Psychoville

Occupation

May Contain Nuts

As openings go, Psychoville's was near perfect. A quill scratched over paper, a guttering candle flickered in the darkness. Then suddenly all was light. The candle was on a post office counter. A figure shrouded in black swept out, and a stout lady in the queue pursed her lips. “'E's left his candle,” she said to another lady.

The slick genius of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's new comedy was that it didn't feel like the first episode of anything: indeed its gallery of grotesques seemed immediately very familiar. Were they benefiting from our foreknowledge of their previous opus, The League of Gentlemen? Here too are a monstrous set of characters, ghouls made flesh and plonked in the everyday, and they are all linked (as yet we don't know how) by a letter each receives which reads menacingly that the sender knows what he or she did.

Dawn French as the deranged ante- natal nurse who treats her doll baby as if it was real was particularly compelling. The scary children's entertainer, Mr Jelly, comes with a hook hand and is terrifying. He's not, he says emphatically, Mr Jolly and scares a group of children into screaming fear. When the parents nervously inquire if he really is a children's entertainer, he growls, “No, I'm Harold Shipman.” In a production of Snow White, a dwarf actor falls for the leading lady and receives the benevolent counsel of the leading man, without realising that they spend their downtime laughing at him in the porn video he once made. But he has a rather violent capacity for telekinesis...

In a gloomy mansion, a shadowy figure called Mr Lomax intrigues “Tealeaf”, the young man sent round to help him. The strangest relationship is between a mother and son, incestuously attracted to each other (she scrapes his back and tucks him in just a second too long), which is quite dark enough without the delicious twist that he seems to be ready to start acting out his obsession with serial killers.

Pemberton and Shearsmith's characters hum with a deranged vitality. The humour is dark, irreverent and vicious - yet warm and affectionate too. The characters are freaks, but we care about them. The mysterious figure in black reminds me of the Phantom Flan Flinger in Tiswas.

The final episode of Peter Bowker's Occupation bought the intertwined dramas of three British servicemen who had fought in Iraq to a dramatic and intelligent conclusion. Mike (James Nesbitt) watched his son join up and reassured him that every one of his peers - despite the camaraderie - was scared of dying. Bowker had throughout skilfully muddied lines of good and bad, gallows comedy and tragedy. Mike's affair with the Iraqi doctor Aliyah was cut short when she was murdered for her supposedly immoral behaviour. If Danny (Stephen Graham) seemed an obvious villain, keen to make as much money as possible out of Iraq, running a private security firm, a stunning final scene saw his reasonable attempt at justification: “Did we have a f***ing clue why we were there? Did we f***ing care?” he said of their soldiering. Making money seemed as sensible a way as any of making good from bad.

Graham's was the standout performance. Danny's own actions had led to the death of Mike's son, and he refused to take responsibility for it. Mike was disbelieving: what had Iraq done to him? Bowker's drama wasn't overtly political: the bigger issues hovered around the three men's lives and actions, sometimes a little too conveniently and close. But you can always judge a drama, especially a demanding one, by its ending: too neat and it feels forced. Occupation ended with the three men as uneasy compadres rather than fond intimates, their resigned shared looks across plates of half-eaten food at Mike's son's wake implying a weariness and lack of answers and conclusion. The “occupation” of the title referred to our military occupation of Iraq, the men's jobs as soldiers, and of the continuing “occupation” of Iraq in their hearts and minds.

Using the same denouement measurement, the mess of the ending of May Contain Nuts - after such a brilliant start - showed what a parlous waste of time it had become. The nice parents who cheated to get their daughter into a good school (mother sat an entrance exam as her daughter) renounced their snobbishness. The really snobby mother (Elizabeth Berrington, the only compelling actor on screen) got a telling-off for her attitudes. But bizarrely the racism at the heart of the drama was never directly addressed, although those that practised it were shown to be idiots. This satire on competitive middle-class parenting was blunted by a script that descended into dumb farce and screechy over-acting that descended far lower than that.

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