Cooling off
Simon Hoggart
Lots of new comedy this week. Mitchell and Webb are a puzzle. They had a successful sketch slot, which followed the first runs of Peep Show. Then they turned up in the ads for Apple computers. One of them (I forget which) is supposed to use an Apple Mac and the other a boring old PC. Apparently, Apple users are free, artistic, untrammelled by the petty rules of others. PC users are wage slaves, crawling their dreary way towards retirement.
Some people who think themselves cool regarded this as the single least-cool commercial campaign ever. It was held to have demolished Mitchell and Webb’s own carefully burnished image of cool. Even at my advanced years, I could see that it was terminally naff. Somehow, my new Apple laptop seems far less attractive; it’s no longer a cool style icon, but just another lump of steel and silicon. I presume that this is one of those expensive campaigns that actually harm the image of the product.
Peep Show (Channel 4, Friday) is a cult, which means that, while most people are indifferent, those who like it like it very much. It was funny, though it trod wellworn paths — the young man who goes to spend the weekend with his fiancée at her parents’ house, in this case unaccountably taking his best friend along. The bonkers father, the sexually predatory mother, the clingy little brother — these are familiar figures, but welcome for all that, I suppose, like the stock characters in the Commedia dell’Arte. We would feel short-changed if we didn’t get them. And there were some good lines. Best friend is trying to avoid predatory Mum by pretending to be asleep. ‘But I heard you snoring,’ she says. ‘Oh, er, just practising!’ he replies. But for the most part, this looked like a show knocked up with a Microsoft program called SitComCraft rather than by a lone creative genius sitting in front of his Mac.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs turned up on the painfully titled new sketch show Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul (BBC1, Friday). They were played as two fiber-nerds, happy to let their beautiful wives go off with strapping hunks while they excited each other to the point of orgasm with computer talk. The show is based around Harry Enfield — back on our screens after some years — and Paul Whitehouse, one of the most inventive comedians British television has ever seen. It’s like the longlamented Fast Show, full of short if-youdon’t-like-this-there’ll-be-another-in-lessthan-a-minute sketches. Some of the targets were familiar — Notting Hill trendies, over-friendly American tourists, bent antique dealers — but others were startlingly bold. Nelson Mandela pushing highalcohol booze: ‘The quick way to get kids hammered’; ‘Try Nelson Mandela’s Organic Fighting Beer!’ Oh, there will be letters. ‘Dear BBC, the depiction of Nelson Mandela, one of the finest human beings on the planet, as a greedy drinkpeddler ... ’ We got the pious self-regard of Bono and his guitarist The Edge, and the pompous and stupid football manager José Arrogancio: ‘For me, totally to my mind, the referee is a piggy tit.’ (I wonder who he was modelled on?) There is a running gag about the East Europeans who have taken over our service industries. When they talk to each other and giggle, are they giggling at us? What have we said to make them seem so shocked? Bubbling paranoia is central to this style of comedy.
Whitehouse loves carefully crafted evocations of old film — you may remember the appalling music-hall comedian Arthur ‘Where’s me washboard?’ Atkinson from The Fast Show — and the finest sketch of the new show was a meticulous, and filthy, recreation of Brokeback Mountain, with Whitehouse and Enfield as Laurel and Hardy, all tinkly piano music and lovingly scratched film. When you finished saying, ‘My God, can they do that?’, you realised how perfectly detailed the whole thing was. I have high hopes for this show.
Derren Brown is back on Channel 4 (Friday) with Trick or Treat which, like Nelson Mandela filling our young people with gin, hovers very near the boundaries of good taste. Volunteers pick one of two cards. If it says ‘treat’ they get a treat. If it says ‘trick’ something nasty but not fatal happens to them. The first victim, woken in the middle of the night, made the wrong choice. He was taken to Kew Gardens station and hypnotised in a fake photo booth. Then he was flown to Marrakesh with no memory of the intervening period. Did he look puzzled! Well, a bit, though less than you might have expected. And, having done the trick, Derren Brown seems oddly detached, almost bored, no more inclined to cry ‘Ta-da!’ than your milkman does when he leaves your milk.
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