The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
THE POETRY PHARMACY CONDITION: CHOOSING A LIFE PARTNER
Also suitable for emotional defensiveness · social discomfort
After Little Britain’s brief return to radio last October – a “Little Brexit” special – David Walliams says the sketch show will “definitely” be back. “I can’t say when exactly,” he told the Sun. “But at the right time and place.” It’s hard to think when that might be. In the 14 years since the last Little Britain TV broadcast – a pair of Christmas specials in 2006 – Big Britain has changed, and the show is now firmly out of favour for its portrayal of gay, trans and ethnic minority characters.
And if Little Britain is offensive, it’s nothing compared with Matt Lucas and Walliams’s oftenforgotten 2010 follow-up, Come
Fly with Me, a spoof airport documentary in which the comedy duo, in prosthetics and paint, play a multi-ethnic cast of characters, such as the coffee kiosk manager Precious, a West Indian woman (played by Lucas in blackface) too lazy to do a full day’s work, who shouts “Praise the Lord!”; Taaj (Lucas), a deeply stupid ground crew worker of Pakistani descent, who ends each sentence with “Isn’t it” or “D’you get me?”; Moses (Walliams, also “tanned-up”), a camp executive passenger liaison; and dodgy Arab billionaire Omar Baba (Walliams in double-chinned disguise), owner of fictional budget airline FlyLo, apparently based on easyJet founder Stelios HajiIoannou. Even at the time, Come Fly with Me was controversial. Now, with a decade of hindsight, it feels like something from the Seventies.
Unlike Little Britain, which began on Radio 4 and had to work its way up to BBC One, Come Fly with Me landed in the prime Christmas Day slot in 2010. The first episode drew 10.3million viewers – the third-biggest TV audience of the day, making it the most watched comedy of the year – but complaints came quickly. Twitter users, likening it to The Black and White Minstrel Show, said it stepped “clumsily over the line into overt racism”. Jim Davidson, the comedian known for routines about his West Indian friend “Chalky”, leapt to their defence in the Sun – not the ally they were hoping for.
Lucas reportedly “vetoed” a second series, even though the BBC had commissioned one. Many viewers were left wondering how it had made it onto television in the first place. “We wrote that material, we played those characters,” Lucas later said on Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. “But we weren’t asked the questions we would be asked now.”
The BBC had picked the airport mock-doc idea out of various proposals brainstormed by Lucas and Walliams for a Little Britain follow-up. (Another, recalled Lucas, was to play “a couple of actors, who had been in some sort of Seventies show together, that was now regarded as really un-PC. And they were going around America because they couldn’t get any work.”) In spirit, Come Fly with Me was close to Little Britain – Lucas and Walliams as cartoonish characters, with a loose thread of running gags. Its outrageousness, too, was merely an extension of the earlier show’s. Little Britain had included Daffyd, the “only gay in the village” (which Lucas later learnt was used as a taunt against gay kids in schools); Emily, the overly masculine transvestite (who would now be thought anti-trans); Desiree, a morbidly obese black woman, played by Walliams; and Lucas’s Thai bride, Ting Tong.
Now, of course, the concept of “offence” is hurled back and forth in the unwinnable shouting match between Left and Right, woke and alt-Right. Our era is dominated by discourse about “cancel culture” and the ever-shifting parameters of what’s acceptable. Jamie Oliver can’t rustle up jerk chicken without a three-day Twitter firestorm about cultural appropriation – never mind Lucas in a brown rubber mask, afro wig, and fat suit, crying: “Praise the Lord!”
Actually, Come Fly with Me is funnier than critics will admit. There’s a good running joke about a couple who have “the holiday from hell” – from finding their hotel isn’t properly built to being hijacked by pirates and kidnapped by a voodoo tribe – which taps into great British pastime of moaning; and the shoddily run budget airline, with flights delayed up to a year, is amusing, if depressingly real. There’s also Fearghal, the gay Irish airline steward who resorts to underhanded tactics to win “Air Steward of the Year” and tries to seduce a straight colleague
Irecently watched ITV’s White House Farm, a drama reconstructing the murders committed in 1985 by Jeremy Bamber at his family’s remote Essex house. It happened near to where I have lived all my life, a crime so appalling that we in deepest Essex still talk about it. I was pleasantly surprised by the show; the locations and the characterisations (especially Freddie Fox as Bamber and Cressida Bonas as his mentally-ill sister) were entirely credible, though I doubt an Essex policeman in 1985 would have used the ghastly Americanism “I’m sorry for your loss”. Somebody has been watching too many American police procedurals.
But it did cause me to ask why even a half-decent British drama these days causes such surprise, when American television seems overflowing with exceptional ones. ITV is also responsible for the unfailingly excellent Endeavour. Beyond that, one struggles to find much of note. I have lost count of the “flagship” dramas to which I have not returned after the first commercial break, let alone after the first episode. Dramatisations in which almost every character appears histrionic and caricatured, and for which the script is abominable, are the norm. The latest series of the popular, and entirely absurd, ITV detective series Grantchester, set in the Fifties, has become a tedious appeal for the legalisation of homosexuality, something the writers appear not to have noticed happened 53 years ago.
At least with ITV the dross is not funded by the tax known as the BBC licence fee. Take A Very British Scandal, which I thought deeply intrusive of Norman Scott’s privacy – and a wonderfully hypocritical thing for Hugh Grant to be a part of, given his bleatings about Hacked Off, or The Trial of Christine Keeler, which portrayed John Profumo absurdly to make a point about establishment wickedness. It was the 2017 Howards End – a travesty to anyone who knew the novel, which was something of an achievement since it stuck pretty close to Forster’s narrative – that made me realise that the BBC drama department feels it is on this earth to engage in social engineering and, when dealing with historical drama, to right the wrongs of the past which were society’s norms at the time. Thus in Howards End one saw the streets of London filled with people of African origin in Edwardian dress, while a significant minor character suddenly became West Indian. It no doubt offended those responsible for the programme that London in 1905 was not very multicultural, so they did not hesitate to compromise the authenticity of the drama by making it so.
The BBC relentlessly uses drama not for entertainment, but to impose politicised values on its audience, particularly about minority rights. For the vast majority who do not live under a cloud of permanent victimhood this is puzzling, however much many of us hope to live in a society where no one endures prejudice. As at the last general election, when it became clear that much of the political class was wildly out of step with the public, it is now equally clear that BBC Drama is too. My children stopped watching Doctor Who when it became an exhibition piece of wokeness. If threats are carried out to end the licence fee, the BBC should not wonder if very few people outside the vested interests – those who exploit drama as a publicly funded form of brainwashing or propaganda – object.
Our broadcasters have missed an opportunity to satisfy our appetite for quality storytelling, by insisting on inflicting their pet obsessions on the public. The audience for sophisticated drama is there, and waiting, as shown by the popularity of American imports. In the last 20 years, nothing produced in this country has matched The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, True Detective, Fargo, Breaking Bad – or, in recent months, the darkly comic Succession or Russell
Crowe’s stunning performance as the disgraced TV executive Roger Ailes in
The Loudest Voice.
This last show, about the sexual harassment of women in the workplace, was a perfect example of a “woke” subject dealt with in terms that avoided boxticking and virtue-signalling. It simply told a story and told it brilliantly, thanks to an understated script and fine acting. Here, our writers and directors manipulate and patronise.
Perhaps if BBC drama as we know it is about to go west, others will do so in another sense, and look to America.