Ars Longa, Vita Brevis? (Life’s Too Short, BBC2)

You’re Ricky Gervais. You’ve created one of the best and most-loved entertainments since John Logie Baird first stuck his finger in a cathode ray tube. You’ve endured the Difficult Second Sitcom (not a classic, but not a disaster either), performed hugely successful stand-up and podcasts, written somewhat less successful films, made fun of the rich and famous at awards ceremonies, become quite rich and famous yourself, and duly made fun of yourself for it. What do you do now?

The answer, apparently, is to do it all again. There’s been quite a bit of comment on how Life’s Too Short, the new Gervais/Merchant sitcom, recapitulates many of his trademarks: the faux-documentary format, awkward situations, edgy humour, celebrity walk-ons. The scenes with Gervais and Merchant even feel like a televised podcast. The series co-writers sit on one side of a table in their office, joshing with Warwick Davis, vertically challenged star of the show, sometimes with a celebrity guest in tow. All we’re missing is Karl Pilkington to make Gervais crease with strangely un-infectious laughter.

All of which does raise the question: what is the point of these scenes, given the already animated existence of The Ricky Gervais Show? More generally, what is the point of this show? Not, I hasten to add, that’s it’s rubbish. Davis is a strong lead, though a little too close to Gervais/Brent in manner and outlook. He particularly excels at the sideways worried glance that a show built from awkward encounters gives him plenty of chances to deploy. The supporting cast, including Rosamund Hanson as Davis’ assistant drone and Jo Enright as his estranged wife, is pitch-perfect for the strained naturalism the format requires. A couple of scenes in the first episode were brilliant: Davis caught by his wife attempting a unorthodox return to his house, and the scene with Liam Neeson. His cameo, demanding to learn the secrets of comic improvisation from Gervais and Merchant, is a masterpiece of earnest bafflement with an undertow of unhinged menace. The writing was crisp (though I could have done without the references to Schindler’s List – they felt too jokey), but Neeson took it beyond anything else seen thus far.

The reason for this is telling. Apart from Neeson’s performance, the exchanges felt like they had a point; that they revealed something about his character, in a way that wasn’t merely contrived to produce uncomfortable silences (though it produced plenty of those). In contrast, much of the show feels aimless, comedy awkwardness for its own sake. The point isn’t that awkwardness is passé, or that Gervais and Merchant are recycling the same tropes. It’s that proper awkward comedy demands attention to plot and character. Precisely because no-one is allowed to crack wise every twenty seconds, the humour has to come from telling details of characterisation and motivation; it has to make sense for the characters to get into these situations, to realise what’s happened, and to react as they do. Curb Your Enthusiasm does this season after season (the most recent series is arguably the best yet). The Office was a superb example of how to build this kind of comedy out of everyday non-events.

In contrast, Life’s Too Short is far too episodic and short on plot (no pun intended).[i] Worse, it’s short on milieu. Davis floats in a sitcom nowhere, not quite the media, not quite entertainment, not quite office life or domesticity. It all feels frictionless, lacking the undertows of frustration or resentment that might result in consistent comedy. We’re left with a collection of individual scenes – some very good, some featuring Johnny Depp, and some with Gervais and Merchant that will make you think of other shows you have seen them in. You hope they won’t end up wondering where the time went.

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[i] Oh alright, it was.

A Brief Entry In Lieu Of A Proper Post

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn – not the kind of ungainly title you’d expect to see at the start of the post on a comedy blog. (I imagine the film is no laughing matter either, though I have no plans to find out.[i])

But digging through some of the ridiculous internet sturm und drang that has blown up around the film, I discovered something worthy of note, if little more. The latest Stephen Speilberg project, produced by Peter Jackson, is written by a Scot and two Englishmen who are, to all intents and purposes, comedy writers: Steven Moffat (writer of various sitcoms, and co-creator of last year’s Sherlock); Edgar Wright (director of Spaced, co-writer and director of Shaun of the Death and Hot Fuzz); and Joe Cornish (one half of Adam and Joe).

Is this the future for the animated blockbuster? Should we brace ourselves for Pixar movies scripted by Graham Linehan, or Dreamworks commissioning Chris Morris to write yet another Shrek sequel? Will this influx of British sitcom expertise revive a slumbering giant, or will these writers become lost in the labyrinthine bowels of the Hollywood system?

The real mystery, of course, is how Stephen Moffat, a man who co-created the latest version of Sherlock Holmes and wrote the excellent first episode, could also have been responsible for Coupling, one of the most wearily formulaic sitcoms I have ever seen. Something for an intrepid Belgian boy journalist to investigate, perhaps (if he ever makes it back to the big screen).

