Read more of Caitlin Moran's TV
reviews
Red Dwarf (Dave)
The Speaker (BBC One)
Yes We Can: The Lost Art of Oratory (BBC Two)
Look, I believe that anything that gets you through your teenage years
unpregnant, unstabbed and relatively not addicted to heroin is OK. But for
decades, being an adolescent Red Dwarf fan was seen as about as low as you
could sink, socially, without actually having a bell tied around your neck.
In what we might factually term the heyday of Red Dwarf - eight million
viewers in 1999, Best Comedy Series at the Comedy Awards - each one of those
viewers would still have had to be wary, chary even, about admitting he or
she was watching the show to anyone who wasn't part of that self-same eight
million. You certainly wouldn't walk into a mixed social setting, ten
minutes late, and exclaim, “What the smeg is up with the Docklands Light
Railway? That driver was a complete gimboid.”
Ten years later, however, and Red Dwarf returns to an almost unrecognisably
altered country, in terms of sci-fi nerdacceptance. Theoretically, Red Dwarf
fandom should be the love that can finally speak its name. Look at this
place! It's Doctor Who here and Watchmen there, and The Dark Knight all over
the shop. It's even perfectly normal to be into fantasy, in the wake of The
Lord of the Rings. In the 21st century people have sexual feelings about
elves and hobbits, and openly discuss them. In pubs. Or the workplace. The
16-sided die has ultimately rolled “Victory”. If ever there were a time that
a sitcom about a spaceship carrying a hologram, a man-cat, a robot and a
Scouser who shouts “Smeg!” could become cool, it would be now.
And yet ... and yet. When Red Dwarf returned this week, after a decade-long
hiatus, it became clear that the big issue is not the social acceptability
of sci-fi - but simply that this is a pitifully weak revival.
This was to be the ninth series of the show, until it was rejected by the BBC
- despite Red Dwarf DVDs selling in their millions. The cable channel Dave
then stepped in, took a punt on its biggest commission yet, and funded these
three half-hour episodes instead.
However. In the comedy equivalent of invading Russia in winter, the decision
was taken that preserving the secrecy of the plots was the key priority -
why? Why? In heaven's name, why? We're talking about vague narrative pegs on
which to hang the phrase “smeg-head”, not who killed Laura Palmer - and thus
the shows were shot without the usual studio audience.
As a result the opening episode of Red Dwarf is as cold and unatmospheric as
the deep space the characters are travelling through. Although the first,
pivotal utterance of “smeg” comes just 2.39 in, without the roaring
acknowledgement of an audience, it's a bit like Freddie Mercury shouting
“Day-o! Day-o!” to an empty Wembley.
The conceit of this series is that a hot replacement personnel manager - Peep
Show's Sophie Winkleman - is teleported aboard, with the intention of
returning the crew to modern-day Earth. That it takes the entire opening
episode to explain this, without a single creditable gag to its name, makes
it one of the more genuinely dispiriting television events of 2009. My God,
the cast look knackered and uninterested. Craig Charles - Coronation Street
star and tabloid staple, after his acquittal for rape, and subsequent crack
addiction - claims that he read the script and thought, “I've got to have a
piece of this”. But it's hard to see what “this” he means. The biggest gag
is that the Cat (Danny John-Jules, also a tabloid staple since he was
arrested for assaulting a binman while wearing his girlfriend's dressing
gown) confuses the words “tentacle” and “testicle” as he describes how he
has been attacked by a monster. The line is delivered into a disquieting
void. Later, Rimmer (Chris Barrie, who hasn't been in the tabloids at all)
snipes “Let's play ‘What's in the Bag?' Is it fish paste - or Lister's
trainers?” The silence where once an audience would have laughed turns,
somehow - by a process probably only explicable in a sci-fi storyline - into
a palpable throb in the viewer's forehead.
I am not choosing the worst jokes here. If my children's lives depended on my
telling you the best, this is what I would have to give you. Had the BBC
commissioned this it would have been a far more scandalous use of the
licence fee than all of Jonathan Ross's wages. As it is, all that's
happening here is that, once again, teenage Red Dwarf fans are being abused:
but this time, by the people expecting them to watch this uninteresting,
threadbare and exploitative crud.
Over on BBC One, and The Speaker aims to “find Britain's best young speaker”.
