The Spandau Ballet boys take us through the barricades of bad TV
Oh dear. Feeble doesn’t begin to describe it. Painful is too kind a word. So are pitiful, grim, dire and unfunny. even the savage, five-syllable ones such as excruciating and a-bloody-by-smal are on the generous side.
The only way The Kemps: All True (BBC2) could be worse is if this spoof rockumentary featuring Spandau Ballet brothers Gary and Martin turns out to be the pilot for a series, and not just a disastrous one-off.
What the writer and director rhys Thomas was thinking defies understanding. he ought to know what he’s doing — back in 2014 Thomas created the Brian Pern series, one of the funniest send-ups of the music business ever made.
That starred Simon day as a washed-up vocalist trying to organise a comeback for his Seventies prog rock group, and co-starred Michael Kitchen, Nigel havers and Paul Whitehouse. It ran for three years and was frequently hilarious.
But the cast were actors. despite their foray into movies with the Kray twins movie 30 years ago, the Kemp brothers are not. They’re barely hams.
Playing themselves as the del Boy and rodney of eighties pop, complete with a three-wheeler van, they tried to send up the conventional music documentary. We saw them going back to the terrace in London where they grew up, and returning to the studio to re-record their greatest hits.
Matt and Luke Goss of Bros did something similar last year for a film called after The Screaming Stops, which was charming, cringeworthy and deluded in equal measures. But the Goss brothers weren’t trying to be funny... and couldn’t quite understand why people laughed at them.
The Kemp boys desperately want to be laughed at. They lunged at every gag, seized it by the neck and mercilessly beat it to splinters, the way Pete Townshend used to destroy his guitars.
They did one routine about which of them was older — Gary, who is 60, or 58-year-old Martin, who sleeps less and thus, ho-ho, has been conscious for longer.
Just as it seemed they had hammered every ounce of humour out of the idea, they began totting up their total hours of existence with a pocket calculator. If that was laboured, the routine about each brother being the manager for the other’s solo career went on for so long, it felt like they should have had an interval and sold choc ices in the middle.
The only real laughs of Sunday evening went to the wife of onelegged stand-up comedian alex Brooker, who was talking about the physical challenges he has overcome on Disability And Me (BBC2). Lynsey was wasting little sympathy on her husband, who has to remove his prosthetic leg before bed. ‘You just use it as an excuse to get out of doing stuff,’ she said. ‘If we got burgled in the middle of the night, I reckon you’d send me out — “I haven’t got my leg on!”’
It’s a shame Lynsey featured only in one scene because, in many ways, she could see more clearly than alex how his life was affected. he was born with hand and arm deformities and had his right leg amputated when he was a baby. he spent much of his childhood in hospital but, having never known anything else, he simply got on with it. It’s the brutal truth that his condition was as familiar to him as breathing.
Talking to the Paralympic swimmer Susie rodgers didn’t shed much light either. She clearly never wastes a minute thinking about what she can’t do.
This wasn’t a bad documentary, and there were moments of raw emotion, but in the end alex simply didn’t have a lot to say.