around the sofa-based set in the name of Tetris and Tekken.
BBC Scotland put together some preeminent talking heads for British Sitcom: 60 Years of Laughing at Ourselves (BBC Four) and the forgot to give their jobs in the captions. I ought to be a lot more bitter about the fact that the one successful mainstream sitcom I have been involved in was tossed off in a quick montage at the end, but 60 years is 60 years, and I’m proud to have made it into a footnote (albeit represented by a clip that I had no hand in writing – I did come up with the title!)
Joanna Lumley, who might as well just change her name to Joanna Luvley and be done with it, proved a briskly enthusiastic tour guide in Joanna Lumley’s Japan (ITV), a three-parter so full of breathless exclamations it ought to have an exclamation mark at the end of it. (Incidentally, if you think Joanna is being a bit of an air-miles Pollyanna, in Ep1 she does visit the contaminated site of the Fukushima nuclear accident, with a Geiger counter in hand, and in Ep2, which I have yet to see, she watches dolphins being slaughtered on a beach.)
And it’s safe to enjoy this beautiful cat from HBO whodunit The Night Of (Sky Atlantic) without fear of it giving away who the murderer is, or are.
Oh, and here’s a little DVD extra:
We, the Telly Addict crew, made a five-minute film at UKTV Live, the industry showcase that took place the other week at London’s BFI Southbank. It was nice to get out.
Again, apologies for the delay, but Telly Addict‘s benefactors at UKTV were not in the office yesterday. I have no idea why. In any case, one of my favourite televisual experiences of last week was All Aboard! The Country Bus (BBC Four), a two-hour journey of the actual kind (as opposed to the emotional “journey” usually taken on TV today) from Richmond in North Yorkshire across the Dales, in real time, as part of the Slow TV movement originated in Norway.
If you require volume, there’s always Joe Wicks: the Body Coach (Channel 4), a cross between Jamie Oliver and Russell Brand who’s already a superstar on Instagram, which is something you can be in this day and age. If he’s real, and not a sensational hoax played by a genius character comic who created him for an Edinburgh show, then I warn you against him if you find “healthy eating” anathema. I quite like him, in tiny doses. (Spot the difference in the following two photos.)
I remain vexed by the BBC’s Sitcom Season (BBC One, BBC Two), which marks 60 years since the corporation broadcast but didn’t record or keep Hancock’s Half Hour. Rather more reverence is afforded the form these days, but not in the case of Are You Being Served? (BBC One), a karaoke version with a top-drawer cast having the time of their life doing impressions of beloved characters from the 70s and early 80s. I loved this show between the ages of seven and 12. And I don’t blame seasoned Benidorm writer Derren Litten (with whom I briefly worked on the early days of Not Going Out), for taking it on and pushing the envelope of taste (there’s a double entendre about “seamen” that might not have made it in 1972). But I just don’t know why it was on my telly. Surely you celebrate classic sitcoms by showing them, not remaking and rebooting them?
Victoria (ITV) started well, and beat Poldark (BBC One) in the overnights. That’s despite Poldark giving its hyperventilating fans (I’m among them) a pumped male torso glistening with sweat in the first 20 minutes. Victoria has no such titilation, just upstairs-downstairs intrigues and protocols for the Downton crowd. I’m hooked already.
I’m also hooked on The Night Of (Sky Atlantic), a remake, eight years after the event, of Peter Moffat’s legal drama Criminal Justice, re-set in New York and New Jersey and inflated to eight episodes. By the time you read this, I may well have binged on the whole series, which is utterly addictive. Even if, as I do, you remember the original really well, including the outcome, which I hope they’ve changed. One objection: the credit “Created by Richard Price and Steve Zaillian”. Created? Really? Like Derren Litten “created” Are You Being Served?
A nod to John Bishop, whose In Conversation With (it’s on W, which always look odd when typed) chat show slot is proving worthwhile. It’s no mean feat for a man who talks for a living (I’ve interviewed him – he’s a superb guest) to shut up so respectfully and professionally, leaving guests like James Corden and Charlotte Church to take centre stage for the best part of an hour.
