Television
Upfront misery
Simon Hoggart
Pul Whitehouse's Happiness (BBC 2) is part of that newish genre, the situation tragedy, or sitraj as I think of it. Other recent examples include the excellent Roger, Roger and How Do You Want Me? Of course all sitcoms had elements of tragedy. Hancock, we knew, would never find gentility. Steptoe Jr would always be a rag-and-bone man. The unspoken joke behind Dad's Army was that if the Wehrmacht had landed they would have cut down that lot like a lawn strimmer meeting a family of dormice.
But in a sitraj, the misery is right up there in the foreground. Whitehouse's character Danny is one of those middleaged men who is facing a genuine midlife crisis, or eight. His second wife has just died, run over on a zebra crossing by a milk float. (Even that is a little shameful, reminiscent of Graham Greene's story about the man who can't tolerate the fact that his father was killed by a falling pig.) As the writer and the voice of Dexter, a kick-boxing, nursing, Plasticine bear, he is constantly upstaged by his own creation. The dysfunctional friend or family member is an important part of sitcom (Sid James, Steptoe Sr, Hyacinth Bucket's brother-inlaw) and in sitraj you need plenty of them, just to rub it in. Danny is surrounded by, as he puts it, tossers, of whom the tossiest of all toss-pots is the brilliant Johnny Vegas, an alcoholic whose ambition in life is to drink ever so slightly less. In one poignant courtroom scene his character witness in a custody hearing leaks blood all over his shirt, from the nipples he's just had pierced. I know about laughter fighting its way through tears, but in that scene it almost had to fight its way through vomit.
The only woman Danny feels for is his ex-wife, Rachel, who is now having the chil dren she always craved with her new husband Terry, another friend who's a tosser. 'At least he's a tosser with sperm,' she replies in what must be the most squelching put down on the BBC since Mrs Merton interviewed the lovely Debbie McGee. Nothing goes right for Danny, especially when it looks as if things are going well. He is thrilled to get Dawn French to appear in a Dexter programme, even though she has no idea who he is. `It must be lovely not being recognised all the time; I'd love that,' she remarks wistfully, but as soon as she has established at least one reason why his life might not be hopelessly unbearable, he spoils it all by trying to flatter her: 'Are you going to do another Ab Fab? I loved that So in a sitcom you expect to laugh, but get a frisson from the underlying sadness. In a sitraj you feel like topping yourself until a joke comes along. In episode two, to be shown next week, Danny gets a face-lift, which looks grotesque, so he decides to have it undone. Not a great deal happens apart from that. Life's a bitch, as the Americans say, and then you die. Danny spends a lot of time in the pub, because it's nicer and safer than real life. Cunningly, Whitehouse, as co-author with David Cummings, hasn't even given himself the best lines, though occasionally we get flashes of his old Fast Show characters — the terminally morose Ted, the pub bore CI used to be black. Worst job in the world, that . . . '), even the horrible Arthur Atkinson, struggling to survive in a world which is about to change utterly. I won't say it made me cry with laughter, but I certainly laughed while nearly snuffling.
Walk On By (BBC 2), a history of modern popular music, made an excellent start. The notion that it all began with the fusion of East European Jewish traditions with American blacks is hardly new, but always worth pointing out again. And the scraps of film! Irving Berlin himself singing, in colour, 'Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning'; George Gershwin on the radio 'presiding over this programme of entertainment presented by Cedarmint, the chewing gum laxative', the song title 'All Coons Look Alike To Me' (according to John Cleese in The Human Face [BBC 1] it is true that we all have trouble differentiating people of another race from our own.) The way that 'Ole Man River' has been bowdlerised to suit white ideas of what black people ought to think. One of my minor niggles about the BBC is the way that regional headquarters are sometimes (a) far too chippy and (b) a little bit sloppy, with (a) coming into tetchy force if you ever point out (b). But this show, made by BBC Bristol, was immaculate. Worth the whole thing too to hear Berlin's 'Suppertime', which was not a pastiche of Gershwin's 'Summertime' but an unbearably poignant song about the widow of a lynching victim. Not a sitraj, just the tragedy on its own.
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