012 Contemporary Comedy – Old
An impressive crop of comedies this time around. As seems to be my frequent refrain, it took
me a little while to get into Secrets
and Lattes by Hilary Lyon. However,
by the final episode I was absolutely hooked.
I’m sure this went on to at least a second series, so I’m eagerly
awaiting that. It’s the story of Trisha
(Julie Graham), a Scottish-born school art teacher who returns to Edinburgh to
start a coffee shop called Café Culture, financed by her strait-laced,
financially solvent older sister Clare (Hilary Lyon). They hire an opera-loving Polish chef,
Krysztof (Simon Greenall), who is apparently stunning, and Lizzie (Pearl
Appleby), a teenager. Krysztof has
secret passport troubles and a heart condition.
Trisha has a secret, too—she left London after ten years because she had
been having an affair with Richard, a married man with kids. Lizzie is a kleptomaniac who inserts herself
as a waitress and general dogsbody. At
first, it reminded me of the adorable Bangers
and Mash, but by the second episode, I could tell it was quite different in
many ways. The main thing is that the
relationships, while comic, are a lot more complex than in Bangers and Mash. How
so? Well, it’s difficult to know whether
to ship Krysztof and Trisha, or Krysztof and Clare, or Trisha and Richard . . .
it’s complicated. Clare is also an
interesting character with a very strict moral backbone . . . which is thrown
into disarray when she finds out her husband wants to leave her for an older
American woman! Clare had been very
self-righteous regarding Trisha’s relationship with Richard, but has to change
her mind slightly in light of her husband’s infidelities. Lizzie feels like the least well-developed
character, but she’s still well-acted. It also starred Guy Paul and Roger May
and was directed by Marilyn Imrie, produced by Moray Hunter and Gordon Kennedy,
and was an Absolutely production from 2014.
Buy Me Up TV from
2008 was quite silly, yet some of the ads were really funny. Buy Me Up TV (and I think this is the second
season?) is a shopping channel which sells you stuff you don’t need. Angela works (Katherine Jakeways) hard to
sell you crap, as does Bob Norton, who refuses to acknowledge that he wears a
hair piece. Giles is a very strange man
who is in love with Angela and does all kinds of strange things over the
episodes in order to win her, culminating in taking some kind of strange
Chinese pills that transform him into a (female?) lingerie model. I was, naturally, a bit annoyed at the portrait
of Americans inherent in Jackie Tanner, the American owner of Buy Me Up
TV. Each episode there was a guest
star. Eamonn Holmes played a really
obnoxious version of himself, as did Ruth Madoc, who was out to steal Angela’s
job and take over the world. Rich Hall
played an American self-help guru who advocated a return to the simple life
until he got sucked into Buy Me Up TV’s capitalist consumer ethos and then
wanted to . . . take over the world for aliens?
In the final episode, Jackie Tanner turned to various celebrities for
endorsed productions, which included Brian Blessed singing songs about cheese
for a long time. Terry Wogan also got to
be annoyed when they misused his product.
Overall, not the funniest nor the wittiest Radio 4 comedy, but still
oddly addictive. I also thought Katherine
Jakeways was quite good. Written by Justin
Edwards, who also starred, along with Colin Hoult, Ewen MacIntosh, Alex
MacQueen, and Greg Proops.
Due to the complex production and commissioning system
within the BBC, you could be forgiven for thinking that they only want
homogenous radio drama that isn’t going to ruffle feathers or try anything new. However, that Ida Barr: Artificial Hip Hop
was ever allowed to exist puts paid to that notion, at least in part. Because it is just so weird and
unquantifiable and worth experiencing for that alone. Christopher Green dons drag as Miss Ida Barr,
an octogenarian (?) former musical hall star who now raps successfully with her
friend beatboxer Schlomo. Barr’s routine
is complex, as she uses her IdaPod (an old-fashioned Walkman recorder) to
record her thoughts and real-life conversations she has in an East End youth
club, at the Italia Conti School, and with pensioners in Hackney. In addition, she gives performances and
ruminates on buzz words such as Responsibility, Diversity, Transparency, and so
on, providing an incisive if wacky social commentary. The comedy is seldom of the laugh-out-loud
variety, but Ida is an engaging character. Originally from 2010, it was
produced by Claire Grove.
It took me quite awhile to understand the tonality of The Last Trace by Sue Rodwell. It was a firmly black, tongue-in-cheek
comedy, which only made sense during the second half. Sally (Elizabeth Mansfield), the narrator, is
a genealogist by trade. She is contacted
by Frank (Peter Dahlsen) from Australia (naturally, having been made in 1990,
it was some decades before Web 2.0) who has come to the UK to trace his
ancestors and any living relatives. With
no family of his own, the good-looking, charming Frank is the descendent of a
convict whose brother, who escaped punishment, remained in the UK. Sally is charmed by Frank but her partner,
Paul (who never meets him) is not. They
contact Frank’s remaining relatives, a decidedly shady lot, bachelor Tom,
spinster Emily, their nephew (?) Jimmy, Jimmy’s wife Sheila, and their grown-up
daughters, the tactless, bickering Liz and Emily. The relatives are transparently in it for
Frank’s money. Some great performances,
really fleshing out some odious people! Directed by Sue Wilson, it also starred
David Bannerman, Jan Shand, Susie Baxter, Anny Tobin, Elizabeth Kelly, David
King, and Paul Downing.