Woah! Eleven minutes and seven seconds?! What happened there? By all means watch all nine Telly Addicts so far and compare the running times. I do try my hardest to keep them under ten minutes, but sometimes – as with this week’s – I find that the clips are just so good, I have to let them run. There’s a full-scale Laura Kuenssberg montage! And two very long but exquisite pauses from Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag (BBC3; BBC Two, like all BBC3 shows), which I feel sure you’ll appreciate. We are all in the appreciation game, after all. AA Gill, Marmite TV critic of the Sunday Times, made a poignant remark in his review of the new Clive James book about binge-watching box sets, basically asking how any TV critic could possibly criticise TV if they hated TV? You have to love it, he said, in order to dislike it. If you didn’t care about it, why would you criticise it? What would be the point. I know what he means. Anyway.
The good news: Versailles (BBC Two), that addictive slice of wiggy court life flounced to its conclusion, with an announcement over the end credits promising a second series “next year”. Hooray! I have loved every second of this pricey-looking historical romp with its tendency to slip into Ultravox video mode and have fallen for its – to me – previously unknown stars George Blagden and Alexander Vlahos (the king and his brother). I’ve also appreciated Kate Williams and Greg Jenner’s polite little lectures, Inside Versailles (BBC Two) after each episode. So gossipy and yet informative at the same time. And it has an easel. Not enough shows have easels.
Sad to hear of the cancellation of The Living and the Dead (BBC Two) this week – the Yin to the previous piece of news’s Yang. Another of my favourites since taking Telly Addict to the badlands of YouTube, the bucolic ghostbusting mystery shall be sorely missed in my house. Fingers crossed for a return for Brief Encounters …
To Fleabag, then. Waller-Bridge is 30, I think, but has her finger on the pulse of what it is to be young and urban and anxious, and a daughter, and a sister, and a lover, and single, and in a relationship. This show might have slipped under my demographic radar had I not been alerted to its beauty by other critics. So thanks to them, I am now watching a sex comedy. We’ve seen “mockumentaries” before (we’ll be seeing one again in a minute), and post-Office naturalism (ha ha, Post Office) done to death, but Waller-Bridge’s theatrical trick of talking, or gurning, to camera so that ONLY WE CAN SEE HER is its genius move. And the guy with the false teeth in the grab above, Jamie Demetriou, was in Fleabag this week, and also in this mockumentary:
I understand why jobbing actors end up in two things that end up being on at the same time on different channels, but I like it when it happens. It’s sort of spooky and foretold. And Demetriou is very funny at nice but dim, as proven by Ep1 of Fleabag, and Ep1 of Borderline (Channel 5), about which I was cautious, although I met its star Jackie Clune at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000 and she was lovely company, and a caution. She’s the only really familiar face in this new comedy set in a tiny airport, but the rest of the cast, who seem to freewheel, are excellent, especially James Michie, whose name I looked up especially. I am often reluctant to criticise comedies, as I write comedy and comedies, but it’s nice when two come along at the same time that are funny, and appealing to me.
Here’s something a bit more grave.
A clip of Michael Gove when he was Government Chief Whip and not that important, before he became important, and then stopped being important again, once the thing he was important enough to be trusted in selling to the electorate actually happened and then he went away again, thank God. In the clip, for James Delingpole’s YouTube channel (hey, we YouTubers should stick together, but maybe not all of us), Gove compares himself to Tyrion Lannister. Watch Telly Addict to see the full horror. Laura Kuenssberg really proves her mettle in this otherwise depressing film, Brexit: the Battle for Britain (BBC Two, again) which was really well made.
I wasn’t expecting to see hopeless Labour leadership hopeful Owen Smith turn up on Dragons’ Den (BBC Two), selling a thimble, which he can use to collect all his votes in. Hey, enough of my Trotskyist propaganda! I only watched the Den see if it had changed, and it hasn’t (they’re still using that ancient looking air conditioning system out of Saw, but three of the Dragons who were on it last time I tuned in have been replaced by other Dragons, whose provenance is not yet known to me).