With its regional auditions, panel of three judges, boot camps, celebrity
advisers and eventual winner, it's essentially The X Factor, but for
teenagers who can't sing. Teenagers who want to be on television - but who
know, God bless them, that they would make Mariah Carey's Hero sound like a
procession of sea lions being thrown out of a biplane.
You know what, though? The Speaker just isn't an idea to be bitchy about. I'm
telling myself this more than you. I am consciously deactivating my
automatic bitch-spritzer. Because if, in our cups, we become lachrymose
and/or vexed that the only career plan “the modern kids” have is “being
fabulous superstars” - how different to our day, when we all wanted to be
Morrissey, etc? - we should be thrilled by The Speaker. It's the BBC
encouraging nerds to stand up and give speeches, and all presented in the
hyped-up manner of a Simon Cowell light entertainment divathon. Teenagers
who don't want to win fame for being the first person to bring herpes into
the Big Brother house but who want to be councillors, politicians,
motivational speakers and stand-up comedians instead. Amazing. You just know
they don't have anything like this in Iowa.
True to what we might refer to as the “Cowellian” formula, the three judges
fit into broad stereotypes. The comedian Jo Brand is “the loveliness”,
Jeremy Stockwell, a Royal Academy of Arts performance tutor, is “the nutty
professor”, and the motivational speaker and former basketball player John
Amaechi is “the dour humourless unfeeling automaton who crushes every ounce
of fun out of the process”. Brand encourages the chatty kids, Stockwell
points out the contradictions in their speeches and Amaechi kills any sense
of fun, frivolity or silliness stone-dead. One girl gives an amusing speech
on the differences between straight and curly hair.
“Do you have any bigger topics? Could you talk on any subject with a bit of
... meat?” Amaechi asks, sternly.
“The Jonas Brothers?” she replies, gamely. I stood on my chair and clapped at
her.
Next week Alastair Campbell, Earl Spencer and Kate Silverton chip in with
their advice to the speakers, on communication and performance. I do hope
that Campbell's is simply screaming “Bollocks! Bollocks! Horse-s***! You're
f***ing dead!”
As if by way of providing a putative “career moon” that The Speaker's winner
can “shoot for”, Alan Yentob's Yes We Can: The Lost Art of Oratory took a
lengthy canter through the topic of public speaking. Backboning its
narrative with the rise of Barack Obama - apparently the statesman who has
singlehandedly restored the notion of public speaking, along with everything
else he has been up to - the programme aimed to deconstruct classic speeches
of the past 2,000 years.
It primarily achieved this by intercutting between The West Wing and footage
of people reading from the speeches of Cicero. Apparently, Obama's style
“screams Ciceronian”. He uses all
Cicero's favourite techniques: Captatio benevolentiae. Praeteritio.
Scaramouche. Fandango. Etc.
For many, Alan Yentob is a considerable impediment to the enjoyment of a
project, but really you have to take the Alan Yentob rough with the Alan
Yentob smooth. Yes, he has a simultaneously supercilious yet furtive way of
looking at the camera - like a mouse that feels all clever about having
found some big grains but also fears the imminently descending talons of an
owl. That's the Yentob rough. A mouse presenter is annoying.
But, on the other hand, an Yentob documentary does mean a superlative cast of
talking heads. Look at the A-list on this: Geoffrey Howe, Jesse Jackson,
Gore Vidal, Boris Johnson, Germaine Greer, Tony Benn, Bill Clinton. There's
so totally no Paul Ross there. Literally no Nikki Grahame from Big Brother
7. Or that extraordinarily vexatious red-haired paparazzi photographer
who'll pop up on anything claiming that Diana, Princess of Wales “loved the
attention”.
Yentob has got more connections than a BT interchange. He probably got that
lot just by seeing who was milling around his conservatory on the first day
of shooting.
As you would expect from a show on good talkers, there's some good talking
here. The high-octane fact-chatting. Greer explains how, at Gettysburg, the
speaker before Lincoln took up two hours, while Lincoln wrapped up his
speech - the one on which the most powerful nation on Earth was founded - in
under two minutes. Then Vidal archly rejoins: “Well, the Gettysburg Address
is stolen from Pericles, of course.” Of course.
At the end, Bill Clinton does his mellifluous Southern Baptist preacher thing,
and concludes: “Good speeches not only make a person change the way they
think about something - but about the way they feel. It's an incredibly hard
thing to do.”
No pressure on Britain's Best Young Speaker, then. No pressure at all.
