This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 7th May 2016.
The Windsors: Friday, Channel 4
Grayson Perry: All
Man: Thursday, Channel 4
Made
by the team behind scattershot celebrity satire Star Stories, The Windsors
boasts a similar blend of heightened silliness and healthy disrespect. It’s a brash
sitcom in which our beloved Royal Family are depicted as a workshy bunch of freeloaders
and functioning alcoholics. Happy birthday, your majesty!
Though
framed as a Dallas-style soap parody,
that’s really just an excuse for a hit and miss barrage of nonsense. Yes, it
ticks off all the usual Royal gags – Harry and William are nice but dim etc. –
but it attacks them with relish. It’s not an excoriating or particularly clever
satire, but it’s full of crude, amusing energy.
It
also subverts the tired comedy notion that Charles is a harmless duffer.
Instead it portrays him as a dictatorial bully with a savage sense of
entitlement. That alone makes it more interesting than your average Royal
spoof.
His
fellow antagonists are Camilla, an embittered, power-hungry schemer, and Pippa
Middleton, a duplicitous sex-pot. Prince Edward also crops up as a desperate
failure. It’s all good fun, although the absence of the Queen and Prince Philip
is curious. Aren’t they ripe for parody too?
The
writers presumably felt that someone among this motley shower of buffoons had
to be vaguely sympathetic, if only so they can fall victim to the cruelty and
stupidity of the others.
That
honour goes to William and Kate, who are depicted as essentially well-meaning.
Kate is ineffably bland, so her character doesn’t work, but full marks to Hugh
Skinner (Will, the bumbling intern from W1A)
for seizing the role of William – a hapless hero who’d rather fly helicopters
than be King – with such dense enthusiasm. It’s the sort of role that Hugh
Laurie would’ve nailed in his youth, but Skinner does a fine job.
Harry
Enfield is also good value as Charles; his absurd line-readings are a
particular highlight. And I’m always pleased to see Morgana Robinson, a comic
actress whose devotion to grotesque clowning is admirable. Her own starring
vehicles have never matched her talents, but she always adds a peculiar energy
in supporting roles.
While
no classic, The Windsors does at
least milk some barbed comedy mileage from a deserving target.
Be
honest, you’d watch a series about Britain’s hardest men hosted by Grayson
Perry. Placing the cross-dressing artist in aggressively male environments
sounds like a recipe for fish-out-of-water fun. But there’s far more to Grayson Perry: All Man than that.
It’s
a thoughtful study of masculinity in which our charismatic host – “a lifelong
cissy” – tries to find out why some men feel compelled to be macho. He began
his investigation in the violent world of cage fighting, where his own
prejudices were challenged by meeting dedicated, articulate athletes with an
undercurrent of emotional vulnerability.
His
natural ability to relate to anyone he meets triggered the poignant spectacle
of one fighter breaking down while discussing his brother’s suicide. As well as
providing a surrogate family and sense of self-worth, cage fighting for him was
a form of therapy. Perry went on to reveal that 80% of people who kill
themselves in the north-east, where the programme was based, are male.
He
also illustrated how deprived backgrounds inspired many of these men to channel
aggression into something positive. Perry handled this raw subject without a
hint of condescension. On the contrary, it was a sensitive, moving, open-minded
essay on working-class community pride and the tragic price of male stoicism.
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