This’ll make you laugh. There was a time when actors took pride in not being recognised. I’m not making this up, really. It’s strange but true. Way back before fame and notoriety shacked up together to produce the hyperbolic, egomaniac celebrity, stage actors — for there was only the one sort — used to take a professional pride in being able to walk through the foyer of the theatre they’d just performed in unnoticed.
An actor, so the rubric went, was a blank mannequin who assumed or grew into a role through talent, skill and magic. He then sloughed it off and returned to a profound blandness. The character was memorable, the actor was not.
Alastair Sim, an actor who became famous through film after a lifetime on stage, always politely but firmly refused to sign autographs because it wasn’t him they wanted, it was his performances. Today, if an actor is not famous he fires his agent. Actors have publicists whose sole job is to make them and keep them famous — because what we’ve discovered is that what we really want to see is not performances but celebrities. You want to see actors being famous in a directed script. Acting anonymously, becoming a character, is now a strange minority interest, like chamber music on original instruments or sailing model boats.
Two new comedies this week played with the inherent contradictions and dichotomies of celebrity and performance. Fat Actress (Thursday, FX) is an American show starring Kirstie Alley playing Kirstie Alley as a fat celebrity who can’t get work as an actress because she’s fat. Alley manages to play this because she is very fat. If the part had been written for an actress who can’t get employed because she’s anorexic, then Alley would have had a problem. As it was, she was not wholly believable as herself.
Also appearing in the first episode was John Travolta playing John Travolta, and he really was hopelessly miscast — completely unbelievable, clunky and slow, as if the mountain of playing a man who makes Bob the Builder sound like Nietzsche was just too much for him. He simply never got to grips with himself.
This tells you something that you probably already knew about celebrity. American sitcoms of the late 1950s began this thing with celebrity guest stars. Lucy wearing curlers and face cream would shriek: “Ricky, get the door.” And in would walk Laurence Olivier or Bette Davis or Bob Hope, and the studio audience would go wild, clap and hoot and just hug themselves with joy at being let in on this moment of celebrity in-jokiness.
Fat Actress is about Kirstie Alley, who can’t get a show. It is written, produced and directed by Kirstie Alley. It tells you that the thing you’re watching can’t be happening, because Kirstie Alley is too fat, but if she wasn’t this fat, then it wouldn’t be happening.
And that makes it sound more exciting than it in fact was.
The truth is that this show may make people in Hollywood smirk with an insider knowingness but, as a comedy, it was sadly underwritten and unpolished. The supporting characters (the most important bits of American sitcoms from I Love Lucy to Will & Grace) were not played with anything like enough comic gusto, and Alley herself probably wouldn’t have got the part if she hadn’t been doing the auditioning — not because she is too fat, but because her talent is too thin.
No programme has been more assiduously and knowingly publicised than Extras (Thursday, BBC2). On every possible occasion, we’ve been told not to expect too much — this was going to be a bit of a flop compared to The Office.
Ricky Gervais has been downgrading Extras until it sounded like his concept album. He is a man who speaks in so many layers of irony that he comes across as a sarky mille-feuille. So, naturally, with a nod and a wink, we all understood that Extras was probably going to be simply brilliant.
The setup is that, in every episode, a celebrity comes on and plays himself with self-humiliating comedy. This is a familiar fame thing — as old as surprise guest stars. Only really big and secure celebrities can take the mick out of themselves. Indeed, some celebrities remain celebrities only by relentlessly mocking their former incarnations. William Shatner, for instance, or Neil Kinnock. Extras had a similar premise to fat Alley’s show: actors and acting, not actors acting. And, actually, Gervais was right the first time: it isn’t very good.
Anyway, Gervais has cast himself as David Brent, which is odd. The character, the intonation, the timing and the awfulness are exactly as he left them. Maybe this is all he does, maybe this is who he is or maybe it’s him acting himself. Whatever the reason, having made such a big deal out of leaving The Office behind, taking a character who is indistinguishable from Brent into your next show is strange.
But then that is how actors become celebrities: by being exactly the same in every role. The first guest star was Ben Stiller, playing himself, of course, which he did with mercurial gusto and some comic enthusiasm. This effectively cut the first episode of the HBO/BBC co-production in half. It was two different dramas, with two stars doing lead performances; Gervais doing the hideous, crippling British comedy of embarrassment and Stiller the American comedy of superego. In this episode, the Yanks had it hands down. The English bit was sniggering and nasty, the American bit was big and brash and very funny. I wanted to see much more of Stiller — and I’ve already seen enough of David Brent.
The third comedy this week was a new series of The Catherine Tate Show (Thursday, BBC2), which starred someone called Catherine Tate. She is a considerable comic actress who does lots of roles that involve lots of make-up and wigs. She’s immensely clever and incredibly unlucky. Too many of her characters and jokes have already been done by other shows, not least Little Britain, and nothing is as unfunny as hearing a joke repeated slightly differently.
And, while it’s a clichéd rule that timing in comedy is everything, there are two distinct sorts of timing. There’s the rhythm of the joke, and there’s knowing when the joke is over. Tate has the first down to a Swiss chocolatier’s bowel movement, but is constipated about the second. Every setup lingered excruciatingly too long, and with comedy, what was riotous can, three beats later, become a rictus grin.
The opening of the second series of Absolute Power, with John Bird and Stephen Fry (Thursday, BBC2), was much improved on the first. The plot about ID cards was wickedly satirical, but the characters are still not defined, nor grossly comic enough. The joy, in a week like this, is that you still know Bird and Fry remain their charming old waffly selves — they are just play-acting.
