. . . but make up your own mind
James Delingpole
My favourite programmes this week were Cold Steel: Ray Mears’s guide to the knife-fighting techniques of Anders Lassen VC (Channel 4, Monday); Das Reich: From Poland to the Ardennes with 2nd SS Panzer Division (BBC2, Wednesday); Richard Holmes’s Kohima and Imphal: the Untold Story (Channel 4, Thursday); and Götterdämmerung: When Heinrich Himmler Met Aleister Crowley (C5, Sunday).
Or they would have been if they’d actually been on. But unfortunately they weren’t, so instead, for a change, I thought I’d do comedy. Now before I go on I should warn you that you mustn’t trust anything I say because in order to judge a TV comedy properly you need to have seen at least three episodes and I’m afraid I refuse to give that level of commitment to something I might easily decide after episode three is complete rubbish.
Take The Worst Week of My Life (BBC1, Thursday). I am quite prepared to believe, as some critics are saying, that this is one of the funniest new comedies around especially since it stars two of our most likable comedy actors, Ben Miller and Sarah Alexander — but I couldn’t even stick it to the end of the first episode.
Possibly, it’s the sort of thing you’d like if you enjoy practical jokes, which I don’t. Practical jokes are about sadism, not wit or humour, and so, I fear, is this. Each episode, as far as I can gather, is an exercise in heaping new embarrassment and indignity on its cock-up-prone hero Howard, and your job, as the viewer, is to sit there squirming and watching through your fingers and going, ‘Noo!’ So, to enjoy it, you really need to be a masochist as well as a sadist. You also have not to care about character too much. Howard has no real personality: he merely exists — and Frank ‘Ooh, Betty!’ Spencer was annoying for similar reasons — to do whatever stupid thing is necessary to propel him into the next extreme-embarrassment scenario. Many of the background characters are similarly implausible, their job being solely to behave as gracelessly and unsympathetically as possible towards Howard in order to ratchet up his pain. So, for example, when a generously cleavaged girl in the office catches Howard looking up at her, she can’t just shrug and go, ‘Men!’, she has to take maximum umbrage and be convinced that he’s a sexual predator, etc.
Man Stroke Woman (BBC3, Sunday) is supposed to be funnier than Spoons (Channel 4), which doesn’t say much for Spoons. Its cast are amiable and its sketches about the irreconcilable differences between men and women do have the groovy feel of now about them, but they never seem quite to catch fire. I mean, I like its observation that when blokes are talking to a pretty woman they instantly lose interest the moment she mentions those fatal words ‘my boyfriend’, but the most this can ever hope to provoke is a sage nod, not a full-on belly laugh. Compare it, say, with that genius Fast Show sketch where the fortysomething bloke shows off his teenage trophy girlfriend to his mates, and you’ll see how much further Man Stroke Woman needs to go if it’s ever to hit the spot.
I blame my wife for not letting me enjoy Family Guy and American Dad! (both BBC2, Saturday) as much as I think I could have done. Her basic rule of thumb with new comedy is: ‘If in its first ten seconds it’s not as funny as the funniest ever episode of The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Frazier-when-it-didn’t-have-the-annoying-Mancunian-brother-in-it combined, then I hate it and I wish you weren’t a TV reviewer and why can’t we watch something I want to watch for a change?’ But as I kept trying to explain to her during these two offerings from American animator Seth MacFarlane, it probably gets a lot better once you get to know the characters. The alien (like ET, only much, much crapper) in American Dad!, for example; or the sinister baby in Family Guy who talks with a sort of Noël Coward-y accent and enjoys rubbing his buttock cleavage against telegraph poles: at first meeting, they seem a bit grotesque; but, who knows, maybe on closer acquaintance, they’ll start becoming as lovable as Homer Simpson. The question is, will my wife let me get that far?
Do you know what really annoys me about Peep Show (Channel 4, Friday)? It’s that for the previous two series I’ve been singing its praises till I’m blue in the face and no one ever noticed, no one cared. And now suddenly series three has come along and the whole world is like, ‘Oh, yeah. Peep Show. Course I love Peep Show. Everybody loves Peep Show.’ And it’s not as though the series has suddenly got brilliant after a shaky-ish start, as, say, Blackadder did. Peep Show scripted by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain; starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb — was always funny, always clever, always disgusting and cynical and puerile and fantastically well observed. I was about to dash downstairs to my TiVo machine so I could copy down a few one-liners for your delectation. Then I thought, ‘Sod that. It’s not like any reader is really going to appreciate the extra effort. And, anyway, I’ve got to go to the car-hire place now to pick up the swim bag I accidentally left in the boot.’ Which is true.
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