Scare At Bedtime with Podge and Rodge Network 2, Monday
Attention Scum BBC2, Sunday
Two Pints Of Lager and a Packet of Crisps BBC2, Monday
Spaced Channel 4, Friday
The Blizzard of Odd Network 2, Thursday
Langan Behind The Lines BBC2, all week
It may seem odd that the enduring image of the telly week should be a puppet vomiting, but there you go. It came in A Scare at Bedtime with Podge and Rodge, when Rodge was explaining to Podge his penchant for phone sex. The full nastiness hit home when Podge sniffed at the phone and recoiled in horror, or at least as much horror as can be mustered by a piece of wood. "It wasn't the whole phone," Rodge explained. "Only the bit you're holding."
As Podge leaned over and puked, there was enough splattering and wretching to make it sound like the little guy was turning himself inside out.
I only mention it because it has got to a stage where you don't know whether to laugh at TV comedy, or hide behind the sofa and sob for your mammy. Between The League of Gentleman and Chris Morris's Jam, comedy has begun to corner the market in the freakish, the disturbing, the genuinely frightening. It is the side of comedy that people with a phobia for clowns have seen for years.
This week's comedy of horrors came in the shape of Attention Scum. It took little time in getting to the point. "Attention scum." It's talking to you. "Scum. You are nothing. Absolutely nothing. You are . . ." A lot of things flashed up on the screen very quickly, but I'm pretty sure that, in the semi-subliminal assault, I caught "irrelevant", "shaven monkeys", "arse-mouths", "hope junkies" and (my favourite) "library rejects". Flattery will get you everywhere. It's hard to know what to call Simon Munnery (who calls himself "The League Against Tedium"). He's a stand-up comedian, but only in the sense that he's standing on top of a white van, in front of a screen from which he dictates a disjointed lecture to the population of whatever hapless village he seems to have turned up in. His routine is an outburst of insults, oneliners, skewed add-ons and common aphorisms. He brandishes a cane with a swan head, wears tails with loose golden epaulettes and sports an exaggerated top hat with an exclamation mark on it. If he sat beside you on the train, you would get off at the next stop. The punch lines are like fingernails down a blackboard. "Why do men die before their wives? Is it because they want to?" he sneers, following with a comedy drum roll that begins to sound like the slow journey towards the guillotine the more you hear it. "No man is an island, but six men tied together makes quite an effective raft." Attention Scum is punctuated with horrendous Teutonic opera, nonsensical sketches, brief calms filled with soothing music. And there seems to be some kind of brilliance at work, even if it doesn't always come through the screeching. The opener had a running sketch in which a guy in a red skin-suit with a big question mark on his chest running around a park shouting, "What am I? WHAT AM I?" Tormented, banging his head with his hands. "What am I? WHAT AM I?" Eventually, at the end, a big voice in the sky told him. "You are curious." Question-mark-man thought about it for a moment, then collapsed to the grass yelling, "Why? Why? WHY?" Tucked away at the fag-end of a Sunday night, Attention Scum is tar-thick black coffee - not hot chocolate at bedtime. But this is the one and only series, as BBC2 has already decided not to re-commission. Maybe it's unnecessary anyway. The first book of Bush-isms came out during the week. "I know how hard it is to put food on your family," Dubya is quoted as saying. Even Simon Munnery might need to pause and think about that one.
THE only thing strange about Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps is the deja vu that accompanies each joke. Women who don't understand football going out with guys who do, gags about willies, sexual incompetence, lascivious barmen, why pornography is better than a woman, toenails being excavated using tooth-picks. The word "baps", it makes clear, is pure gold. Most sitcoms take a couple of episodes to get over introducing the characters and start developing them, but this makes a virtue of having it as one-dimensional as possible. Four 21-year-olds with sex and football and booze and nothing else on their minds. It is filled with lines that arrived in the office e-mail, deliveries hammered home so loudly that they would rouse even the most stoned student. "He's hopefully lying in a poolful of vomit being buggered by Mr T," comments one of the ladettes of one of the lads. I suppose it never claimed to be Shakespeare.
IT might have got away with it too, if Spaced hadn't started its second series on Channel 4 a few days before. This is comedy so rich in imagination that you need to tape it and re-watch it just to ensure you catch everything. It is ostensibly about a twenty-something couple, but exists purely in the surreal. Cameras are skewwhiff, colours are dulled, shots are out of focus, dance music stitches it together. Simon Pegg and Janet Stevenson write and act it out to scripts which notch up a dozen references a minute. It's perfectly natural for someone to open a bedroom door and find a scene from Apocalypse Now inside, or to be pursued by the sinister men in black from The Matrix, and even the Star Wars jokes seem fresh. But none of these ever weighs down the originality. TV has never really found a way to deal with the chemical generation but, with Spaced, it may have finally found the answer. And not a mention of baps anywhere.
CONTINUING on the comedy front, The Blizzard of Odd deserves a mention in dispatches. Colin Murphy's series - a trawl through public information films, homemade videos, bad Irish movies, cult nonsense, websites, the embarrassing pasts of our best-loved actors and a comparative study of the movies Island of Gannets and The Erotic Dreams of Natasha - finished up this week, but has been re-commissioned. It's cheap, pointless, dumb and cheerfully addictive. It ended with my personal favourite: a take on The Angelus, in which someone stops urinating on a postbox to listen to the bells. Again, it never claimed to be Shakespeare.
`THERE is no beating here," the man from the Office of ReEducation in Kabul told Sean Langan, in Langan Behind The Lines on Monday night. He was a proud man, a smiling man. "No beating," he repeated. He was a man loved his job, enjoyed the things he was doing in the name of the Taliban and Allah, proud that there was no physical violence needed to re-educate. There was nothing that wasn't punishable by a spell of re-education. Trimmed beards, "monotonous" music, especially that sung by women, short, "Western-style" hair, an unrelated couple travelling in a car together. It didn't stop there. Homosexuals are stoned to death. Men and women having relations before marriage receive 100 lashes. "If a Muslim becomes an unbeliever, then we will kill him," he added with such glee that the sun was catching off his teeth. Who needs beating when you have a grin that sinister. This is a land where job satisfaction was too high to be comfortable. Langan met some men from the Office of the Promotion of Virtue and the Protection of Vice as they patrolled the evening prayers. "Where's his beard?" the man from the office asked Langan's interpreter. It was explained to him that Langan was a Christian, here to learn about Islamic ways. The man from the office had the smile too. "Tell him to grow the beard." Langan's style was backpacker reporting, somehow blagging his way into a highly dangerous country that had already kicked him out once before, having tea with as many crazy bandits as possible while secretly filming them. But the blokish approach had its limits. It ended with him sitting in the stand at a football stadium, unsure what he was there to see. Sometimes it hosts football, sometimes an execution. Here they give homosexuals the choice of having a wall pushed over them or being buried alive. "I wondered what would happen that afternoon. You never really know until the last minute." And that was that. A repulsive cliffhanger. Tune in to the next exciting instalment. It might be a boring football match, you might get to see a man getting buried alive. Don't touch that dial. As it turned out, the storms intervened, knocked out my BBC and I didn't find out what happened. Hopefully the smiling man from Office of the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice came to ask Langan why his chin was still so baby smooth.
