Time for this curiously shallow sitcom to grow up
Who is Man Down (Channel 4) for? Or rather, who was it for? There’s one episode to go in the third series and there’s a sense that it is seeing itself out, and perhaps won’t be allowed back in through Channel 4’s doors.
The premise has been all about a middle-aged man called Dan who can’t seem to go it alone as an adult. The situation has long been a staple of comedy. It was at the heart of Steptoe and Son, and Ronnie Corbett’s Sorry! Men Behaving Badly was really about men behaving adolescently.
Each of those sitcoms found humour in the recognisable: a manipulative father, a domineering mother, fear of commitment. Man Down has never been driven by anything so tangibly real. Dan has been stuck in his childhood home for three series not because of an organic character flaw but because that’s where the script has needed him so that he can be comically disappointed by life. As a result, the comedy has been perilously shallow and heavily reliant on the antic chops of Greg Davies in the lead role.
In this penultimate episode, he led a party of regular characters to Southend to seek out an Irish couple who had adopted him as a baby then handed him back. Cue much halfbaked seaside farce in which Dan disgraced himself in an Irish pub.
A bit like Dan, Man Down suffers from an identity crisis. It serves up a standard diet of absurdity (many of the other gargoyles are stupid or boring) mixed in with generous dollops of delusional self-pity. The flavours don’t go, and the script resorts to crude signposting.
In one scene, Dan discovered he was put out for adoption by his parents (rather than being, as he first thought, adopted by them). “I think that is the funniest f-----g thing I have ever heard,” said the woman in the café who never ever laughs. Everyone laughed.
Nothing in this series is the funniest thing you’ve ever heard. It’s asking a lot for an audience to commit to a character with no qualities at all, let alone redeeming ones. Dan was here described as “a small British failure”. If only Man Down really were an observational comedy about a little Briton. Instead it refrains from telling us anything about being British, or even human.
Versailles (BBC Two), the 17thcentury drama set in the titular palais, embarked on its torrid journey 10 episodes ago seemingly bent on setting a new benchmark for wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling surroundsound erotomania in a mainstream historical drama.
Phwoar, we all panted – or whatever the Franglais is (Phweaur?) – as King Louis XIV did it lying down, standing up, in the topiary, in the hall of mirrors and, of course, in his dreams.
But by this final episode the theme was no longer “petit mort” but actual mort. The King (George Blagden) had just settled down for the night with his growling Glaswegian high-security detail after pleasuring his minxy mistress, whereupon his Spanish wife (Elisa Lasowski) and his English sisterin-law/hot young squeeze, Henriette (Noemie Schmidt), both wandered into the king’s bedroom. Could have been awkward in normal circumstances, if the latter hadn’t been clutching her aching sides and dribbling blood.
Thus, there was no occasion for further entente horizontale as the various courtiers busied themselves trying to establish who had done what to Henriette and why and so forth. One suspect was falsely accused and duly poniarded to the next world by the King in a hectic tussle that looked very much like a detonation in a wig factory.
Versailles has aspired to hit two quite separate targets: to take itself deeply seriously as a historical saga, while simultaneously rejoicing in its rock-video silliness. As a later occupant of the Palais de Versailles once nearly said, let them have their cake and eat it. Hence the corridor slomos with bouncing hair, the dynastic politics played out to the fluffy pulse of electropop, all those talk-of-the-devil moments when characters walked into conversations bang on cue.
At least for now we are to be spared the weekly trauma of listening to two cardboard brothers SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER as if under the misapprehension that there’s an Emmy Award for this year’s loudest actor. But there will be more. The last shot showed the abduction of the Dauphin. Anyone wanting to know what happens to Louis’s heir will have to tune in for a second series as the history books, one slightly suspects, are silent on the matter.