Watch the No Heroics
trailer
In a London not too dissimilar to our own, Electroclash (superhero power:
controlling machines with her voice) and She-Force (the third strongest
woman in the world, albeit incredibly needy) are standing outside a
superhero convention. “Stop sulking,” She-Force urges Electroclash. “Meeting
the fans is part of our job.” “Violence is our job,” Electroclash replies
scornfully, drawing on a fag. “Equipping is our job. Hanging out with a
bunch of sweaty knuckle. . . ” but her abusive lips switch quickly to a
charming smile as two geeks from the Brentwood Powerfan Society open the
door with lascivious glee. “Here’s your appearance money,” leers one. “Do
you want to count it? Like a prostitute?”
No Heroics is ITV2’s debut sitcom and possibly the first genuinely amusing
sitcom on any ITV outlet since, well — any suggestions? It pictures a London
where superheroes are the norm, but, unlike in mainstream cinema or previous
spoofs such as the overplayed Tick or Adam West’s ludicrously camp Batman,
the caped crusaders are miserable, sulking, petty, excessively competitive
narcissists who hang out in their secret pub, whining about their powers,
reviews and fame. There’s even a board in the Fortress, named after
Superman’s icy hideaway, keeping tabs on their television appearances, with
the overbearing bully Excelsor leading the pack at a solid 90 news reports
and his own cereal brand.
In this parallel universe, some heroes are woeful. Xerox has the power to copy
documents with his eyes; Thundermonkey can summon monkeys to obey his
commands, but they take hours to make it from Africa; and Lightkiller has
the power to turn lights on and off. Our heroes include Claire Keelan and
Rebekah Staton as Electroclash and She-Force, and Nicholas Burns as the
resentful, whiny and ambitious the Hotness (so called because he can control
fire, but roundly mocked for having the gayest superhero name ever). He has
to catch the bus to drug busts, only to find Excelsor beating him to it and
swallowing £60,000 worth of MDMA. It is, delightfully, exactly as you hope
real superheroes would be.
There are even cape groupies, including Vicci, who has been with 20
superheroes, including a demon and a man made entirely of tin.
“It’s as much a parody of celebrity culture as comic books,” argues Keelan,
who stole the show as Claire Aschcroft in Nathan Barley and whose cocky,
sullen Electro-clash does pretty much the same in No Heroics. “She’s a
blue-blood superhero, but she drinks, smokes and tries not to get involved
in rescuing anyone - except once when someone agrees to call himself a
bell-end and give her free Ginsters and cigarettes for life.”
The show’s creator, Drew Pearce, is a comic lover, but actually came up with
the idea while in an unsuccessful late1990s country-rock band, Woodchuck.
“Being in a band basically consists of one hour in the studio, then five
hours in the pub bitching about the reviews in the NME,” he explains.
“It’s reached the point where all these dark Hollywood superheroes are
dominating the genre and becoming moodier and moodier with each film or
comic,” he adds. “They’re now so introverted and destructive that you can’t
believe they’d ever actually go out and do anything.”
Pearce’s homage to this angst is the Timebomb; a psychotically violent hero
who carves vicious slogans into foes’ faces and can see 60 seconds into the
future, so essentially struggles with a constant sense of ennui about his
own life. He thus spends much of the series retired, drunk and watching
porn.
It is, however, the “Dark Age” superheroes we have to thank for the current
billion-dollar hero industry. (For those not up on the 50-odd years of
comic-book history, there is considered to be a “Golden Age” - the 1940s:
Superman and Batman; a “Silver Age” - 1950s and 1960s: Spiderman and the
Hulk; and the “Deconstruction Age” or “Dark Age” of the late 1970s and
1980s, when Frank Miller returned Batman to his psychotic roots in The Dark
Knight Returns, while Alan Moore created the murky Watchmen series of
sociopathic and sexually frustrated heroes. But then you probably knew
that.)
Since publication of The Dark Knight Returns, comic-book adaptations on the
big screen have taken more than £600m at the UK box office alone, according
to Nielsen figures for Film Source, and the spiralling lust for gothic
introspection has reached the point where this year’s Batman film was
eulogised entirely for its depressing vision of bleak despair, going on to
take more than $500m, and rising, in the USA.
And yet No Heroics represents part of a long, slow, witty fight back. This
year saw Will Smith playing Hancock, an alcoholic with superhuman powers who
causes millions of dollars in damage each time he battles villains blind
drunk. Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, when discovered in costume by his
assistant, shrugs, saying: “C’mon, this is nowhere near the worst thing
you’ve caught me doing.” Last year’s Austin Grossman novel, Soon I Will Be
Invincible, is an arch joke, telling the struggle between Dr Impossible and
The New Champions as an intense and reflective chunk of Russian
existentialism - even as the supervillain Dr Impossible constructs his
latest world domination scheme, which he knows, at heart, is fundamentally
futile, doomed and repetitive, he wonders if he could have pursued a life
that didn’t involve being regularly pummelled by superheroes and knows he
couldn’t.
All these reversionings, argues Pearce, are about making heroes comfortable
again. “There’s a need for comfort in comic books,” he says, “and a need to
roll back the enormous levels of violence. There’s a feeling that, in the
last couple of years, there has been an awful lot of bloodletting and the
comic universe has become so big and black that it’s unsettling, and that
now it’s time to have some fun.”
That’s not to say he is divorcing himself from the world that inspired him. He
made sure that every one of the signs in the Fortress was written in the
original Captain America font from the 1940s, and all the drinks in the
series reference comic geekery: Gin City for Frank Miller’s recently filmed
epic Sin City, Logan’s Rum - for Jenny Agutter in the 1976 movie Logan’s
Run, later a comic, too - and Green Lamp Ale for the DC Comics character
Green Lantern. To be honest, there are hundreds more, but they would just
scare you.
And anyway, they would distract from a sentence I never thought I would ever
write about people in capes and leotards: No Heroics keeps it real.
No Heroics, a six-part series, begins on ITV2 on September 18 at 10.30pm
