Sorry, Walliams, but you can’t wince as well as Arfur Daley
DRAMA-COMEDY can be summed up in two shots — it’s Terry McCann smacking a villain in the mush, and Arfur Daley wincing as he peeps from the velvet collar of his camel-hair coat.
Dennis Waterman and George Cole, playing the tough nut and the sly rogue i n the Eighties classic Minder, perfected the business of slipping laughs between the thrill sequences.
Action shows like The Professionals had always woven gags into their format, but the jokes were secondary and knew their place — a Bond-like quip after a punch-up, some banter in the closing scene.
Minder was different: it scattered laughs all the way through. Most of it wasn’t even in the dialogue but in the performances, especially George’s.
The death of the original Flash Harry actor l ast week aged 90 provided a glorious excuse, as if any were needed, to tuck into a few repeats of Minder, which is currently showing every weekday on ITV4.
It’s a joy to see Cole extracting comedy from menacing situations with just the flicker of an expression — the hint of pain, like a spasm of indigestion, when he realises he’s going to have to get his wallet out, or the momentary shadow of fear when he thinks of ’Er Indoors.
David Walliams and Jessica Raine are chasing laughs with the same techniques, as married sleuths Tommy And Tuppence Beresford in Partners In Crime (BBC1). The trouble is that the scripts keep getting in their way. Walliams has been working on expression of repressed discomfort, like a man at a job interview who has sat on a drawing pin and doesn’t like to mention it.
This would be funnier if he wasn’t expected to look like this all the time. Raine has got a little more scope — sometimes she is i rritable Tuppence, sometimes she’s braveand-resourceful Tuppence.
Her hair seems to react dynamically to the situations. It’s a pixie cut when she’s the bored housewife, and a glamorous, ruffled shock when she’s on the trail of adventure.
She was funniest when her husband tried ineptly to lie to her about state secrets. Her jaw jutted crossly, and then jutted some more, so much that she was in danger of dislocating it.
Raine and Walliams play well off each other, and thankfully this episode — the first of a new, three-part adventure based on one of Agatha Christie’s best espionage tales, N Or M? — kept them together in most scenes.
The period detail felt more convincingly Fifties, too, with Tuppence in a kitchen apron and horn-rimmed specs, except when she was blundering around in the London smog being shot at by a secret agent in a platinum wig.
It worked all the better because the action centred on a typical Christie mise en scene, a seaside boarding house peopled by a suspicious assortment of military types, petty crooks and oddballs.
What this place had to do with the kidnap of an atomic scientist wasn’t too clear, though. The more intriguing mystery was the Beresfords’ Morris Traveller van.
Last week it was a write-off with a buckled front axle, abandoned in a field. This week i t was restored to pristine fettle. We know Tuppence is a practical girl but, if she’s that good with motor cars, they should forget the gallivanting and open a garage.
It was non-stop gallivanting in The Saturday Night Story (ITV), a whistle- stop history of variety show classics on telly. A halfhearted attempt was made at the start to convince us that this compilation of slapstick highlights had deeper social meaning, by claiming that The Generation Game and Noel’s House Party were the direct descendants of music hall.
‘ Variety i s the backbone of Britain,’ claimed Amanda Holden. ‘It’s what keeps us going.’
But the show soon gave up its intellectual pretence, and became a cavalcade of pranks, catchphrases and high jinks from 50 years of family viewing.
Ant and Dec kept popping up to explain that their Saturday Night Takeaway format was inspired by these classics, but would never rip them off.
‘We didn’t nick that stuff,’ they insisted, ‘it’s an homage, a nod of the head.’
We believe you, boys.