Let’s be honest... this comedy just falls flat
STATH CHARALAMBOS is a cross between a Greek-cypriot Mr Bean and TV’S queen of malapropisms Nellie Pledge. On paper he should be a scream; on TV, in Stath Lets Flats (Channel 4, Tuesday), I’m not so sure. The incompetent London letting agent mangles words like the cast of Mind Your Language on piece-rate. “I’m going to be my father soon,” he tells a man he mistakes for a client, adding, “Our father to my dad…son! I’m trying to tell you I’m going to be a dad!”
Stath croons “Your teeth is how you breathe” to a small baby, and greets a pal by pointing at him and singing “The father of the bride!” Asked why, Stath replies “Because I’m going to be a father.” Are you laughing yet?
Where man-child Frank Spencer was surrounded by adults, here every regular character seems clueless (Raymond
Allen’s Some Mothers plots had much more going for them too).
Writer Jamie Demetriou’s warm comic performance impresses, but the show’s central premise – in fact its only premise – is let’s laugh at the soppy immigrant. Alert the thought police!
At least it’s aiming for laughs; most modern comedies are too wrapped up in themselves to bother. Mrs Brown’s Boys Live (BBC One, Friday) is the antidote to such pretension. Brendan O’carroll’s pantomime vulgarity thrives on single entendres, slapstick and faux-swearing, and millions love it. It’s too blue for prime time though. Shame.
People say that the fuel crisis, food shortages and inflation make 2021 feel like the 1970s.
True, but back then we were enjoying a comedy golden age: Eric and Ernie, The Two Ronnies, Benny Hill got 21million viewers; and wonderful sitcoms – Porridge, Fawlty Towers, To The Manor Born, George & Mildred, Citizen Smith, Rising Damp – helped allay our worries and fears. What is there now?
Lovers of well-crafted comedy could look to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Comedy, Monday), a riot of interconnected stories which build to reliably hilarious pay-offs. A burglar had drowned in Larry’s pool… which broke LA by-laws by not having a fence… allowing the burglar’s brother to blackmail Larry into casting his chubby talentless daughter in his new Netflix show… even though she’s Latino and the part requires a skinny Jewish girl.
Other plotlines involved the dangers of “plopping” – people hurling themselves down on to settees – a jeweller with dementia who owed Larry money; Larry looking like a feeble old man after walking into a glass door and losing girlfriend Lucy Liu because of it; and comedian Albert Brooks’s disastrous “living funeral” which saw him exposed as a Covid hoarder. Smartly hilarious, Curb is like a rawer, ruder version of Seinfeld (Netflix) which David co-created – cranky George Costanza was based on him – and which itself had much in common with Galton & Simpson’s Hancock’s Half Hour.
That too was a “show about nothing” with four leads, based on petty obsessions, human flaws and the minor irritations of everyday life; it was also arguably the greatest British sitcom ever made.
Satirical comedy is another problem. TV exponents like Nish Kumar and Adam Hills dress heavily to the Left. You wouldn’t mind if they were ever funny. The rapidly improving GB News should launch a weekly topical comedy show. For many Conservative voters, the Prime
Minister’s profligate policies are considerably scarier than Halloween.
Tory comics exist but a “plague on both their houses” approach would work best.
New police show The Long Call (ITV, Monday – Thursday) gave fresh meaning to the “Plod”. Stone me, it was slow. It started with what was claimed to be the first gay TV cop kissing in prime time (Gilmore and Ashton did it on The Bill, 19 years ago), but never really convinced. Laidback Inspector Venn made Rosemary and Thyme seem like Regan and Carter.
He also lived, like many ITV characters, in a house absurdly beyond his income... unless he turns out to be corrupt, which would at least make him more interesting.
We were in Devon where a man had been stabbed and chucked off a cliff; and Venn was a refugee from a repressive religious cult (Christian of course, TV’S bad religion of choice). It was heavy going; well done if you made it past episode two.
TV dramas that pretend to be historical are a constant irritation. Ridley Road (BBC One, Sunday) claimed to be “inspired by real events”. Very loosely though. Fascism wasn’t “on the rise” here in 1962. The tiny National Socialist Movement had 187 paid-up members in its entire miserable history; and although despicable it was never infiltrated by a woman from the Jewish anti-fascist 62 Group.
That part of the story is lifted from the better-known 43 Group, formed by Jewish ex-servicemen to fight Nazis after World War II, whose brave Wendy Turner slept with fascists, suffered a breakdown and was institutionalised for decades.
ASKED, on the increasingly potty Family
to name something you cuddle, contestant Elaine replied “Money.” Eh? The question name someone in a job you’d avoid,
generated wrong answers like “fishmonger” and “doctor”. I haven’t seen a fishmonger for decades, have you? But why would you want to
swerve being a doctor? Half the population are waiting to see their GP. As it stands, you’d have to join your doctor’s picket line for a face-to-face
consultation.