Why analysing a romcom is as much fun as dissecting a frog

Analysing comedy, graeme garden, the former goodie, once explained to me, is like dissecting a frog: ‘no one learns anything and the frog dies.’

Film critic Mark Kermode proved in Secrets Of Cinema (BBC4) that dissecting a romcom was even more deadly. He started off by trying to pin down the traits and tics of the genre, and ended by ripping the heart and guts out of the very thing he loved.

The more he compared film clips, the more he proved that movies have been on the wane for decades — a redundant art form with dwindling appeal even to academics. and that definitely wasn’t the point he was trying to make.

Mark’s problem is that he’s watched far too many movies, many of them far too often. ‘i must have seen this film 100 times,’ he sighed over the early Tom Hanks vehicle, splash.

Why boast about it? i saw it once and, even 34 years later, it feels like a wasted evening.

By comparing dozens of scenes, plucked from the Twenties to today, he demonstrated that every romcom follows a formula that can be broken down into three acts and seven headlines. Then, flinging himself into a head-on gender orientation,’ he droned. But there were livelier moments.

Mark aired his theory on why the same faces keep cropping up in films: it’s because casting directors look for actors whose eyes ‘catch light and sparkle like diamonds’. When they find one, they’ve got a star. it’s an interesting idea.

nobody’s eyes were sparkling on The Five Billion Pound SuperSewer (BBC2), a noxious documentary about the laying of pipes under the Thames to ease river pollution.

One hardy bloke was clamped into a diving suit and lowered into the water on a nylon cable, to chip away concrete from an overflow with hammer and chisel. Two feet below the surface it was pitch black and freezing cold. His boss watched him sink: ‘you always need a dope on a rope,’ he said.

Elsewhere there were plenty of elegiac dawn shots to make up for all the disgusting images of floating waste. But the technical graphics were worse, animated flow charts filling up with brown gunge.

nobody was enjoying it. One labourer, half a mile underground, spent his day rubbing wet cement smooth with a 50p sponge. He tried to be chirpy: ‘i’m the leonardo DiCaprio of concrete.’

The cameraman sighed. ‘Do you mean leonardo da Vinci?’ he said.