Cleese’s big sitcom return fizzes with comic energy
It is 43 years since John Cleese last appeared in a BBC sitcom. You may remember it – hotel in Torquay, rude owner, hapless staff. Fawlty Towers only ran for 12 episodes in the Seventies but no British sitcom has ever had quite the same cultural impact. As Shane Allen, the BBC’S head of comedy commissioning, put it when he announced Cleese’s return: “His last one did alright.”
It certainly did. But those hoping for something similar to Fawlty Towers will have been surprised by Hold the
Sunset (BBC One, Sunday), a defiantly unflashy comedy, whose first episode took place mostly in a nondescript kitchen in suburbia. There was so little action, it would have worked perfectly well as a radio play. And yet, with a first-rate cast led by Cleese and Alison Steadman, reuniting on screen 32 years after starring as husband and wife in
Clockwise, as well as a cracking script by Monty Python collaborator Charles Mckeown, it fizzed with comic energy.
Cleese plays Phil, a widower whose friendship with Edith (Steadman), a widow who lives across the road, has very quietly developed into something more. There was a tenderness to the way they interacted, and hints of a shared melancholy. Their mutual affection was never overstated, just a gentle touch of the elbow here or a fond admonishment there. “Oh, shut up and have a biscuit,” Edith said to Phil after he made a clumsy, harmless pass at breakfast.
But just as they finally decided to get married, Edith’s 50-year-old son Roger (Jason Watkins) turned up out of the blue and announced that he had left his wife and was moving back in with his mum. Phil was put out by this.
Cleese is made for this role. Throughout this opener, he perfectly conveyed the widower’s irritation without ever allowing it to tip over into malice. He moved creakily across the screen, his joints seemingly powered by his growls. “Back trouble?” asked Roger. “No, no, no, that’s the least of my worries,” replied Phil in a way that was at once curmudgeonly and mischievous.
Edith, meanwhile, found that her frustration at Roger’s arrival was no match for her maternal love. As the four childish self-portraits hanging in pride of place on the kitchen wall testified, she would always, first and foremost, be a mother. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she sighed on Roger’s return. And deep down, you sensed that Phil understood.
This was one of those wonderful programmes about everything and nothing – love, getting on with getting on, and simply taking a deep breath and adjusting as best you can when things don’t quite turn out the way you’d hoped. Who can’t relate to that?
Predictably enough for a Saturday night drama rumoured to have cost £16million to make, Troy:
Fall of a City (BBC One, Saturday) had its comically overblown moments. That’s no bad thing – Greek mythology without a slice of silliness would be like Strictly Come Dancing without the sequins. No fun at all.
But the early indications are that, in this retelling of the Trojan war, writer David Farr (The Night Manager) has succeeded in his attempt to “focus on character”, rather than spectacle. Anyone who saw the 2004 blockbuster
Troy, a shallow flex-fest starring Brad Pitt, will agree that this is good news.
In the first episode of this eight-part series, Farr examined the early life of Paris (Louis Hunter), who was taken by wolves as a baby, brought up by a shepherd, then discovered, 20 years later, to be the son of Priam, King of Troy. Seeing Paris – or Prince Alexander – struggle with the turmoil of being whisked from a rural to a regal life helped flesh out a character too often condemned merely as a spoilt troublemaker. The slow-burn of a television series allows for this more considered approach.
The time spent exploring Paris’s mental state also added authenticity to the later scenes when, on his first diplomatic trip to Sparta, he met and fell in love with Queen Helen (Bella Dayne). “I know what freedom is and this isn’t it,” he told her, dismissing her opulent palace. His posturing, combined with Helen’s furtive glances and whispered asides also created a tantalising erotic charge, which crackled off the screen.
What a shame, then, that some of the dialogue was so bizarre. “How did you two get together?” Paris asked Menelaus (Jonas Armstrong) about his relationship with Helen, as if he’d just strolled into the Love Island villa. David Threlfall’s Priam also had an odd accent, which made him sound like he’d been hanging out at a Northern chippy. Hecuba, my love, pass me another battered sausage.
But it’s easy to forgive these things. We haven’t met Achilles yet, so there is plenty of time for things to get hysterical, but Troy: Fall of a City might just be a fresh, psychologically knotty take on one of the greatest tales of them all.