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.
No comments:
Post a Comment