Television
I’m worried about John Cleese. Not because he is sagging of belly, lame, bloated, and has a terrible moustache. But because he agreed to return to our screens in Hold the Sunset, a sitcom that is so poor, so frighteningly dire, it is as if a crime has been committed.
We are in Terry and June territory – kitchenettes, sofas, plates of biscuits, putting the kettle on, and women being bad drivers (‘I thought I heard someone going past in second gear with the handbrake on’). There was a routine about recycling the rubbish. Cleese rebuked a man whose dog was urinating up a tree trunk. Jason Watkins, giving the most strained, stiff performance of his career, came in as Alison Steadman’s grown-up son, who wants to move back home and expects his bedroom ‘to be like it was when he was little’, with his Dinky Toys and Scalextric track still in place. Ronnie Corbett was a stunted child in
Sorry!, and it was a disconcerting concept even then, especially if, like me, you recall freaks like Jimmy Clitheroe and Wee Georgie Wood.
Alison Steadman had the slightly startled air of a person who knows that every line of the script is a dud. Cleese, had a bit of business with a champagne bottle, which needless to say when opened gushed everywhere. Watkins got himself stuck in the window of the shed – because of course there was a shed.
As I get older, comedy does seem to be getting generally less funny. Jokes bore me. Comedy as a thing of brightness and laughter rings so false. Nevertheless, a film I always loved was Young Frankenstein – the black and white photography had a weird poignancy. I thought it hilarious back in the Seventies; the bawdy, Jewish, vaudeville humour and the James Whale gothic romance. But when I watched Mel Brooks in the Imagine documentary, where he was interviewed, over the course of many years, by Alan Yentob, I found the maestro only intermittently amusing.
There was a lot of bombast, a lot of mugging. Everyone (Wogan, Parkinson, Aspel) sat around expecting him to be brilliant – but often Mel, like Spike Milligan, was simply noisy and tiresome, like an indulged toddler. Sid Caesar, whom Mel extolled as his comedy hero, was surely never funny. The 2000 Year Old Man is only very occasionally droll.
These days, in his nineties, Mel is to be seen eating meatballs in a stuffy room with Carl Reiner. If only the documentary had included one of Mel’s lines that did once reduce me to tears of hilarity. Anne Bancroft had just died and a friend of mine went to commiserate. ‘I miss her every day,’ said Brooks sadly. ‘But you know the worst thing?’ ‘What ?’ ‘Her f***ing mother’s still alive.’
In the last series of Mum, conflicts were resolved, matters were brought to a head and an end, and the characters moved off into the future. In the new series, everyone is back where they started, as if time has run backwards – the annoying son, the stupid girlfriend, the snobbish sister-in-law (or whatever she is), the dopey would-be suitor. Lesley Manville is the put-upon saint at the centre of everyone’s selfishness. Nothing happens, except Easter eggs get eaten and a new carpet is going to be
ordered. It is hard to remember that we are the nation of Shakespeare and Dickens, but then they never knew about Toby Carveries or suburbia.
They could have created Harvey Weinstein, however. Though it is not technically his fault, he looks like the late James Gandolfini playing a cheap thug; that’s no excuse for going around being a rapist. In Working with Weinstein, his young personal assistants, now middleaged, told us how he shouted and swore, made tyrannical midnight phone calls, and deliberately created an atmosphere of fear and panic, in which his ‘nonconsensual’ sexual escapades in hotel suites, facilitated by injections for erectile dysfunction, were simply part of his Emperor Nero style. Hush money and non-disclosure agreements were used to conceal the endless harassment.
A voiceover at the end informed us that Weinstein denied everything we had been hearing and seeing. I hated him then for his defiance and arrogance. If honour and decency have any meaning, he should commit suicide.