Noel Fielding steals the show as a very silly Dick Turpin
At first glance, The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin might look like a vanity project for Noel Fielding, but further investigation reveals that it absolutely is.
Remarkably, Apple TV+ has given the Bake Off presenter full licence to say whatever he thinks is funny and generally prat about with his comedy friends for larks. Fielding essentially plays himself in a tricorn hat, bringing his brand of absurdist, knowing humour to the most tousled of shaggy dog stories – a grab-bag of cock-and-bull tales about the legendary highwayman Dick Turpin.
Yet what could have been a painful piece of self-regard or a British comedy love-in (absolutely everyone from the Britcom scene is here – Greg Davies, Mark Heap, Asim Chaudhry, Ellie White – in both cameos and larger roles) quickly turns into something very promising. One of America’s largest corporations has basically funded Fielding and chums to be very silly for six half-hours. It gives you hope.
The set-up sees Turpin as a vegan butcher’s son who, through a series of mishaps and misunderstandings, finds himself at the head of “The Essex Gang”. Naturally, they’re useless, but somehow they keep failing upwards, evading the clutches of Turpin’s accidental nemesis, Jonathan Wilde (Hugh Bonneville), as well as the woman who turns out to be Wilde’s boss in the shady “Syndicate” (Tamsin Greig).
Under the direction of Ben Palmer (The Inbetweeners, Breeders), the series fairly hammers along, and the six chaotic episodes will leave you wanting more. It is distinctly British not only in its cast (who are uniformly superb) but also in its humour. As much as the writers – Fielding, Claire Downes, Ian Jarvis, Stuart Lane, Jon Brittain and Richard Naylor – are happy to get wordy, gear-crunching modern idioms with the 18th-century setting in the manner of Blackadder, they’re also more than content to follow daft digressions and spool out running gags.
The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin is as much in the tradition of Tristram Shandy as it is Morecambe and Wise and Monty Python. That said, it is never above a Dick joke (and all the better for it).
At the centre of it all stands, or lollops, Fielding: he seems to be doing so little that it’s only in episode four, where Turpin disappears for a while (he’s turned into a chicken by a witch) that you notice how he sets the tone. Fielding has done so many panel shows and presenting gigs since The Mighty Boosh that I had forgotten what a singular talent he is. Here they just wind him up and let him go: he stands and he delivers.
The comedy-murder-mystery-horror-gen-z-drama shouldn’t work. Not least because it’s a terrible title for a genre. But, also, brutal murder is hard to combine with humour, and it’s all too easy to lose interest in a mystery that lacks stakes. If it’s all for a laugh, with emotion suffocated by irony, why should the viewer care?
These contradictions have been played out, with varying degrees of success, on last year’s Wreck on BBC Three, on Clique back in 2017, in the recent films of Rian Johnson and to an extent on the Disney+ hit Only Murders
in the Building. Now we have Dead Hot, a new six-parter on Amazon Prime Video. To its great credit, it recognises all of the complications listed above, cocks a snook and ploughs on regardless.
Set in present-day Liverpool, it tells the story of 20-something flatmates Elliot and Jess (Extraordinary’s Bilal Hasna and Rye Lane’s Vivian Oparah) who are devout besties bonded by grief – five years ago Jess’s brother, Peter, who was also the love of Elliot’s life, disappeared. In a typical Gen-z-dramahorror-com flourish, Elliot discovers Peter’s severed finger at their flat.
In Dead Hot, we jump back and forth from five years ago to the present, once Jess starts being contacted by somebody claiming to be her missing brother. Things get weird, and Jess and Elliot find themselves playing sleuth.
There’s a lot that doesn’t work, but also a lot that does (and there’s even entertainment to be had in watching writer Charlotte Coben – daughter of Harlan – work out which is which). Too much time early on, for example, is spent watching people messaging on phones. Yes, this is what “dialogue” is in 2024, but it’s also boring, and an easy shortcut for a writer.
By contrast, when Oparah and Hasna get to play two-handers (they are both first-rate), or when Penelope Wilton or Peter Serafinowicz are thrown into the mix in a pair of brilliant supporting roles, Dead Hot comes alive. It is what I believe is called something of a hot mess.
But at least it’s hot.
The Completely Made-up
Adventures of Dick Turpin ★★★★
Dead Hot ★★★★