Vic Reeves’s tin-foil party was a playful paean to Bauhaus
The midlife crises of comedy duo Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are playing out in contrasting styles across the BBC. No ponytails or Porsches are involved, thankfully. While Mortimer goofs around on riverbanks for BBC Two’s gentle gem Gone Fishing, Reeves was busy indulging his artistic side on
Bauhaus Rules (BBC Four). Coming after a compelling profile of textiles trailblazer Anni Albers and weighty documentary Bauhaus 100, this impish film was the highlight of a themed evening to mark the influential German art school’s centenary.
Reeves, whose real name is Jim Moir, has a sideline as a painter and made an enthusiastic, eccentric host. He aimed to bring radical Bauhaus principles to a new generation by seeing if six graduates of Central St Martins art college could embrace its teachings within a week.
They had to create a new artwork each day, sticking rigidly to Bauhaus rules. Setting their tasks were a veritable VIP guest list of Bauhaus influenced bigwigs, including artist David Batchelor, fashionista Holly Fulton and typography titan Neville Brody.
They began by donning lab coats to practice rooftop breathing exercises,
before being fed the eye-wateringly potent garlic mush that was a staple of the Bauhaus canteen. Then came the creative challenges: sculpting materials scavenged from skips, using Kandinsky’s principles of colour and shape, and designing household objects for Habitat. Well, if you can class a high chair for dogs, a portable bird bath and a cafetière that can’t make coffee as household objects.
Finally, they threw a Bauhaus-style party, with costumes and decor crafted from metallic objects. Cue tin foil capes, cutlery crowns and a suggestively placed shower head. Throughout the experiment, Reeves alternated between enlightening narration and irreverent asides. This was a knowingly pretentious take on a traditional TV talent contest. Bauhaus Got Talent, perhaps, or Strictly Weimaring.
Any goths tuning in expecting a rockumentary about black-clad Eighties band Bauhaus might have been disappointed at first but would have soon been drawn in. The students were palpably inspired by their transformative week going back to art basics. This was a playful paean to creative freedom and collaborative spirit. The sort of self-indulgent yet irresistible endeavour that you would only find on dear old BBC Four.
Deep Water (ITV) is proving to be a shallow puddle. This middlebrow thriller about the tangled lives of three women in Windermere, adapted from Paula Daly’s novels, saw dark secrets surfacing at the school gates. And not just about whose parents had helped with maths homework or panic-bought dress-up day costumes on Amazon.
This was a town where dinner parties ended in illicit bathroom sex (makes a change from After Eight mints) and skint physiotherapists solved their financial woes by sleeping with a patient for a whopping £5K fee. There’s a missing schoolgirl too – isn’t there in most TV dramas nowadays? – but she’s so spoilt and sulky, it’s hard to care.
The second episode didn’t improve matters much. Absent-minded Lisa (Anna Friel) tried to make amends for her role in the girl’s disappearance, while cracks appeared in the smugly perfect facade of worried Kate (Rosalind Eleazar). Masseuse Roz (Sinead Keenan) took the plunge and had sex for cash – before, even more preposterously, being offered £10K for a repeat performance.
Meanwhile, dogged DC Aspinall (Faye Marsay, too good an actress not to play a more pivotal role) and Kate’s git of a husband Guy (Alastair Mackenzie, who I still can’t help associating with his starring role in sleepy Sunday night Mcsoap Monarch
of the Glen 20 years ago) both appeared to be hiding something dodgy.
The Lake District scenery was handsome and the three leads wholehearted but there was little else to commend this pulpy, implausible melodrama. Every male character was awful. Stilted dialogue sounded like it had been written by an alien trying to pass itself off as human. Even the surnames of the protagonists – Kallisto, Toovey and Riverty – were strangely unrealistic, as if generated by some sort of randomising algorithm.
Aiming to be a British Big Little Lies, it’s more like an inferior mountainous remake of Noughties drama Mistresses.
Can I invest another four hours in this hokum? Only if you pay me £5K for the next episode, then keep doubling it.
Bauhaus Rules ★★★★ Deep Water ★★