Last night on television Jasper Rees An astute way to reinvent our love for toilet humour
One of the running gags of (BBC Two) is that Shakespeare was a clueless plotter. The joke doesn’t grow weary, which is why the Bardic sitcom’s return for a third series is, as it says somewhere in the First Folio, right welcome. The plot detail that the Bard couldn’t quite nail this time was the bit where Titania wakes up in love with a common weaver. “All people of lowly birth,” clarified Will (David Mitchell), “are inherently hilarious.”
Ben Elton’s scripts confidently assume knowledge, if not always devotion, to every arcane and overworked reference. If Elton ever gets round to writing episodes assuming familiarity with Pericles, Prince of Tyre or The Two Noble Kinsmen, sides will probably not split. But this riff on the genesis of Midsummer Night’s Dream was a palpable hit which shone a satirical light into the present day.
Thus Puck’s love potion occasioned Will’s sidekick Kate (Gemma Whelan) to wonder whether “a drugged person is capable of giving consent”. “You must curb your tendency to apply a joyless socio-political agenda to every situation,” replied Will, spearing an
Aentire school of Shakespeare criticism.
It’s not all Shakespearean humour. Will’s travails with the transport links between London and Stratford feel like a straight lift from Reggie Perrin, whose commuter train was daily delayed for bizarre reasons. And Elton is not above plundering his own back catalogue. “What be love but a second-hand emotion?” wondered Will. Elton first retooled old song lyrics as gags in his rock musical We Will Rock You.
The pedant in me wishes that he would pay slightly more respect to correct Elizabethan grammar and left off cheap wince-inducing coinages such as “beeneth” and “knockèd uppetht”. Perhaps some won’t warm to the floridly childlike euphemisms and fake archaisms – this episode brought references to the muffly duffington, the purple helm and the turding pot – but it’s an astute way to reinvent Britain’s age-old love affair with toilet humour. And the tottering similes are counterbalanced in a constant drumbeat of monosyllables: “I am not bald,” said Will. “I have a tall face.” A lightly learned frolic.
We live in an era of lies and fake news where it’s estimated that we speak untruths up to nine times a day. But lying is not all about bare-faced plain-as-a-pikestaff whoppers. There are also the everyday evasions that are part of the building blocks of human interaction. And these – slightly disappointingly, if I’m being honest – were the subject of Horizon: A Week Without Lying (BBC Two).
The idea was to quantify the daily output of falsehoods to which we are all pray by rigging up three highly likeable guinea pigs in suits designed to measure physical manifestations of deceit – in short, a bullsh--t detector. Then it asked them to spend seven days living in truth. Three psychologists with whizz-bang graphics duly reached the underwhelming conclusion that you can’t spend your life being bluntly, blurtingly honest.
The three participants seemed well cast. Ruth Newton, a vicar in Leeds who was far too nice to be curt with her parishioners, wore a look of exquisite pain as she ditched her natural instinct to be kind. Hers became, literally, the human face of the church in crisis.
The most intriguing participant was Mo Saha who, working in advertising, habitually told clients the sweet nothings she thought they wanted to hear. But she had a far more complex history of deception because for years she hid her sexuality from her parents. This merited much deeper exploration but it’s not Horizon’s job to offer public sessions on the couch. Plus it’s probably none of our business.
For similar reasons the selfadministered truth serum was too much for Ehiz Ufuah, a highly voluble vlogger who took to his bed rather than deconstruct the extrovert mask that he had donned as an escape from years of bullying at school.
That’s why it felt like mis-selling to gather all these many and various deceptions under one catch-all term that is so pejoratively freighted. Indeed, the programme wasn’t really about lying at all, but about fabrication and performance. I’m not gonna lie, the experiment itself was a bit of a pork pie.
Upstart Crow
Horizon: A Week Without Lying