Last night on television Gabriel Tate Dave Allen biopic was too short to capture his true wit
The best biopics go far beyond a nifty impersonation and some time-worn catchphrases; there’s a depth, an ambition, a stretch for wider significance. The worst feel perfunctory, cobbled-together collages of thin drama, box-ticking set pieces and tired life lessons. The BBC has recent form in both, and Dave Allen at Peace (BBC Two) was closer to the latter; distractingly episodic and unsatisfactory.
It could – and should – have been better. Its director Andy De Emmony had steered Michael Sheen’s glorious Kenneth Williams in Fantabulosa!, one of the finest biopics of its ilk. Its top-notch supporting cast included Julian Rhind-tutt, Robert Bathurst and Pauline Mclynn, each delivering a brief but telling cameo. And Aiden Gillen had a respectable tilt at his fellow Dubliner, linking the piecemeal narrative to well-turned simulacra of Allen’s gleefully heretical sketches with anecdotes from the comedian’s life and career, perched on the familiar bar stool.
Above all, there was the intriguing subject himself, a mainstream master of barbed subtlety and twinkling iconoclasm in an era of gag merchants and game-show hosts. Dave Allen at Peace, however, lacked anything like the same sophistication, instead settling for some pretty obvious points about religious tyranny in Ireland and moral puritanism at the BBC, while turning over the topsoil of Allen’s family life to no great avail.
Screenwriter Stephen Russell only had an hour to tell the story, so every line had to mean something. Too often this undermined a cast capable of showing rather than telling. We saw Allen’s father tell the young Dave, shortly after the boy had lost half a finger in an accident, “it’ll be a great friend to you, that finger… have a different story every time someone asks you [about it], and never tell the truth,” thus setting up Allen’s notorious tall tales about the incident. “No good comes of laughing,” warned Mclynn’s hatchet-faced nun, when of course we knew otherwise. In the most affecting scene, Dave reunited with his alcoholic brother John in hospital, decades after their Butlins double act that got one noticed while the other got left behind. Gillen and Conleth Hill were heartbreaking in their dance of prickly affection, until the latter was dealt the line, “I hate your success, it highlights my failure,” and the whole scene crumbled.
Allen would never have let such one-dimensional material reach the screen. Unlike the man’s apparently meandering monologues, Dave Allen at Peace lacked punchline or point.
Lenny Henry has made comic capital out of his heritage throughout his career, never flinching from addressing moronic racism or societal hypocrisy along the way. Lenny Henry: Commonwealth
Kid (BBC One) showed the more serious side that we’ve seen in documentaries and his charming semi-autobiographical drama, Danny and the Human Zoo, as he returned to Jamaica to investigate why his parents left and queried whether the Commonwealth that had inspired them meant anything today.
This was an hour heavy on personal journey, but it was an interesting and revealing one that reached an emotional peak when Henry and his brother Seymour visited a series of mossy mounds just behind the ruins of their grandmother’s house in the isolated hinterland. Underneath were several babies lost by their mother in childbirth. The experiences drove her to seek a better life overseas. “But this is roots,” said Seymour, consoling his spooked younger sibling.
Henry’s force of personality and unmediated honesty ensured the daft moments – Lenny is dreadful at cricket, Lenny spluttering on highgrade Jamaican rum – never jarred unduly with the horrifying, if familiar, sequences about plantation slavery, nor with the more introspective material where he mused over accepting a knighthood from a nation with such a troubling imperial past.
Henry also teased out evidence that the Commonwealth has been left behind by a fast-globalising world: youngsters seemed either unaware of or uninterested in it; sponsorship programmes to promote entrepreneurs were being trumped by better initiatives from the United States; practical assistance for victims of Hurricane Irma proved elusive.
In a post-brexit Britain, the Commonwealth, with its 2.3 billion citizens, could be about to assume a renewed significance. This offered a few pointers on how to make it work.
Dave Allen at Peace
Lenny Henry: Commonwealth Kid