bevan on the box
NATHAN BEVAN CASTS A CRITICAL EYE OVER THE WEEK’S TV
THERE’S a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot,“goes the old Steven Wright joke. And there’s also a very fine line between self-indulgent celebrity-led telly fodder and genuinely well put-together shows toplined by famous faces doing, well, all sorts of random stuff.
Take travelogues for example, there’s not an exotic animal in need of saving that hasn’t, at some point in its endangered life, had the likes of Martin Clunes or Robson Green creep up whisperingly behind it with a small camera crew in tow and a wellrehearsed look on their face.
So, to be brutally honest, I wasn’t holding out much hope for Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing,a new BBC2 series which swaps fly-on-the-wall for the kind you use to bait an angler’s hook and decamps two of the nation’s most beloved funnymen (Bob and Paul, respectively) on the banks of various provincial rivers for some ad-libbed larks.
You can see the potential for some yawnsome navel-gazing there, right? Especially since both men are tickling 60 and have recently undergone major heart surgery. And that’s nothing to laugh about.
Yet, thanks to the pair’s easy chemistry, off-beat humour and obvious genuine affection for each other, Gone Fishing manages to be a breeze.
In fact, were you to take a postmodernist galavant like The Trip (in which Steve Coogan and Rob Bryon toured the country in pseudodocumentray style) and Mackenzie Crook’s mellow mirth-fest Detectorists, then you wouldn’t be too far away from what’s on offer here.
Long lingering shots of sun dappled river banks, dragonflies darting amidst the ferns and slowly cooling Thermos flasks provide the perfect backdrop to our amiable duo waxing lyrical about their own mortality and how much of a bugger it is that, postcoronary, they can’t eat cheese anymore.
A victim of the middle-age spread myself, I felt a twinge of recognition when Mortimer walked into a farm shop and was overcome by the sight of moist, freshly baked cakes – forbidden fruit to him now – and lovingly pressed his face against the packaging.
“Oh, those cakes of yours,” he raved to the woman on the till. “Lovely aren’t they? They’re made here in our kitchen,” she replied.
“I know – I must confess to having had a little lie down on them earlier.”
“What do you do when you can no longer reach endlessly for biscuits for comfort?” asked Mortimer at one point, bemoaning the lack of vices left to him since his health scare.
The answer, it would seem, is the company of a good friend and the beauty of the British countryside. ■ NOT sure if I’m sold on
Stath Lets Flats, Channel 4’s new sitcom about a GreekCypriot family of estate agents.
Intial thoughts are that the title character (played by Jamie Demetriou) seems a little too unlikeable and too much of a caricature to fully get behind – but, hey, we’re still only on episode one.
Seems I remember feeling the exact same way about a certain David Brent at one point.