The dramatised biography as a genre comes and goes. It was hugely popular in 1930s Hollywood, where the lives of the great, the worthy and the impossibly good were recorded in a hagiographic pearly light. These days, the subject is likely to be an ordinary person pushed into extraordinary circumstances: such as the bloke who tied balloons to his deckchair or a tobacco company’s whistle-blower. Which could be seen either as a welcome egalitarianism, an end to deference, or as a reflection of the boundless, slavering envy and sense of entitlement to fame and riches that is now the defining motor of western civilisation, depending on whether you are reading this in a collar and tie or a fleecy tracksuit. Making biopics of people whose reason to be famous is already recorded on film is rather more problematic.
Why do it, was the question begged by Not Only But Always (Thursday, C4), about the life of Peter Cook and his partnership with Dudley Moore. There are no hidden depths or secrets or insights to be revealed. This was essentially a cuttings-and-gossip job, which wouldn’t necessarily make it bad telly, but does underline the original question: why bother making it at all? It began with an unfortunate and probably unintended imitation of Citizen Kane — Pete and Dud watching their early life on a flickering cinema screen. Imitation was both the saving skill and the great ditch for this dramatisation. Rhys Ifans’s portrayal of Cook was uncannily lifelike, believable and overbearing. It overbore everything and everyone else. It was such a Bremner-like performance that you couldn’t help but continually think how clever it was, rather than how relevant. Terry Johnson’s script didn’t help by being confusingly and lazily episodic, disjointedly racing to get in all the salient points and people like a speeded- up steeplechase. Wizened girlfriends sailed past untroubled by variations in character or emotion.
As well as attempting too much, Not Only But Always also expected that we all had a comprehensive knowledge of Cook and Moore and their back catalogue. There was little time to reflect on their talent. It was taken as read and remembered, and again it begged the question: why bother? By far and away the best section was that devoted to the forming of the Beyond the Fringe company with Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. I really wanted them to take a slice of their life — such as the Establishment club, Private Eye and the rebirth of satire — and give it time and space to become a proper drama, instead of trying to shoehorn a whole life into one boot. I’ll be astounded, though, if Ifans’s performance isn’t nominated for every conceivable award. Peter Cook is worshipped by every Tristram in existence, all of whom are people he couldn’t and wouldn’t abide.
Not Only But Always could be described as an anti-buddy story. Buddy movies as a genre also come and go. They’re most commonly found among policemen — The Sweeney, The Professionals, Starsky and Hutch, Batman and Robin, Rosemary and Thyme. The original detective buddies were Holmes and Watson, and none of the good-cop, bad-cop pairs that followed them down a dark alley have come close to the complex and unlikely pairing of an Indian army medic with a limp and a lonely, cocaine-addicted amateur forensic detective with a penchant for the fiddle and fancy dress. Together, Holmes and Watson are two of the strangest characters in popular fiction. What makes them even odder is that they’ve become more real than most characters in history and have spawned any number of adaptations. “Elementary, my dear Watson” was never written by Conan Doyle but came from a stage play. But then, everybody’s discovered that.
As with remakes of The Three Musketeers, my heart sinks at the prospect of yet another expensive remake of the weird duo for television. It’s always about a fevered, absurd plot with lots of come-quicklies and running up and down corridors, like extreme midwives. Holmes and Watson have become cardboard variations on a theme, rather than reinvented characters. So I didn’t have much hope for Rupert Everett in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (Boxing Day, BBC1). Yet you shouldn’t judge on appearances. First, the story was a cut above the usual “I must ask you to lock all the doors and remain here” drivel. It was a sort of Edwardian debutante’s Silence of the Lambs. Even if the surprise ending was something of a cop-out, it still managed to grip; and it was beautifully shot, atmospheric without being National Trust-y, though the John Cage minimal music was a jarring choice.
The biggest surprise was Everett’s Holmes: a compelling, brilliant, darkly original character, much closer to the original stories than to deerstalkers and meerschaums and Basil Rathbone. Everett was dangerously cerebral and on the edge. He had the uncomfortable feeling of being a man both out of time and place, awkward in his own skin, placating demons with the distraction of crime. It was all done with minimal business and dramatic movement, just a steady intensity. I hope there will be more of these episodes to come. Everett as Holmes and Ian Hart as Watson are an excellent partnership.
Roman Road (New Year’s Eve, ITV) was a buddy road movie only in the baggiest sense of the word. It was a story of ... Oh, never mind. Even the idea of having to paraphrase it is too tedious. It started off exhausted and just got slower until it was somnambulant, then finished when it slipped into a coma. I can’t imagine what could have induced someone first to write, then read, then direct and finally transmit this pile of, well, it wasn’t even s***.
S*** has had a more interesting journey than Alan Davies and John Gordon Sinclair but, you see, they’re the reason it got written and read, directed and transmitted.
There aren’t any favourite stars other than the added loveliness of Anna Chancellor — what was she doing in this lip-mumbling? It’s about time someone gave her a proper part in a real series.
But I ask you, please, what is the point of Alan Davies? What is he supposed to be? What’s he for? He’s not funny, and he doesn’t act. I don’t mean he can’t act, he just doesn’t. He is patently too self-conscious, too overwhelmed by the self-evident foolishness of the whole business. He sort of half-performs, like a man reluctantly playing a party game with children. He plainly doesn’t want to be famous or a star or even terribly good on television. He’s just a nice sort of chap with a mild speech impediment and hair, who finds himself surprised by cameras, like a weedy lion. Why does he do it, and why do you want to watch him not doing it terribly well, whatever it is he thinks he’s doing? The only rational explanation I’ve come up with is the English love of the hopeless amateur, and he is amateurishly hopeless — an Eddie the Eagle Edwards of dramatic performance, but without the concomitant sense of excitement.