And finally … Parks & Rec (Dave), which nears the end of its road. But by forwarding the action by three years, the writers have invigorated the arc for its valedictory run of 13. I will be bereft. If you haven’t yet viewed Telly Addict #9, look out for my cuddly sparrow, bought from a garden centre and made in China for the RSPB. It makes a realistic sparrow noise when squeezed. I thoroughly recommend one for therapy in this squalid world. We didn’t start the fire.
I wish I was a baller. Actually, I don’t wish I was one, judging by the portrayal of that particular lifestyle of the rich and fatuous on sharp and sharp-suited comedy Ballers (HBO/Sky Atlantic), returning for a second season of wry, self-lacerating Cribs-style aspiration. As I say in my review on the new Telly Addict, which features an expensively animated duck, the parts for women may be few and far between on this show about insecure Miami-based football players and the men – and it is apparently always men – who move their money around, but the gentlemen don’t come out of it that well. They’re just big babies. And Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson even looks like one. In a suit.
Sticking with HBO, I celebrate the return after one of those irksome “breaks” of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight (HBO/Sky Atlantic), just in time for the aftershock of the Conventions. I am a little bit in love with John Oliver, although we are stablemates at the same management company, so I should probably work on that. I’ve genuflected at his creative use of HBO-excused swearing in the past (and sometimes calling Donald Trump a “fucking asshole” is the only sensible response, even for a Wildean wit), but this week, he brought the house down on the much less promising subject of Hillary’s running mate Tim Kaine with a simple, “Is it?”
I’m saving the new HBO comedy from the people who brought you Eastbound & Down, namely Vice Principals, until next week, for fear of an HBOverload. The Amazon Prime sensation Mr Robot (Universal) arrives on steam-powered TV, while the early adopters binge on Season Two, which is already up on the bookshop. I’m hooked, as I knew I would be, and if I’m hallucinating the gentle allusions to The Third Man (more paranoia in supposed peacetime), I apologise. But I like TV fiction that encourages that kind of tangential response.
The BBC seems to be spoiling us beyond its usual Ferrero Rocher pyramid of music documentaries this summer, with – and look out for clickable links to that garden of earthly delights BBC iPlayer – Julian Temple’s archetypally esoteric Keith Richards film The Origin of the Species(BBC Two), Jon Savage and Paul Tickell’s 1966: 50 Years Ago Today (BBC Four), from Savage’s book of the same year, and part two of the ongoing People’s History of Pop (BBC Four), wherein Danny Baker proved the eager and appreciative conduit for other folks’ curios and souvenirs from 1966-76. A very good sort-of-decade. Watch all of these programmes, please.
I expect if you’re a diehard fan of Robot Wars (BBC Two), you’ll need no cue from me to watch its return to the Corporation after a “lend” to Channel 5. This amiable, foam-finger-waving scrapheap challenge is aimed at me in no way whatsoever, but I do get why people go nuts for it. And it celebrates ingenuity, hobbyism and craftspersonship, as well as Sunday league-style competition. I am more than able to wield a screwdriver or bradawl when required, but I am no mechanic and find Robot Wars a little outside my comfort zone, but far more nerdy than nearest touchstone Top Gear, and I mean that in a positive way, clearly.
Afore we go, a promise that if you’ve never before sat down to view Friday Night Dinner (Channel 4) by Robert Popper, an autobiographical Whitehall farce set not in a bedroom but, mostly, a dining room, it will not let you down, so please do remedy that. You can box-set all three previous series on All 4. It is a joy. Brilliantly cast, with Tamsin Greig, Paul Ritter, Tom Rosenthal and Simon Bird as the family, and Mark Heap as neighbour Jim, and various supporting players, its most recent episode had the most satisfying one-line ending (after half an hour of ever-spiralling disaster that seemed to know no end) I almost stood up and saluted.
Here’s that duck. (Forgive me, but I haven’t forgotten which Collings & Herrin fan gave it to me as a thoughtful gift circa 2009, but if it’s you: look, I’ve still got it!)
The Poldark Moment. You’ll remember this iconic scene in the first series of Poldark, when a woman attacked Aidan Turner with a paint brush in a field.
This was a clear homage to the Darcy Moment, which happened in olden times: the 90s. Although in that apparently more innocent epoch, a damp blouse was enough to get the pulses racing among heterosexual women and homosexual men.
