A highly entertaining take on TV’S filthiest tirade
The Sex Pistols’ appearance on Thames TV’S Today programme in 1976 provided the two most incendiary minutes of television ever broadcast. Last-minute replacements for Queen, the Sex Pistols were provoked by the noticeably refreshed host, Bill Grundy, and responded with a mix of irritation, amusement and four-letter words. It’s a perfect subject for the amiable comedy series Urban
Myths (Sky Arts) which, with a pleasing irreverence and an intentionally loose grasp of the facts, has tackled everything from Cary Grant taking LSD with Timothy Leary to chaos behind the scenes at Live Aid.
Steve Pemberton played Grundy as a boorish, conceited dinosaur, his comfy suburban life introduced by Neil Diamond’s What a Beautiful Noise; Daniel Mays and Kieran Hodgson acted their way through tremendously unflattering hairpieces as Today producer Mike Housego and Pistols Svengali Malcolm Mclaren, both increasingly frazzled at the prospect of their futures going up in flames.
But while Urban Myths can feel like an excuse for famous faces to goof off, here it also showcased members of the National Youth Theatre. Frankie Fox channelled Johnny Rotten’s monotone charisma, Matt Whitchurch was the perennially picked-upon Glen Matlock and Charlie Wernham’s oafish Steve Jones felt just right.
The showdown itself was depicted with due care and attention to detail, yet couldn’t match Kevin Eldon’s preposterously accurate, inexplicably Amish recreation of the incident in 2013’s It’s Kevin (still a watermark of sketch comedy). The real fun came later and was based, astonishingly, on genuine internal memos from Thames: when the broadcaster’s switchboards were overwhelmed by complaints, and so calls were diverted to the green room where the Pistols picked up the phones and stirred the public into still greater heights of frothing outrage.
It was, for the most part, a riot, although the faux vox pops fell flat and the foreshadowing was unsubtle: “I don’t do adverts, declared future Country Life butter mouthpiece Rotten, sullenly, while Matlock and Jones’s scrap over the Beatles (“Hey Jude? Pretentious dog----. What’s wrong with Hey Geoff?”) anticipated the difference of opinion that would see Matlock ejected from the group.
The presence of researcher Christine Whitehead (Rachel Bright), warning of the dangers of drafting in the Pistols, ensured this was more than a museum piece: another savvy woman ignored and patronised by her male bosses. But this never came close to doing anything so vulgar as making a point. It entertained handsomely without lingering long afterwards, and there’s no shame in that.
Not so Humans (Channel 4), whose allegorical pretensions have become so prominent that this third series has become less about human frailty and AI technology gone awry than a meditation on immigration, terrorism and fear of The Other, as the synths have found themselves shunned, despised and interned for the acts of a few rogue elements and their supposed masters.
This topic has been tackled in everything from X-men to Paddington; here, the set-piece speechifying during meetings of a government commission assessing synth-related legislation makes the points straightforwardly enough but bogs down the pace. When Laura (Katherine Parkinson), the synth-rights lawyer (“conscious synths could turn out to be the saviours of the NHS, etc etc”), got frustrated at the cyclical debates, I could only sympathise.
The simple human stories worked better. Laura’s ex Joe (Tom Goodmanhill) trying to teach synth Sam (Billy Jenkins) how to blend in at school by drawing like a child rang touchingly true, while Gemma Chan was once again eerily persuasive as synth Mia, deciding to prove that humans and her kind can live in harmony by moving onto a Rough Estate. Other strands felt pat by comparison: synth-turnedhuman Leo (Colin Morgan) hooked up with Mattie (Lucy Carless), the woman haunted by the consequences of allowing synths’ consciousness, seemingly for no other reason than to give them both something to do.
As Westworld viewers are now discovering, there’s a thin line between smart and self-indulgent, while a tone of chilly gloom can stifle emotional engagement. If Humans can stay the course and support the first-rate cast by keeping focus on relationships, it might even outlast its bigger-budget counterpart.