Tuesday 24 March 2015

TV Review: YOU'RE BACK IN THE ROOM and ORDINARY LIES

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on Saturday 21st March 2015.


You're Back In The Room: Saturday, STV

Ordinary Lies: Tuesday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

ITV's Saturday night schedules are haunted by the ghosts of countless dead ducks. Last week this shiny-floored miasma of shrill mediocrity was visited by a quacking flop to end them all.

An insurmountably flawed game show, You're Back In The Room features dignity-shy contestants working together to win a grand prize of £25,000. The high-concept twist? Their various challenges must be carried out while under hypnosis. Let hilarity commence!

Derren Brown aside, stage hypnosis is ill-reputed as a cheap, tawdry spectacle in which velveteen show-offs make pants-exposing patsies dance to Sex Bomb while barking like dogs. You're Back In The Room does little to dispel such preconceptions. Indeed, it embraces them.

But that's not really the problem. No, the honking flaw in its premise is the dubious competitive element. I'm the world's most painfully awkward human, but I dare say even I would abandon my self-respect to perform an abysmal James Brown impersonation on TV if thousands of pounds were on offer. The whole sorry enterprise is catnip for cynics.

Blandly Irish mind man Keith Barry, whose job it is to manipulate the contestants, immediately set alarm bells ringing when he demanded that sceptics ask themselves this: would the participants really do these “crazy, silly and outrageous” things and risk losing a big cash prize if they hadn't been hypnotised?

Well yes. Obviously. Come on, Keith, you're familiar with human nature and the demands of television, right? Seriously, I doubt the world of stage hypnosis will ever recover from this catastrophic own goal. Its integrity has been fatally compromised.

While I appreciate that hypnotic suggestion works on those susceptible to it, the confection laid before us is woefully unconvincing. In their supposedly triggered state, the contestants seem suspiciously self-conscious. It's like watching a bunch of amateur comedians improvising ineptly.

Round one summed up the rot. A potter's wheel skit, it was as if The Generation Game had been hijacked by wacky 1970s military scientists with a warehouse full of psychotropic drugs. Except nowhere near as much fun as that sounds.

This misfiring concoction is embarrassing, not because the contestants make fools of themselves – they don't, not really - but because everyone involved is trying desperately hard to conjure entertainment from an unworkable concept.

One of the safest pairs of hands in the business, Phillip Schofield can host such pap in his sleep. Possibly quite literally in this case. But you can tell his heart's not in it. He giggles along gamely, but even the studio audience, who can normally be relied upon to laugh uproariously at nothing whatsoever, sound like they'd rather be back in any other room than this.

A sub-Jimmy McGovern ensemble drama, Ordinary Lies is essentially a series of standalone plays following various car showroom employees as they struggle with their awful lives.

The overarching theme of guilt and deceit was introduced via the story of a disenchanted salesman – a decent straight performance from comedian Jason Manford – who, when faced with redundancy due to persistent lateness, concocted a terrible spur-of-the-moment lie: his wife had died. Playing on his colleague's sympathy, he manipulated the fantasy before inevitably being rumbled.

McGovern would've milked this uncomfortable premise for all it's worth, but writer Danny Brocklehurst delivered an unsatisfying, thinly developed morality play bereft of depth or surprise. It was all so... ordinary.

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