It seems pertinent that Pride & Prejudice adapter Andrew Davies had added in the scene in the pond, although, he says, not to moisten viewers but to show Darcy is a less than dignified state in time for an accidental meeting with the recalcitrant Miss Bennett. Either way, clingy shirt was enough to create a pornquake, and now it’s become a prerequisite for any vaguely nice looking male actor in a period drama who’s prepared to put in a few intensive days at the gym beforehand. Last week, we had Colin Morgan in a mid-series episode of The Living and The Dead (BBC One), actually climbing out of a pond in direct homage to Colin Firth, except without the inconvenience of a shirt. (I know the lithe Mr Morgan has a massive, swooning fan base, so you get the feeling everyone involved knew what they were doing.)
And here’s Hans Matheson in the ill-fated ITV Yorkshire western Jericho (which I really liked) earlier this year, actually being forced to take his top off and “do a twirl” for Mark Addy’s detective character. (He’s looking for incriminating scars after an assault – that’s his excuse, anyway.)
And here’s James Corden.
Finally, a UK broadcaster, Sky, has bought the rights to show year-old CBS late, late show with James Corden, The Late, Late Show with James Corden. It’s only the latest in a long line of American chat shows, and not even the first to have a non-American host, but its inventive and playful “bits” as they call them, are tending to go viral, reaching an audience a hundred times larger than the show’s, which goes out at half past midnight. (I’m usually nodding off during Press Preview on Sky News and that starts at 10.30.)
And here’s a man who has and will take his top off, but only for comedic reasons: Greg Davies. Here he is, fully clothed, but in a skip, off of Man Down (Channel 4). You can’t see him. It’s one of nine shows coverered on this week’s added-value Telly Addict if you count The Late, Late Show and The Late, Late Show Carpool Karaoke Primetime Special as two shows, which you should. Also: The Secret Agent (BBC One), Eden (Channel 4), Parks & Recreation (Dave), Shades of Blue (Sky Living) and The Rebel (Gold). All in under ten minutes.
And here’s me stroking the face of a picture of a cat in this week’s What’s On The Coffee Table? (It’s my cat-a-day cat calendar from home, and I was particularly taken with the black cat on Monday.) Incidentally, those are normal-sized croissants/pastries in my rider, but they look huge, as if perhaps they have been near a beam of radiation in a sci-fi film. You’ll be relieved to know that I don’t eat them all; one is for me, one is for producer Dave, and one is for cameraman Matt. I ask them to choose their favourite first and I take whichever is left, because that’s the kind of prima donna I’m not.
I watched two minutes and 38 seconds of the first episode of Ben Elton’s new sitcom Upstart Crow (BBC Two). In that time I did not laugh, and I did not smile, which seemed portent enough not to carry on with the remaining 27 minutes of it. It goes without saying that I still hold Ben Elton in high regard for writing, or co-writing, The Young Ones, Happy Families, Filthy Rich & Catflap, and the second, third and fourth series of Blackadder, plus all the stand-up routines he delivered when he was a lightning rod for the shifting tectonic plates of comedy in the 1980s and early 1990s, and his first novel Stark. (I suspect of all those, the novel will stand up least well to the passage of time, although I gobbled it up on publication, when I still thought he was a visionary.) But that all seemed a long, long time ago when I switched on Upstart Crow in good faith, as it looked for all the world to be a return to the fertile comedic ground of Blackadder. I was dissuaded of this Panglossian notion during the tortuous first two minutes and 38 seconds.
That is my review. I voted with my feet. Comedy is subjective, so I hope others enjoyed it more than I did. A large part of my own comedy writing and script-editing CV took place within the world of audience-based studio comedy, so it is not the form that’s the thing, it’s the mismatch between how funny I felt a line being said out loud by talented actors was, and how funny the studio audience thought it was. I’m sure many people find a similar discrepancy, for which there is no known cure, in Not Going Out. Making a comedy with a studio audience is the opposite of the old stand-up complaint, “Tough crowd.” But it’s a mighty long way down rock and roll, from the Thames TV studio to your remote control.
As David Mitchell said just before I switched off, “It’s what I do!”
Telly Addict 