Festive slapstick with more laughs than Mrs Brown’s Boys
‘Typical BBC audience,” snarled drunken Father Christmas straight down the camera in The Goes Wrong Show (BBC One). “Sitting around with nothing better to do than write in and complain.” Steady on, Santa. You’ll get put on your own naughty list.
West End favourites the Mischief Theatre troupe, who are best known for the award-winning The Play That Goes Wrong , arrived on television for their first six-part series, following one-off specials in 2016 and 2017. Beginning with a Christmas episode, the latest spoof production by their misfiring (and thankfully fictional) Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society saw Santa Claus come to town to solve one girl’s festive woes. But then his elves got stuck in the chimney, a magical snowman got eaten alive and the already surly Santa overindulged in the sherry, then started giving everyone a piece of his mind.
As always, the am-dram proceedings were beset by disaster: prop mix-ups, malfunctioning pyrotechnics, missed cues. The accident-prone cast got burnt, throttled, squashed and accidentally stripped to their underpants. Amid the escalating chaos, their panicked looks and awkward pauses were reminiscent of Victoria Wood’s seminal soap opera pastiche Acorn Antiques.
Mischief ’s co-founder and artistic director Henry Lewis stole the show as the bombastic, self-pitying actor playing Father Christmas – sort of Brian Blessed meets David Brent – who didn’t so much break the fourth wall as kick it to smithereens. He dismissed the script as “saccharine c---” and ranted about Christmas being “a commercial holiday that only benefited Amazon”. When his elves claimed to be happy, he replied: “Why? You’re essentially enslaved.”
It was knockabout festive fun, like a playfully postmodern panto. My children cracked up at the slapstick pratfalls, while the more risqué material (including a snort-inducing sight gag involving a carrot) thankfully whooshed over their heads like a high-speed sleigh. Not every joke hit its target but misses didn’t matter much because there would be another one along soon.
This old-fashioned, family-friendly comedy trod the line between seasonal cheer and black humour with aplomb. It was like Mrs Brown’s Boys but funny.
Enough unseasonal attempts at sarcasm. Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen (BBC Two) was actually annoyingly good. This Bafta-made retrospective rummaged through the archives to trace Grant’s career, including an in-depth interview with the award-winning thesp himself.
He’s certainly a more successful film star than political campaigner. The documentary was replete with delicious clips, both from his Richard Curtis romcom era – Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually – and recent TV hit
A Very English Scandal.
Footage from his early days in comedy troupe The Jockeys of Norfolk was less widely seen but equally enjoyable. Such floppy hair! Such sharp cheekbones! When he went up for his breakthrough role in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he told his agent: “I think there’s been a mistake. You sent me a good script.”
His former Hollywood co-stars Andie Macdowell and Sandra Bullock palpably adored the crinkly-eyed cad. We heard time and again how ferociously hard he works: endlessly poring over and annotating scripts, doing in-depth research and creating detailed dossiers on his characters. It takes a lot of hard work to make it look this easy.
Just to top things off and foil any lingering desire to dislike him came the chat with the man himself, during which he proved a natural storyteller with a gift for mimicry and sardonic self-deprecation. He called himself “a pretentious Oxbridge ponce” with a “big ego” which “needs stroking”, dismissed his romcom persona as “Mr Oh-gosh-i-love-you” and admitted he often “played the same part”.
When offered his villainous role in Paddington 2 (complete with razzledazzle dance sequence choreographed by Strictly’s Craig Revel Horwood, trivia fans), the script came with a note: “The baddie is a washed-up, narcissistic actor and we thought of you.”
This was a luvvie backslapping session, rather than a rigorous journalistic endeavour. Grant’s political activities weren’t mentioned and his notorious 1995 arrest for lewd conduct in a public place was tactfully skipped over. Yet with a back catalogue this beloved and a subject so charming, it was impossible to resist.
The Goes Wrong Show ★★★ Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen ★★★★