Television Can Blow Me (17 page)

As the low ranking capes unwind in The Fortress, discussing their mediocrity and self-loathing they have to negotiate the superhero pecking order clear to everyone in the joint. Alex’s life is made miserable by Devlin, “Excelsor” (Patrick Baladi), Britain’s most successful superhero. A smug and cruel egomaniac, he gets great pleasure from bullying Alex in front of his crew of flunkies at every opportunity. This is always funny because Alex kind of deserves it for being such a tit and Devlin is a remorselessly unpleasant bastard. Patrick Baladi does great with this one.

No Heroics is a lot of fun. Our heroes are treated with contempt by pretty much everyone whose path they cross and there’s no embarrassing Heroes style meditation on what constitutes a real hero. If anything, it’s a celebration of human weakness. No one really knows how to do the right thing and the best that they can hope for is to be slightly less than useless... just for one day.

The verdict on No Heroics:
Hate the caper, not the cape.

Marks out of 10:
8

The Thick of It Series 3

No show cares more about language than The Thick of It. Dialogue heavy, it is brutally gangbanged into shape through multiple drafts, read-throughs and cast improv and if a syllable is one degree off rotation it is vaporised and rebuilt from scratch. It’s probably why writers like the show so much and why the verbal violence they revel in is more dangerous than a surgeon who dips his scalpel in shit.

Series 3 begins with a new dawn at the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship. Hugh Abbot is no longer with us because the public believe Chris Langham is a baby rapist
¹
. In his place is Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front) - inexperienced and out of her depth in the piranha pool. Her marriage is flailing around like Danielle Lloyd exiting a nightclub and her son’s about to be expelled from school. Glenn and Ollie are still doing their double act which, as you can imagine, is a massive help to her.

Murray is stuck in a conceptual cul-de-sac while trying to explain her big idea: fourth sector pathfinders. Pathfinders are people who get themselves out of poverty and inspire the community to do the same. No one really knows what this means and it commits the government to nothing but platitude. It’s the perfect modern policy.

In episode five Nicola goes head-to-head with her Tory shadow Peter Mannion on The Richard Bacon Show and it’s glorious. The pair take turns in mangling the party line, prompting both Tucker and Tory spin doctor Stewart Pearson to parachute in to shore up their defences. Pearson, a brilliantly drawn rucksack sporting rat fuck played terrifically by Vincent Franklin, is one of the lesser known joys of the show. Brought in by the Tories from the world of brand management he’s an unexpectedly good foil for Tucker. He wants the Tories to appeal to “One Show man and Holby City woman”. There’s something heroic, almost epic about his shitheadedness. It’s barely human.

And showing he’s sometimes human, Tucker reveals a chink of vulnerability in episode six after Terri (Joanna Scanlan who has the knack of appearing in some very good comedy) gently points out that many of the things that have gone wrong that day have been his fault (“I think you’re wrong, Malcolm - you’re like a sultana in a salad”). He takes her to “have a word” and instead of the skewering we expect he opens up about the pressure he’s under “I used to be the fucking pharaoh” he tells her “But now I am fucking floundering in a fucking Nile of shit.”

This scene has been criticised elsewhere (“we like our Malcolm bulletproof” type objections), but Aerial Telly liked this. He likes his characters to have layers. Tough guys like Tucker are allowed to be vulnerable as long as you don’t totally lob their balls off like Buffy the Vampire Slayer did to Spike. Malcolm Tucker walk around castrato? Fuck out of here.

Naw, dog. What we’re watching is a show at full throttle, at the peak of its powers and out for blood. It’s about idiots in extremis and how reasonably smart people can be dumb as Easter Island statues when under briefed, underqualified and under pressure. It’s as acute as Yes Minister was on squirrelly self-preservation when the political tides change. Praise comes no higher.

The verdict on The Thick of It Series 3:
Implausibly good right now.

Marks out of 10:
9

¹
If they were looking for precedent to justify employing the nonce they could have cited Jeffrey Jones who appeared in three seasons of Deadwood after his child pornography conviction.

Saxondale

Comedians do their best work when they’re miserable. It’s a cliché as truthful as it is hackneyed. Domesticity, moderation and sexual fidelity produces smug observational truisms that amount to nothing. Sexual incontinence, substance abuse and mental breakdown produces searing, insightful life-affirming comedy. And the reason Steve Coogan is still doing good comedy is because he’s made such a colossal fuck up of his personal life that all his energy is being sublimated into his art. Aerial Telly doesn’t make judgments but hooking up with Courtney Love at this time of your life is a sure sign that things aren’t right. The whole point of fame and talent is that they allow you to trade up the nookie food chain, not end up balls deep in the grunge Yoko Ono while you pat the masturbating Michael Stipe on the head like the little bald man off Benny Hill.

