One of the small curses of being a television critic is the insistent tinnitus of déjà vu. After a bit, everything reminds you of something else. If this is beginning to remind you of last week’s column, well, that’s just collateral repetition. The spooky sense of having been here before was delivered this week by
Arrested Development (Sunday, BBC2), an American comedy whose title might have been a clever pun on the fact that a great many of the characters spent a lot of time being interviewed by the police, or might have been a reference to the obvious block suffered by the scriptwriters.
Anyway, it is a revival in the sense that zombies are revived humans. This one is a reprise of Soap. Soap was a farce/satire on the conventions of American soap operas, and for a couple of seasons, it was sharp and funny. Arrested Development is pretty much the same thing: a large, psychotic family and their grotesque dysfunction. It relies on a dry voice-over to tell you what is happening and, give or take a twitch or a deformity, it has pretty much the same cast of characters as Soap. They have dispensed with the element of satire: Arrested Development isn’t a comment on anything except the cleverness of its own conception, though its original idea probably came via the success of the film The Royal Tenenbaums.
There is little intentional, organised farce on television. The genre is out of fashion. Patrick Cargill used to do Feydeau, and Brian Rix used to do big knickers. Drama is now either plot-driven, where characters have to be moulded to the imperative of the story, as in whodunnits, or it is character-driven, and the plot is what people do, as in soap operas. But in farce, the characters are reduced to simple comic tics such as a speech impediment, nymphomania, amnesia or mistaken identity, and the plot is a fixed fact, like a maypole around which everything gets tangled. It might be rich Aunt Maude arriving next Thursday, a lost wedding certificate, a misheard name. Farce is concocted by firing the characters like pinballs across the set. Every time they come into contact with the plot device or each other, they do their funny-tic thing. Farce is the most mathematically rigorous of all dramatic forms, and when it’s done well, it’s one of the most satisfying.
Unfortunately, Arrested Development isn’t done well. It has its moments, but they never amount to the frantic, syncopated rhythm that drives farce. You will recognise many of the actors as supporting characters in other dead American sitcoms. They all seem to be far too self-aware — and, in the end, farce is a custard pie in the face of vanity, snobbery and self- importance. It’s a deeply un-American genre. There are few professionals as vain, snobbish and self- important as American actors.
Meet the Magoons (Friday, C4) is a new comedy set in a Scottish Indian restaurant. That’s an Indian restaurant in Scotland. It is an ensemble piece about four friends, who work a bit like a Celtic-Asian Three Stooges, with an added Sikh in a kilt. This does seem, fortuitously, like a comedy that has found its moment. The whole nature of multicultural identity seems to be at the top of the nation’s playlist. The Magoons are good characters. Asian humour is becoming the British version of American-Jewish humour, thanks to the Kumars and Goodness Gracious Me. There is a palpable smugness among Tristrams that this is proof of our liberal multiculturalism, or binary-culturalism, or masala-culturalism, or whatever it’s called this week.
Actually, although television tends to see all Asians as interchangeably similar, the truth is that this comedy comes from a talented but small group of Indians. The Magoons’ restaurant is, unusually, an Indian restaurant run by Indians. Most Indian restaurants in this country are run by Muslim Bengalis. There was a running gag in this first episode about one of the characters who didn’t much like another. Most of the audience wouldn’t have got the implication from his name that he was a Muslim. That was a sly dig kept for the unicultural viewer.
It’s unfair to dump all the social and racial insecurity of television onto Meet the Magoons, which is just a comedy that has a lot going for it and might well evolve into something classic. But it isn’t a sign of cultural pluralism. The Muslim, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities of Britain are still most likely to see themselves on screen in gritty dramas about arranged marriages, illegal immigration, domestic violence and racism. They have yet to be afforded the Kitemark of inclusive acceptance by being laughed at.
E=mc2 (Thursday, C4) was a joyous piece of television. Rarely does a programme this pompous and ponderously faux-wise take such a fabulously slapstick platform. The premise was a neat one: to tell the story of Einstein’s famous theorem by tracing the series of scientific discoveries that led up to it. A good idea, except that they had also, at the same time, had the not-so-bright idea — in fact, the calamitous idea — of making this a co-production with the French. Deciding to make television with the French is like deciding to make an aeroplane out of mud, or canapés with Texans.
What should have been a small, intelligent, talking-head documentary about physics became a costume re-creation that grew to be a wonderful homage to Monty Python — blissful little dramatic reconstructions, with lots of wigs, where some quite good actors got to test the extremes of their ability to withstand corpsing as they delivered lines of chronic, unintentional hilarity. It left me breathless with pleasure: “Nobody expects the splitting of the atom.” All this was accompanied by that terrible, by-the-yard Walking with Dinosaurs-type music, a portentous soundtrack with big hair.
There is nothing like enough science on television, and the reason is that Tristrams can’t fit it into their multiculturally prescribed format, which, at the moment, is either “reality empathy”, which is difficult with nuclear physics, or dramatisation, which is slow, wasteful and, in this case, inappropriate. But if they can make interesting television out of archeology and property makeovers, which are essentially digging holes and watching paint dry, then it can’t be beyond the wit of Tristrams to make a fist of the most exciting moment in the workings of the world.
Mind you, there was a secondary pleasure in knowing that the French were going to have to sit through this, and that it was going to be the best thing on their set this season. My opposite number in France, if there is such a Gallically oxymoronic thing as a French television critic, will be saying what a triumph E=mc2 was, and how it injected a little taste of French intellectual rigour into the flabby, moronic mental mush that is English-speaking broadcasting. Perhaps this will open the square eyes of les rosbifs to the pleasures of the open-ended, primetime existential-philosophy debate.
