Television
Roger Lewis
A depressed, poorly-paid midget living in a decaying resort on the south coast – Toby Jones in Don’t Forget the Driver had me written all over him.
This series was magnificent, better than The Detectorists and further proof that the best comedy is seldom funny and that there are no such things as jokes.
The setting was Bognor Regis, where in 1963 Hancock shot The Punch and
Judy Man. Miraculously, Jones’s new six-part show, despite the sentiments expressed (‘There’s nothing here, is there ?’), avoided melancholy blackand-white, and everything was suffused with bright light and bright colours. Indeed, the cinematography was often beautiful, in a Wes Anderson way, with exaggerated rectilinear perspectives and carefully composed symmetries – seagulls on poles; mobility scooters clustering outside ice-cream parlours; people in bungalows peering through net curtains at the shingle beach.
Jones, in a short-sleeved shirt and a polyester tie, with a name-tag, was our coach driver, driving his passengers on day trips to Dunkirk, donkey sanctuaries, a Devonshire model village and Ashford Retail Park.
Nothing much happened really – except lots of shots of Thermos flasks, sausage baps and a tartan piles cushion – until a refugee from Eritrea was discovered in the boot, and Jones and his family took her in and helped her out.
It was a slow-burning and thoughtful portrait of drab kindness and confusion. The final episode fell apart a bit, with matters both too hastily wrapped up and left dangling, as if all concerned were uncertain that a second series will transpire. I hope it does.
Jo Eaton-kent was excellent as a cross-dressing funeral director (‘I’m one of the girls’), Danny Kirrane made me laugh as Squeaky Dave, the ghastly and duplicitous colleague at the bus garage, and, as the dotty old lady, Marcia Warren showed she is one of the best actresses in England, capable of being hysterical and poignant without resorting to either camp or caricature.
Dotty old ladies abounded this month. Miriam Margolyes, in Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure, still keeps trying too hard to be an eccentric personality, belching and breaking wind as she pestered the terminally ill, examined flat-pack coffins and maundered about the afterlife. She is not lovable, and should stop trying to be – her eyes burn fiercely.
Miriam, I fear, is what the vulture-like and potty-mouthed Phoebe WallerBridge’s Fleabag will grow up to become. I am frankly not besotted with these flamboyant and vengeful characters, whom ‘feminists’ nevertheless applaud. The one I adore is Kate Beckinsale in The Widow – especially when, exhausted and wan, she lost her luggage in Africa and fell off a hill in Wales.
Hard to Please OAPS, in which vaguely recognisable former celebrities got to grips with modern technology, had its moments. Ruth ‘ Hi-de-hi!’ Madoc and Michael ‘Posh Steptoe’
Whitehall,‘armed with a carrot’, went to look at llamas in Buckinghamshire and stayed in pop-up inflatable tents.
‘She’s still dripping!’ said Ruth in a South Welsh screech, of the urinating llama. June Brown and Amanda Barrie, wearing terrible fright-wigs, inspected home-fitness gear, such as a backstretching yoga mat, a canvas sauna and a vibrating footplate. ‘Anything could happen here,’ said Amanda, with a saucy glint. What happened is that June fell fast asleep and everyone thought she’d died.
‘I think it’s quite dangerous for pensioners,’ said Harry Redknapp of a remote-control golf trolley. John Sergeant came on in a silver foil suit, which is meant to help him shed weight, though had he been shoved in an oven with an onion up his bottom, Eritrea would not need to starve.
Sometimes it is hard to know where one programme ends and another begins. Our Dementia Choir, with Vicky Mcclure – her with the folded arms off Line of Duty – was Hard to Please OAPS with music. We had a version of this in Hastings – an art class for the Alzheimer’s mob. The trouble is they forgot to turn up from week to week, and had to be rounded up by relatives, known these days as ‘carers’. Everyone had to start again; be shown what a pencil is for. But as in this touching documentary, art of all kinds alters the mood, gives a calm focus, and is better than drugs.
The real solution might be that people should stop being compelled to live so long. It is cruel.