FEW creatures on planet Earth are more repulsive than the showbiz Latin beside him, the northern European lager lout is a font of integrity, a beacon of civilisation, a repository of humanity. Even the Californian/Australian beach hunk - blond, bland and thick as two short surfboards - cannot match the Latin lover for narcissism, vulgarity and repugnance.
Permed, moustachioed and Rolexed, Steve Coogan has reinvented himself as The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon. Tony is the tanned quintessence of sleaze a putative singing phallus, half-macho and half-effeminate. He drives a red, convertible sports-car with zebra-skin seats. He's brilliant. The only wonder is that it has taken so long for anybody to take the mick so thoroughly. In white suit, white, shiny shirt, white socks and white, shiny shoes, Tony Ferrino is so showbiz smooth that he makes Daniel O'Donnell seem like Sid Vicious. Yep, Tony is the big time.
When he sang "I'm fishing for girls/In a river called love," the choreography was perfect. Above a stagey set of undulating waves, Tony took out his fishing rod. As he did so, a shoal of bimbos rose out of the waves. "Swim a little closer girl/And see the worm I'm dangling," sang Tony. Now that's class, especially as it was followed by Tony introducing his "number one fan - my 78-year-old mother". After that, there could not have been a dry sickbag in the house.
Mind you, Coogan's targets didn't stop at sleazeball Latin lovers. The parody was set in the sad world of the 1970s TV variety show, a world which has now, more or less, been banished to the daytime schedules of the corniest satellite channels. But the cheesy bimbos, in their skimpy rig-outs, brought it back in all its horror. They could have been Pan's People on Prozac and they were splendidly inappropriate for Tony's musical version of The Silence of the Lambs.
Still, while it was very funny, the prominence of parody on television is alarming. By now, we're all familiar with the spoof chat show, the spoof game show, the spoof sitcom... even the spoof Christmas Day message (Rory Bremner on Channel 4, 1996). By all means, take the mick - a great deal of television deserves it - but, even with television, there's only so much mick to be taken.
Coogan, though, has hit a rich vein with Tony Ferrino, a character who hasn't quite as much mick as he (Tony) might like, but who is, probably, the best Coogan creation yet. Pauline Calf and Alan Partridge, two earlier Coogan alter-egos, were funny, but they lacked the sheer sleazeballness of Ferrino. Tony, you see, thinks his lechery is not only macho, but cool. Therein is the secret of his odium.
And yet, for all his brilliance, even Tony Ferrino falls short of the triumphantly repulsive real thing. I once saw a certain Spanish, Latin lover, singer/sleazeball interviewed on television. "I, eh, how you zay, love all ze vimmen and gurls of ze vorld," he said, in what was, presumably, intended to be a sexy, smouldering voice. Then he grinned and half-closed his eyes. Maybe, just maybe, he too was taking the mick....... but dozens of matronly types in the audience didn't think so.
On a New Year's Day when the six English-language, terrestrial channels screened 28 made-for-cinema movies, The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon was a rare example of television producing its own material. That it was a parody of what television used to produce is cautionary. Certainly, Ferrino is hilarious, but parody of any genre (apart, curiously, from Elvis in Las Vegas) has a short shelf-life.
Educated readers might explain if there's something post modern in the stack of spoof television these years. It's all becoming quite complicated. Much more of it and the straight stuff will begin to seem like a spoof of the ascendant 1990s genre - the spoof. Still, over a shoddy holiday period for television, sleazeball Tony Ferrino and his bimbos were as superbly vile as Tony's finale - a romantic rendition of Bigamy at Christmas, Latin-style.
TELEVISION indulged in more satirical navel-gazing with Cuts, a comedy about a mild-mannered, rural writer/academic, adapted by David Nobbs from a story by Malcolm Bradbury. Peter Davison played the ingenuous rustic Henry Babbacombe, who is hired by Eldorado TV to write a 13-part drama script. Stardom, loot and sex beckon for Henry if his series can get Eldorado's franchise renewed.
Then he meets TV types, lampooned here almost as savagely as Tony Ferrino doing Julio Iglesias. Donald Sinden is the fruity, old actor(e), Timothy West is the bullying, telly-magnate and Pippa Haywood as Cynthia Hyde Lemon is the drama executive who has had more lays than Tony Ferrino could dream about. Ms Hyde Lemon takes Henry under her wing and under, over, astride every other part of herself too.
Mind you, the sniping satire wasn't directed just at television. The cuts of the title were aimed at academia too. Henry, who taught an evening course on "Sex and Maturity in the English Novel" at his local university, found that the TV work came at an opportune time. He was about to be sacked, the university's Classics and English departments about to be closed down. They would be replaced by departments of Theme Park Administration and the Sociology of Football. Old jokes.