I really enjoyed Hobby
Bobbies, which was quite funny and featured a cast of silly characters you
wanted to return again and again.
Granted, it was the epitome of a sitcom series in that the characters
never seemed to develop or change.
Longest-serving and most inept (yet entirely harmless) PCOS Geoff
(Richie Webb) and Nigel (Nick Walker) are the thorns in the side of “the Guv” (Sinead
Keenan) (no, they do not refer to her as “Gov,” as in, “understood, Gov,” it’s
“understood, the Guv”). Geoff loves
pastries too much, and all Nigel has ever wanted is to be a proper police
officer—yet he’s just so weird and uptight.
Everyone except Nigel likes Jermain (Leon Herbert), a Chicago cop on
loan who is cool and wears sunglasses indoors.
Being an American, I’m always pleased when representations of Americans
are accurate, and Jermain—although he doesn’t necessarily sound like a
Chicago-an—seems to be a reasonably accurate depiction of one. Jermain’s biggest fan after the Guv is Bernie
(Chris Emmett), a totally camp man who owns the pastry shop. Geoff’s dad makes two appearances as a
screaming, abusive old man. I don’t know
who or what Noddy Holder is, but he seems perfect for this part. Indeed, the performances are all great here,
in front of a live studio audience.
Originally from 2013, it was a Top Dog production directed by Steve
Doherty.
I have to say, At
Home with the Snails is probably the raciest and most satirical radio drama
I have ever heard on Radio 4 Extra. I
don’t know how well this all went down with its core audience (satirizing Radio
4 listeners to Radio 4 listeners seems a double-edged sword to me, though it
yielded some really funny jokes about Radio 3, Radio 2, and Classic FM—plus the
gem of the series for me, “If Bill Sykes had read Oliver Twist, he would have known better”). However, series 1 implies there was a series
2, so we’ll see. It’s well-cast,
well-performed, with an earworm of a theme tune (in which high-pitched snails
titter and scream at you). According to
this sitcom, the village-dwelling southern English middle class consists of
gardening-obsessed, amoral, egotistical fathers with no paternal or husbandly
feelings who happily exploit their children’s psychological hang-ups for the
sake of selling books and their wives for all day-to-day maintenance
activities; emotionally stunted, blissfully wrong-headed philistine mothers for
whom appearances and useless craft-making are everything; and adult children
who are either money-grubbing, conventional, and unfeeling or whose lives
stopped when they got a 2:1 at university (shock! horror!) and they spend the
rest of their lives rolling around in sheds with snails. Alex (Gerard Foster) and his sister Rose
(Miranda Hart) couldn’t be more different, but both are the deranged products
of their equally deranged parents, the Fishers (Geoffrey Palmer and Angela
Thorne). There are guest appearances
from Gary the ex-con (Dave Lamb) and Colette, the Frenchwoman to whom Alex
loses his virginity, but mostly the story revolves around George’s efforts to
write a bestseller out of Alex’s obsession with snails. Sex is never far from anyone’s minds, whether
they are having it or not. (An extended
sequence involves George in the car using his surveillance equipment to spy on
Alex who is getting deflowered in an extremely noisy fashion by Colette who is
interrupted by his wife who thinks he is listening to a reading on Radio
4.) I was most impressed with Miranda
Hart who I’d never heard on radio before, who was perfectly cast as Rose, with
the emotional and sympathetic qualities of a pebble. Savage.
Originally from 2001, it was written by Gerard Foster and directed by
Jane Bethune.
Carbon Cleansing by
Sophie Woolley, is, by contrast, one of the most difficult Radio 4 dramas I’ve
listened to. At first I dismissed it
because the main characters, Tabitha and Will, were so irritating. They remained somewhat irritating, but what
amazed me about this drama was the fact they completely changed in ways I
didn’t believe possible, and yet the writing made it seem totally
plausible. Tabitha was a posh rich woman
who hired Samantha to clean her hot tub.
Samantha was poor and always had been, but she blogged. Tabitha was ignorant but mostly harmless,
slumming her life away with jet-setting celebrities. When Tabitha hits former anarchist and green
activist Will while she’s driving, her infatuation with him seems initially to
have its heart in the right place as she attempts to become green like
him. However, this initiates a change of
character so radical, that by the end of the drama, Tabitha lives like
Albuquerque celebrity Don Schrader minus the nudity and hijacks a plane with
Will and his activist friends. Will has
always fancied Sam more than Tabby, and in the end he runs away with her to a
desert island where they live off the grid.
Tabby is not that bothered, because now with baby in tow (I should
stress it isn’t Will’s) she is going to continue being the UK’s foremost
eco-warrior. The drama reminded me in some senses of The Incomplete Works of a Dead Body in that its satire was very
subtle and non-polemical, so I couldn’t really tell you what you were supposed
to take away from it in terms of the worthwhile-ness of environmentalism. It
starred Doon Mackichan, Joseph Kloska, Gemma Saunders, Tessa Nicholson, and
John Biggins. It was directed by David
Hunter and originally from 2010.
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