A French court has just ruled that the contestants on their TV’s equivalent of
Feckless Young Wallies Get Drunk and Hopefully Shag on a Tropical Island
Before Lying and Getting Evicted in Tears are, in fact, employees and
therefore covered by the voluminous duvet of the employment legislation de
Napoleon. This has, they say, les far-reaching consequences for le réalité
genre. You don’t say, René?
Not that the French are ever on more than distant nodding terms with le
réalité, especially when it comes to work. But we can only pray that this
sensible judgment becomes European law and that contestants on The
Apprentice will be able to sue Alan Sugar for unfair dismissal. In France,
it’s virtually impossible to fire anyone, so I look forward to the Big
Brother inmates living in that box until they retire with Davina. On Deal or
No Deal, you should have two weeks to change your mind and be able to take
the Banker to the ombudsman. Contestants should have a union, an ethics
committee, victim support.
It’s funny how the MacGuffin, the motivating thing – the briefcase, the
ticking timer, the chip – in thrillers changes with the concerns and fears
of the times. When the espionage genre was invented by the Edwardians, the
MacGuffin was always the plans for a Gatling gun or a map of the defences of
Lucknow, which were about to be given to the Russkies or Krauts. All through
my cold war childhood, it was bits of nuclear bombs, or recipes for bombs,
or scientists who knew how to make bombs. Then it was terrorists’ guns, and
then, for ages, it was drugs. What our neurotic, hypochondriac society fears
most now are pandemics of vile, organ-melting diseases. This year’s ticking
bomb is a sweating woman.
So The Last Enemy (Sunday, BBC1) started with a sticky woman dying of
some horrible, nameless condition.Actually, it began with someone being
blown up on the NorthWest Frontier, and then there was an
obsessive-compulsive mathematician arriving from China. You might also have
noticed that obsessive-compulsive disorder, often with a dash of Tourette’s,
is the condition of choice in the fashionably reluctant hero. It used to be
a war wound, or drink, then shell-shocked flash-back victims, but now it’s
hand-washing and “Bugger off!”.
The Last Enemy was very, very long on atmosphere. It belched atmosphere like
dry ice at a death-metal concert. Atmosphere is the new plot. Why there was
quite such a lot of the miasma of foreboding and portent we were never
vouchsafed. As best as I could make out, this was 1984 remade by Médecins
Sans Frontières, but I was never really sure what was happening. Robert
Carlyle turned in his umpty-ninth atmospheric murderer and said not a word.
In the end, I felt my patience had been toyed with for too long. I felt a
bit used and didn’t care enough to make a firm date with the next episode,
except for Benedict Cumberbatch, who was a compelling compulsive and played
the Winston Smith character with an intense originality that was without any
of the clichés and sleights of hand that espionage parts are prone to. Mind
you, for an episode that relied heavily on futuristic surveillance, it was
annoying how little they chose to show the audience.
The search for the great lost sitcom continues. Pairs of writers, like
orchid-hunters, go ever deeper into the jungle of unlikely scenarios in
search of something original and entertaining, but they all seem to be
coming back with stories about lovable but grumpy artistic types with
varying forms of creative block. I blame evening classes. Teachers,
particularly unpublished or unread ones, always say: if you’ve reached a
blank with the creative flow, stop and write about something you know
intimately. Which, in most cases, is the daily lives of writers who have got
to a blank and don’t know what to write about. Miraculously – for them,
though unfortunately for us – it always seems to work, and they compose
logorrhoeic symphonies about the charm of men who can’t write.
Freezing (Wednesday-Friday, BBC2) is one such paean to the stalled.
Hugh Bonneville plays a redundant literary editor who thinks he has a novel
inside him but can’t remember where he put it. Bonneville is the BBC2
version of Martin Clunes. He’s married to a resting film star. His best
friend is her agent, a coarse, crass but lovable Tom Hollander. Here you
have the all-important sitcom triangle, with its oblique corners for hiding
misunderstandings, misapprehensions and bits of funny business. Also
appearing were Richard E Grant, Joely Richardson and Alan Yentob. This is an
uber-starry cast for a very slight concept. There is a whiff of Extras about
it – the self-mortification of celebrity, a show about talent that can’t
find work, acted by talent who wouldn’t normally touch this sort of thing
with their agent’s prosthetic strap-on. Amusingly, the only person who isn’t
instantly recognisable is the woman who plays the film star.
It’s all very cosy and fleetingly droll, like finding Princess Caroline of
Monaco in your local Oddbins, but, as in Extras, the stars don’t do much
more than turn up. This is not the answer to the great sitcom drought. The
ingredients are too big for the pot. And please, no more scripts about
writers who can’t write. If you’re reading this as a displacement activity
for not completing your script, then let me tell you: the correct treatment
for writer’s block is to do something else. Learn the piano. Go back to
gardening. Teach creative writing in the evenings.
Mitchell and Webb are Little and Large with irony, Cannon and Ball with
O-levels, Mike and Bernie Winters without Schnorbitz. They continue in the
great British tradition of crap double acts, where one half is much funnier
than the other. Mitchell, or perhaps it’s Webb, is a better comedian than
Webb, or maybe Mitchell, and you can feel the tension on screen. I expect
they’ve been mates for ages, did student stand-up and the Edinburgh Fringe,
shared miserable digs, wrote their act together on sticky kitchen tables and
then the one – Webb or Mitchell – just began to pull away. Instead of
driving the act together, now they’re like a Ford Mondeo pulling a caravan.
But he can’t bring himself to dump the dead meat. Loyalty and resentment,
ambition and failure – now that’s a good setup for a sitcom. They could play
themselves, or perhaps Mitchell could play Webb, and Webb Mitchell.
Unfortunately, in That Mitchell and Webb Look(Thursday, BBC2),
they’ve gone back to the weary, sodden midden of sketch shows, the white
elephant’s graveyard of a format. It has remained unchanged or unfunny since
Peter Glaze closed Crackerjack. The problem is that sketches inflate very
small one-line ideas that get a sycophantic titter after dinner but can’t
sustain make-up and costume. This is a defunct Norwegian Blue of a genre.
It’s stand-up with mime for the hard of laughing, and this example is
particularly deathly. It must have had Hale and Pace phoning their agent,
insisting the time was right for a comeback. Mitchell (or perhaps Webb),
it’s time to make the move. You don’t owe him anything. Frankly, you’ve been
his meal ticket for years. It’s rough, but that’s showbiz. You know they
call you Ike and Tina behind your back.