So the Chris Morris collaborator, Perrier Award winner and tabloid love skunk has briefly swapped self-destruction and Catholic self-loathing to unveil his latest creation: former roadie and present pest-control agent Tommy Saxondale. Like his creator, Saxondale has lived the rock’n’roll lifestyle but has now settled down into a relationship with young flagcracker Magz (Ruth Jones, last seen in Nighty Night) who designs those hysterically piss poor T-shirts you see advertised in the back of lads mags - the Pope smoking a joint, Prince Philip smoking a joint, (you get the picture).

Coogan brings to bear the same obsessive attention to detail here that he brought to Alan Partridge, Paul Calf and the critically panned but actually rather wonderful Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible. The seventies musical references, vocal tics and gestures of the ageing rocker are faultless. Coogan’s characterisations are real works of art - nothing is left to chance. Tommy is driven by some of the same demons that plagued Alan Partridge - obsessive pedantry, need for recognition, dismay at turning into a relic of a former time. He attends an anger management course at his local library which seems to have the effect of just making him more angry - I’m pretty sure that’s not how this anger management thing is supposed to work.

Morwenna Banks takes time out from spawning mini-David Baddiels to spin an impressive turn as Vicky, the motormouth receptionist Tommy relies on for pest-control jobs. Banks totally nails the effortlessly patronising manner of the underworked receptionist, complete with unfunny wisecracks, single entendres and phoney concern for your private life. She’s one of the many random irritations that stack up in Tommy’s life - not enough by herself to tip him over the edge but the aggregate of the annoyances frequently see him spitting feathers at the sheer absurdity of it all.

He’s also often to be found lacing his conversation with references to Noam Chomsky and the like and the spectacle of the self-taught working-class intellectual dealing death to the urban rodent is one of the less obvious joys of the show. Like so much of his work, it’s terrifically well observed. Coogan has an eye for human weakness and delusion that’s totally unerring. Tony Ferrino is long-forgotten. He’s one of our best comic performers.

The verdict on Saxondale:
Simply the pest.

Marks out of 10:
8

Gong intermission

Aerial Telly Awards 2009

There isn’t a single human being breathing whose word carries more weight than Aerial Telly. Those TV motherfuckers hang on his every word like a chump chained to a nuke in a made-for-TV movie listens to a bomb disposal expert. Think they give a damn about an Emmy? They’d push their kids in front of a Tube train to get even the most cursory of acknowledgements from the television panopticon. So in the industry, the Aerial Telly awards are the most eagerly anticipated and feared event in the calendar and now the time has arrived. You might want to take something for your nerves. This could get ugly.

Best show: Battlestar Galactica

30 Rock still rocks, Mad Men’s still crazy and Dexter’s still killing it but 2009 saw a gutsy and moving end to Battlestar Galactica, the arthouse reimagining of a 70s curio that shocked and awed its way through four brilliant seasons of melodrama, genocide, theology and war stories culminating in a breathless finale that stayed true to the show’s quirky, dark, captivating vision. Caprica gets the Galactica saga up and running again in January. The pilot was illing. No way on earth will it not rock.

Worst show: Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show

Michael McIntyre blew harder than Katrina, Paradox was dumber than Fearne Cotton, but neither came close to the comedy holocaust that was Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show. Snide, fuckwitted and life-threateningly unfunny it demonstrated the depressing truth that many comics are quite happy to use a celebrity’s name in lieu of a punchline. Shamelessly derivative, it was a show as contemptuous of its audience as any in living memory. No-talent, zero-integrity Twitter groupie TV critics who sucked up to this should contemplate suicide.

Best performance by a male: Ricky Grover as Matron Hilary Loftus in Getting On

Although scripted by its three female stars, the meatiest performance in the terrific Getting On was put in by seasoned salad dodger Ricky Grover as Matron Hilary Loftus, the passive aggressive by-the-book greasy pole climber who proved that no amount of training courses can get past a fundamental stupidity, addiction to procedure and pathological lack of empathy. If there was an award for counterintuitive casting, this would walk it.

Best performance by a female: Katey Sagal as Gemma Teller Morrow in Sons of Anarchy

Sons of Anarchy is Hamlet and Gemma Teller Morrow is Gertrude - Clay Morrow’s old lady and Charming’s unimpeachable bitch queen. But after her gang rape by white supremacists in the season two premiere we see her vulnerable and broken for the first time. She walks through the fire, though, and shows the gunmetal steel required of a biker gang matriarch. Sagal was note perfect all season, nursing her secret like a mortal wound until the devastating revelation in the run-up to the finale. A regal performance.