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[i] I did see the trailer, so let’s say it felt like I saw a whole film, and leave it at that.

Brave New World (The Hunt for Tony Blair, Channel 4)

Satire departs in varying degrees from the facts; indeed, this departure is part of what makes it satirical. Its intent can register in a slight exaggeration of a vocal inclination, or in depicting recognisable persons as animals or inanimate objects. The Hunt For Tony Blair presents a familiar cast in a recognisably different universe, not one created specifically for satirical purposes, but drawing on our knowledge of genre. Blair, Mandelson, Brown and the rest scuttle around in a Cold War-era thriller, which is perhaps suitable given that as a piece of satire it’s a little out of date (one reference to trusting the bankers and a mention of Afghanistan apart, there’s little that speaks to Cameron’s Britain).

And yes, the central theme is Blair as a Tory Boy shyster, on the run from a murder charge: the stuff of a million placards. But don’t let that put you off (too much): this is slick, smart stuff, and a lot better than anything else I’ve seen from The Comic Strip. There aren’t too many outstanding jokes, but the conceit introduces us to a black-and-white world where the theme from A Summer Place swoons over the action, bobbies toot on their whistles while ineffectually chasing fugitives, and the Evening Post is sold at London train stations; but it’s also a world with Iraq, New Labour, and an endless stream of political biographies.

The show is all about this world and its stylish execution: there is little attempt to dig into the coils of politics or present the New Labour years in a remotely realistic fashion. A couple of the actors could pass for distant relatives of their characters (notably Nigel Planer as a drooping Peter Mandelson), but in general there’s little attempt at physically matching the targets; Michael Sheen can rest easy. Stephen Mangan does essay the familiar Blair mannerisms, but it’s not so much a portrait as an aide-memoire to remind us who he’s meant to be. Jennifer Saunders does this even more blatantly with Margaret Thatcher; you’re never in any doubt that you’re watching a comedienne doing a Maggie impression (one of the better things in the show, as it happens). The fun lies in seeing how these characters appear differently in this world, and how it reflects on our perceptions of them in ours. Blair’s perpetually nervous grin suggested a man forever on the defensive; here, he’s got Robbie Coltrane’s hulking detective on his tail. Mandelson’s combination of entitlement and false deferrence to whomever he speaks makes him an ideal subject for police cross-examination. Thatcher is perfect as a faded diva, with Norman Tebbit as the butler playing her newsreel footage of her martial triumphs. Not all the characters are placed so delicately: the portrayals of Bush and Brown are one-dimensional, and the likes of Cherie Blair and Alistair Campbell get cameos at best. But by placing these rogues in a glamorous age, it emphasises their seediness without spelling it out for us. And – who knows – maybe it’s a deliberate attempt to portray them as yesterday’s men and women, their problems seemingly as remote from us as tiny black-and-white televisions, smoking cigarettes indoors, and Barbara Windsor’s East End accent.

Not with a Bang, but a Tinkle: NF Simpson

Prayer: Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality:

Response: Which is an illusion caused by mescalin deficiency.

(from A Resounding Tinkle)

NF Simpson, perhaps Britain’s most influential absurdist playwright, suffered a fatal underdose of mescalin at the end of August.

Before I start, a confession: I have not seen any of Simpson’s plays. My appreciation of him is therefore necessarily more limited than might be ideal. There is an argument that the best way to judge a playwright is by the words on the page, avoiding the risk of any actors, directors or other interested parties making it look better than it actually is. Tempting though this thought may be, I think it must be dismissed. Judging a play in this fashion is like judging a painter only by examining the oils in their bottles. Nevertheless, after reading Simpson’s two most famous works, I have formed an impression which is hopefully worth a blog post at any rate.

Reading A Resounding Tinkle and One-Way Pendulum, I was struck by somewhat contradictory thoughts. Each script was fiercely inventive, but each relied heavily on a particular comic approach which I feel would not work nearly as well nowadays. Humour can date to much the same degree as anything else. There must have been a time, perhaps between the evolution of the opposable thumb and the cultivation of fire, when stories finishing with ‘...and that was just the men!’ were cutting edge stuff. Simpson’s humour was of a much more individual kind, mixing absurdism, farcical events and a recognisably English whimsy which litters both scripts (the playwright complaining that most of his work came to him in Portuguese; the judge asking whether the defendant has any “negro blood”, and being told that he might have one or two bottles of it in his room).

