Knowing when it's time to go
Simon Hoggart
Watching an old and much-loved television programme die is like seeing the same thing happen to a favourite pet — the inevitability makes it no less sad. Take The Story of Absolutely Fabulous (BBCI), a well-assembled history of what was once a great, life-enhancing comedy and is now a self-indulgent pile of pap. Comedy isn't like sport, a constant striving to do the same thing only more so. It's about balance, judgment and self-discipline. The more a show is about people who are out of control, the more controlled it must be. Basil FawIty lashing his car with a tree branch is funny because the mania has been tied down and assembled as tightly as the spark plugs on a Bentley. Edina falling down the stairs for the 278th time isn't. I watched The Story and mourned what Ab Fab used to be.
It's a cliché, but like many clichés perfectly true, that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were right to end The Office (BBC1) when they did. Because it was the last show, they were able to plant the notion of the series' death at the very end, when Dawn realised at last that she loved Tim and — far more improbably — Brent found an attractive, intelligent woman who appeared to like him. Since everyone in The Office led a life of quiet, and sometimes noisy, desperation, we realised a wrong note had been struck even as we watched Dawn and Tim blissfully nuzzling each other at the office party. How could they have continued? Dawn and Tim have a happy family life in Slough, while she becomes a successful illustrator and he gets a teaching job at the University of East Berkshire? You might as well have Jude the Obscure discover his children weren't dead after all.
There were many joys in The Office. Because each shot was composed with a perfect eye for detail, you can always find something more in each of the endless repeats. At the office party in the second episode last week, we could see the massive out-of-focus figure of Keith lowering in the background to many of the most stomach-churning scenes, like some baleful, omniscient yet stupid god. And because all the characters remained perfectly in character throughout, some of the funniest lines were only funny in context, Gareth's 'enough of this tomfoolery' was hilarious because you knew the only tomfool around was Gareth. Or Neil, exasperatedly telling Brent to stop haunting the place: 'You can't come in for a natter.' 'Well, can I come in for a meeting?'
It's a measure of Gervais and Merchant's apparently limitless comic invention that they even produced a new character for the final fling: the appalling Anne. Self-conscious without being self aware, like all the others, she also com bined selfishness, ignorance and priggishness with an alarming candour when it came to her own sex-life. Her detailed description to the appalled Tim of how she conceived her second child was yet another highlight in a series as full of goodies as sultanas in a Christmas cake.
Monarch of the Glen (BBC1) is clearly on its death bed too. With its leading actors — Richard Briers, Julian Fellowes and that bloke who played Archie — unwilling to spend half their lives filming in the Highlands, waiting for a day with out rain, it's running out of both people and plot. The Christmas special was an embarrassing, soggy mess. Yet, I'm told, Monarch is the BBC's most popular export abroad, so the pressure to produce one more series must be powerful. If so, it will be sad to watch a once charming and beguiling programme totter into its grave, Ricky Gervais was back with Who Did You Do? (BBC1), a history of TV impres sionists. (More and more, television is becoming narcissistic and nostalgic. The 100 Greatest TV Treats, I'm Dreaming of a TV Christmas, That Was the Week We Watched, and The Story Of. . series were all shows about television shown on televi sion over Christmas. And why not? For many, perhaps most, television viewers. television is their main interest.) Alistair McGowan is not greatly loved by his fellow impressionists, particularly the remainder of the Dead Ringers team. They think he chooses soft targets, and often they're right. But sometimes he reaches surreal heights. His spoof Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? set in an estate agent's office, with himself as Richard Burton and Ronni Ancona as Elizabeth Taylor, was one of the funniest and most perfectly observed pieces of comedy on television in all the past year.
Caine's War (BBC1) was also beautifully observed, and faithful to Nina Bawden's bittersweet tale of a brother and sister evacuated to Wales during the war. The cattle auction for the children was almost unbearably poignant, and I specially liked the sad, ambiguous ending, quite lacking in sentimentality. I didn't like the occasional glimpse of the Curse of Andrew Davies, which makes people use anachronistic language: for instance, in those days, 'mean' always meant tight-fisted. 'Mean' in the sense of bad-tempered is a recent American import,
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