There was talk too of sponsorship - "The Durex Chair of French Letters" was mentioned - but most of the wit wasn't quite so sharp. . . or cheap. Instead, the script focused on the fact that, in television, the writer's words are seldom unmolested. Perhaps the best joke of Cuts was that Henry discovered that the rewrites were being done before he delivered his scripts to save time, old boy".
The early scenes were breezy and funny in an unsubtle way. It was clear that the cast, which also included Nigel Planer (as Eldorado's head of drama) was having a good time. But, Cuts became lumbering as it progressed, the in-jokes aimed too carefully at television types. "We want it realistic, artistic, visual and luminous," the TV hucksters told Henry, repeating the buzz words with pompous, overblown, mock approval.
The magnate, of course, wanted a credit as "executive producer...
you know, someone who doesn't do very much but gets a separate screen credit on which the camera lingers". Fair enough, but too much of Cuts's script, albeit about what hucksters do to TV scripts, was written for and not just about the hucksters. In the end, it fizzled out. The old ham has a heart attack while enjoying himself under Ms Hyde Lemon's wing. He dies "dramatically, bravely, magnificently". But Cuts didn't - the joke had been long since bashed to pulp.
IF it wasn't a feature film, or cop or doe opera, or parody, it had to be... costume drama. And so it was. The latest offering from a genre which is breeding like unprotected rumpo between Tony Ferrino and Cynthia Hyde Lemon, was George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss. This was a grim tale for New Year's Day, when life's latest copybooks are still unblotted. In its melancholy, it was, to be fair, realistic, artistic and visual.
But given the busts and breeches of recent frock opera, it wasn't exactly luminous. It was too grim for that. "We can't choose happiness, not for ourselves, not for anyone else. We can only choose whether to follow our conscience," said the pivotal character, Maggie Tulliver (Emily Watson). This may well be true, but on a night when "life-enhancing" resolutions had many viewers gasping for a smoke and/or craving a drink, it was rather stark. In fact, it was bloody depressing.
Well, bleak stories of unrequited love are like that, aren't they? Ms Tulliver, as the daughter of a ruthless, social-climbing mill-owner (Bernard Hill) wants to marry the son of one of his enemies. Torn between love and family loyalty (Eliot's story is semi-autobiographical), she's never going to win. As she drowned, her dying breath turning to a string of glistening bubbles, it was a welcome release. . . all round. It also sunk any New Year high spirits that might, foolishly, have thought their time had come.
WATCHING Cows, a new sitcom written by Eddie Izzard and Nick Whitby, you'd have to hope that the rewrites were done before the script was delivered. If they weren't and if Izzard and Whitby are responsible for this stuff, it's too much, lads. Even parody has its limits and in casting the Johnson family as cows - or humans with cow masks - the weirdness of this one, on top of the grimness of The Mill On The Floss, was pestilential.
There's an old rule in sitcom: make it funny. But Cows, a few jokes aside (the Johnsons buy a house to turn into a barn; they drive cars; eat fish `n' chips; smoke huge "grass" reefers; talk like people), was pure dung TV. Oh, it was occasionally clever, but mostly it was as exhilarating as thinning turnips. As this was a pilot, it lasted an hour too. It's hard to imagine that many viewers had the stamina to go the distance.
In principle, parodying the sitcom, which, in ways, is, itself, a parody of soap opera, is fine. But the unfunny sitcom, is, for most viewers, a step too far. Who knows what wings Mr Izzard (a funny stand-up comedian) and Mr Whitby were taken under during the writing of this tripe? Perhaps it is intended as the mick-take of all mick-takes or maybe everybody involved sucked a little too long and too deeply on the cows' reefer. Bizarre and boring is a grim combination.
FINALLY, Limerick 800 New Year's Eve Concert. As such traditional gigs go, it was adequate. Finbar Wright and Suzanne Murphy sang mawkish songs splendidly and D'Unbelievables delivered some splendid parody mawkishly. Presenter Mary Kennedy, wearing a glitzy, cantilevered (or suspension?) dress that left her shoulders bare, appeared to enjoy herself too.
So, it was all rather safe and, in parts, twee. But standard TV genres, done with gusto and skimping on the patronising narcissism so characteristic of television, can have a future. OK, there's no going back to Andy Stewart and the White Heather Club for New Year's Eve (unless it's to parody it), but a seasonal concert, without an excess of false bonhomie, can still do the job. The problem with parody is that only a fraction of it is as funny as, Tony Ferrino.
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