What does not work so well is Simpson’s use of the satiric/absurdist set-piece, in which characters in a recognisable setting earnestly debate or work through some Big Idea, in the process reducing it to something smaller: comedians discussing the purpose of the universe; the spoof radio service quoted from above; the trial which takes up almost half of One-Way Pendulum. These came across as clunky, at times didactic. The hand of the author is too readily discerned in them, carefully positioning his mannequins for maximum effect; the point of the exercise is too obvious. One feels as though each such scene should finish with the author emerging from the wings (as happens in A Resounding Tinkle – another rather creaky device) to triumphantly declare ‘QED!’

I suspect the absurdism which runs through Simpson’s writing might be the root of the problem. The great strength and limitation of the Theatre of the Absurd was the sweeping assumptions it was premised upon. If your claim is that society or the family or middle-class certainties are not just wrong or need to be revised, but are meaningless through-and-through, the temptation will be to present them in as dismissive a manner as possible.  The result tended to be plays which made strong, even thrilling claims, but which had little subtlety to reward closer inspection. Kenneth Tynan, a staunch defender of Simpson, noted that few plays by Eugene Ionesco survived a second hearing. I fear this may also be true of Simpson’s work.

Fresh Feeling? (Fresh Meat, Channel 4)

For many people watching Fresh Meat, it will serve both as a warning and a tantalising suggestion of the squalid glamour of university life. For others, it is a reminder of things we would often prefer to forget, be they grotty student houses or clichéd campus comedies.[i] [ii]When a sitcom is focused on such a narrow slice of life, one’s experiences and expectations of its subject-matter are going to play an important part in how one feels about it. It’s not just a matter of perspective, though. After all, Fresh Meat has garnered generally positive notices from reviewers whose salad days are presumably behind them.  Hopefully it’s not just ageist bias or a fuddy-duddy distaste for Young People Today that’s at work when I suggest that this meat is a little undercooked.

Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s ouvre includes the peerless Peep Show, which at its best perfected a blend of awkwardness, stupidity and pithy dialogue. Their latest offering takes the same ingredients and pours them into a house with seven students, plus forays to the pub and an English tutorial. But Peep Show worked not because of the first-person gimmick or because it was set in a particularly interesting situation, but because the main characters were developed far enough beyond their respective stereotypes. With this in mind, we should give Fresh Meat a chance to uncover any nuance hidden in its humdrum setup. But going on the first episode, the signs aren’t great. Most of the characters seemed pretty thin, their interactions rarely sparked, and perhaps oddly for a show with such a tight ‘sit’, it lacks as yet the focus of a central conflict or relationship.

Joe Thomas (Kingsley) and Jake Whitehall (JP) came closest to providing a fulcrum. Whitehall’s public-school monstrosity had the best lines going, Thomas the most properly-developed character. It is telling that their exchanges most resembled those familiar from Peep Show; if any of the housemates are going to lodge themselves in the popular consciousness à la Mark and Jeremy, my money is on these two.

None of the other characters seemed to be figured out. Greg McHugh (Howard) – one half of Will and Greg, one of my favourite sketch shows – over-sold every line, perhaps under instruction to appear weirder than anyone else. The most obvious pitch at awkward comedy, the exchanges between Vod (Zawe Ashton) and Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie) didn’t work for the opposite reason. Neither character was sharply defined enough to create the tension required. Ritchie was too polite to be nervous, Ashton too relaxed to come across as taking advantage of her.

Early days, you’ll agree. But speaking as someone who has to teach specimens not too far removed from those on display here, I can tell you that you learn to sniff out the over-achievers and no-hopers quite early. Fresh Meat falls into neither category, as of yet. For all that, I have my suspicions.

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[i] Not Campus. Campus would have been doing very well to reach the level of a clichéd comedy.

[ii] A bye-law seems to have been passed forbidding reviews of Fresh Meat from omitting mention of either Campus or Peep Show. This blog plans to tow this line, Vichy-style.

Paris Match (Midnight in Paris)

Like all sentient beings from this planet and beyond, I prefer Woody Allen’s earlier, funny films. Actually, I tell a lie – my favourite Allens are found in the decade between Annie Hall and Hannah and her Sisters. Since then it’s been, to paint in very broad strokes, a long decline, with (increasingly fewer) excellent offerings (Crimes and Misdemeanours; Everyone Says I Love You), amusing miniatures and genre pieces (Curse of the Jade Scorpion; Bullets Over Broadway; Sweet and Lowdown), good ideas that only work to a certain extent (Hollywood Ending; Melinda and Melinda[i]) and some downright stinkers (September; Match Point; Vicky Cristina Barcelona[ii]).

