TV Review: Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are the undisputed kings of avant-garde humour.
In fact, the pair are often credited with ushering in a golden age of "post-alternative" comedy. But with Vic and Bob in Catterick, a six-part "real-time road-trip comedy drama", their distinctive brand of comic surrealism starts to grate.
Set in the eponymous Yorkshire town, this is the story of the hometown reunion of Carl Palmer (Mortimer) with his younger brother Chris (Reeves) - a confused yokel with an improbably voluminous beard - and their search for Carl's estranged son. Vic and Bob have been praised for supplying Catterick with a coherent narrative which shapes and contains their outbursts of lunacy, but it's difficult to detect anything more than the ghost of a plot here. Catterick emerges as a disconcerting series of arbitrary events and grotesque characters: Matt Lucas (of Little Britain) pops up as a kinky-boot wearing hotel manager whose penis was sliced off by a cash register, and Reece Shearsmith (from The League of Gentlemen) plays a sinister armed robber with a penchant for rigorous nose-hair trimming.
In one seemingly random episode, the action cuts to a news conference being given by an American cop (Reeves, in wig and glasses) who runs the police service in Yorkshire.
"I intend to make the county an environment where romance can blossom," he drawls, "where children can play with their hoops, tops and jack-in-the boxes, where pensioners can guard their melon patches without fear of Huckleberry Finn-style moonlight attacks."
Chris's reaction when he realises he has missed someone's 40th birthday party is also typical of Catterick's wilfully bizarre humour: "I saw the balloons tied up outside, but I thought you were just raising the gate posts."
Vic and Bob have an insouciant disregard for all the niceties of narrative and comedic convention. Since their earlier days on Shooting Stars ("the quiz of the business we call show") they've gone out of their way to raise a rather knowing and imperious two fingers to the mainstream. You can't help wondering if, behind all the whimsical gags and absurd one-liners, there's more than a hint of complacency inherent in their comedy. Like many proponents of the avant-garde, there's something sniffily self-congratulatory about them. Do they sit back and titter smugly as confused viewers struggle to make sense of it all?
AFTER 30 MINUTES in the puerile company of Vic and Bob, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee was just the antidote. An adaptation of Meera Syal's novel of the same name, this was a snappily-scripted, colourful and fast-moving comedy drama set in a British Asian community in Ilford in Essex. Refreshingly unpretentious, the three-part tale has been glossed as the Asian Bridget Jones' Diary. Although Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee is undeniably about the bittersweet search for true love, the similarity ends there. It offers a smarter, grittier take on romance - and mercifully we're spared the tiresomely paranoid presence of Bridget Jones.
The stars of this show are Chila (Ayesha Dharker), an idealistic, trusting girl-woman with adorable puppy-dog eyes, and her childhood friends Sunita (played by Syal), now a chronically dissatisfied housewife, and Tania (Laila Footballers' Wives Rouass), a pouty, stroppy media-babe. This first episode opens with Chila's marriage to Deepak (Ace Bhatti), her "Prince of Chigwell", whose sneering good looks scream "philandering rotter!" The rueful, self-deprecating humour of this drama gives it a deceptively light touch, but it isn't afraid to tackle weightier issues of personal betrayal, mental disturbance and cross-cultural conflict.
Documentary-maker Tania films the wedding day's events; later her boss asks her to make her film into a full-blown documentary about "modern love within an ancient culture". She agrees to go ahead despite her initial reservations about the project: "My community? Who the hell are they? I spent my whole life trying to escape the cliches and now they want me to make a film about them." But when the mendacious Tania produces a brutally honest film which exposes the intimate secrets of her friends' lives, she provides the catalyst for a whole series of unexpected events.
The tightly woven script of Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee easily accommodates both shocking moments of raw emotion (Sunita cutting her scarred arms with a razor blade) and episodes of pure farce (Sunita's psychotherapist husband crouching pathetically behind his desk while an irate patient throws a vase of flowers at his head) without losing integrity.
Occasionally, the dialogue sails perilously close to mawkishness: "Why do women cry at weddings? We weep for what we didn't know then, and for what we do know now", but this is a big, rollicking, ample-bosomed comedy drama that could teach Vic and Bob a thing or two.
IF THE COMEDY-DRAMA Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee is a pageant of colour and passion, Paddy Wivell's film Compulsion: Love Will Tear Us Apart is a bleak, claustrophobic little portrait in monochrome. It tells the story of Matt and Camilla, a middle-class married couple struggling with alcohol, heroin and gambling addictions.
"For the first time ever we both want to get well," says Matt, so they have come to Christ Church in Deal, Kent, a community which helps addicts overcome their problems. Camilla and Matt are frank and articulate about the spectrum of self-loathing behaviours which have blighted their lives, and both are surprisingly clear-sighted about the way they use feelings of anger and betrayal to exert emotional leverage on each other.
But as the pregnant Camilla appears to be winning her battle with addiction, Matt sinks ever deeper into self-destructive patterns. Lurking in the background are the couple's two children, Arthur (six) and Phoebe (nine), a pair of mute, sad-eyed little waifs.
"At least Mummy's not behind a closed bathroom door taking heroin," says Camilla.
Wivell rapidly loses any sense of directorial objectivity as he too is sucked into the messy, emotionally turbulent life of the family, offering advice and dispensing money. But although the terrible damage wreaked by addiction is minutely observed, there is little insight into the psychological factors which led to such devastating habits in both Camilla and Matt. We're simply presented with harsh current reality.
HITLER'S IRISHMAN: the Story of Lord Haw Haw showed how a different kind of addiction, to fantasies of power, propelled William Joyce, a street-fighting boy from Galway, to become the voice of Nazi Germany and one of the 20th century's most notorious fanatics. Joyce's ridiculously plummy vowels earned him the sobriquet Lord Haw Haw, as the English voice of German radio propaganda to Britain. Broadcaster and academic Brian Farrell described Joyce's arch, artificial tone as "a ham actor trying to play Noel Coward".
Written and directed by Brian Gilbert, this eloquent film drew on a range of critical voices including Tim Pat Coogan, Peter Martland and Joyce's biographer, Mary Kenny. Joyce's daughter Heather, now a frail elderly woman, added an extra dimension - although her words were faltering and hesitant, her blazing devotion to her father was obvious. She described how, in 1976, she received permission to disinter Joyce's body from Wandsworth prison in London and re-bury it with religious rites in Galway.
Most fascinating was the exploration of Joyce's formative years: in particular, his youthful attachment to the brutal activities of the Black and Tans was critical in framing a fascist, incorrigibly anti-Semitic worldview.
Smarting about his status as an outsider, on his arrival in England Joyce reinvented himself as "more British than the British themselves". As his fellow-broadcaster for the Nazis, James Clark, remarked, "Only Irish William could have become such a dedicated British William".
Described as "a perpetual political adolescent" with a taste for violence, Joyce left London for Berlin a week before the outbreak of the secondWorld War to take up his role as the sneering, gloating mouthpiece of Nazism - a role that would ultimately lead to his trial and execution. He was the last man to be hanged for treason in Britain.
Although the images of Joyce were striking (his face was brutally scarred by a communist attack which razored him open from ear to mouth), this film relied less on visual impact than on weaving an insightful narrative of fact, comment and anecdote from its contributors.
In a week when the world remembers VE Day, it was a salutary account of how the grim seduction of fascism exerts its terrible hold.
Hilary Fannin returns next week