Midnight in Paris is a hard film to fit into any of these loose categories. It has many of the expected Allen touches (star turns; a writer dissatisfied with both his commercial success and his relationship; loving shots of historic buildings and boulevards, presumably arranged in conjunction with the tourist board of the relevant European city). The conceit – Owen Wilson’s frustrated scribbler finds himself able to travel back to the Paris of Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds and the Lost Generation – is both lovely and recognisable as a variation on plot devices in other Allen films (most obviously The Purple Rose of Cairo). It’s also developed in a way that both brings out the theme and is easy to follow, proving that Allen is still capable of coming up with engrossing plots.

The passages between the present day and the gilded past are sweetly achieved – no effects or attempted explanations, just an old-time taxi cab crawling around a corner. The 1920s scenes are a little bit name-droppy, at times an elaborate game of émigré lit talent-spotting – Djuna Barnes pops up at one point – with artists ranging from Man Ray to Modigliani getting walk-on parts or mentions. I rather enjoyed this aspect of the film, but I can imagine if you’re in the wrong mood it would come across as smug, or even desperate to impress. Not a great deal happens in these scenes, but the atmosphere is every bit as bright and fragile as you’d expect. Watching them, I really wanted to be there, which is surely the highest praise you can give a film depicting high-class carousing.

The bigger problems are also familiar from Allen’s recent work. Some of the characters are too eager to state the point the film is obviously making; the treatment of Gil’s wife and her family is perfunctory to the point of being annoying; and, while very enjoyable and occasionally amusing, it is not particularly funny. One feels compelled to class it as a comedy, but perhaps an adjacent genre – light fantasy? – would more easily accommodate it. It hardly matters though; Midnight in Paris is, if not a triumph, then at least an accomplishment of charm over substance.

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[i] Well, I thought it was a good idea anyway.

[ii] Face it, it was awful. Stop living in denial.

Toby or not Toby?

If asked for an antonym of ‘comic’, one might plump for ‘serious’, but it’s never been obvious to me that each excludes the other. Not only does some comedy concern serious themes, but it can be a serious examination of them, rather than frivolous light relief. The best character and situation comedy usually has a sincerity about it. Not only will the comedians, writers or actors take the characters seriously, but the piece will work only if the audience take them seriously as well. Hancock (the character from perhaps the first recognisable sitcom, not Will Smith’s grungy superhero) is in many ways a ridiculous character, and takes himself too seriously by far, but for the show to work the audience have to empathise with him.

I saw a lovely example of this approach to comedy in the second-last show I caught at the Fringe, Lucky, by the sketch duo Toby. Ostensibly, Lucky is a sketch show about a troupe struggling to put on a sketch show, falling out with each other over creative differences which are really personal, and so on. This is a familiar device, to the point where any troupe using it need to add some sort of spin of their own to make it worth their (and our) while. One easy way to do this is by making the characters in the sketch troupe, the ones struggling to stage the show-within-the-show, as oddball and different from each other as possible.

Toby do this, in that the on-stage characters are very different; they are also sisters (Sarah and Lizzie Daykin), which itself adds a certain frisson to their exchanges. The basic dynamic between the two is relatively simple: Lizzie’s resentment simmers as Sarah hogs sketches and proclaims her greatness to the audience. However, the duo also do something much more interesting: they take these characters very seriously. This is the first sketch show of this sort I’ve seen where the characters struggling to stage the show are written and acted with enough detail and concern to make their plight genuinely poignant. It’s still comedy, mind, but it’s slow-burn stuff, particularly during the numerous pauses and awkward moments between the two. These are employed to wonderful effect in the sketches the two stage, where the relationship between them warps the performances without, for the most part, being referred to. (Lucky is one of the few sketch shows of which it can be truly be said that none of the material would work as well performed on its own.) In the sketch where they play a married couple, Sarah (the wife) browbeats her husband, who for the most part sits silently. Lizzie’s one lengthy speech in this scene, a story told to the unseen waiter, is a lovely little character detail, showing us the character’s predicament without having him or his wife refer to it it. The hugely exaggerated pause while his wife reads the menu is the funniest bit of the sketch, but it is all the funnier for coming from such a finely crafted scenario.

There are probably a dozen other moments in the show like this one, where the characters don’t do or say anything funny but the comedy comes anyway, from who they are, their mannerisms, and the show’s inevitable spiral into disaster. It’s a high-risk strategy, eschewing the basic set-up/punchline structure for something more slanted and tangential, but Toby make it work every time.