This article was originally published in The Courier on Saturday 19 August 2017.
CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP: Monday to Friday,
Channel 4
QUACKS: Tuesday, BBC Two
Noel
Edmonds is a phenomenon.
A
modern-day sage, seer and alternative thinker, he’s the most misunderstood
multimillionaire maverick genius since Howard Hughes.
He’s
also a frustrated comedian trapped in the body of a leonine entrepreneur, never
happier than when he’s prowling around a daft fantasy world that’s broadcast on
television for the delight of several. Crinkly Bottom was Noel’s Shangri-La,
his safe retreat from a cruel, uncaring society.
Alas,
CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP, a semi-scripted
comedy quiz show in which our host plays the owner of a bonkers department
store, fails to scale the dizzying heights of that Blobby-bothered wonderland.
“It
is a very, very simple game,” explains Noel. He’s not wrong, although it is at
least a slight step up from his previous vehicle/cult recruitment process Deal or No Deal, which had no rules
whatsoever.
Noel
presents the contestants with a variety of actual products – it’s okay, Channel
4 are allowed to advertise – and they have to guess which of them retails at
the cheapest price. The more correct guesses they make, the more money they
win. The grand prize is £25,000. But if they get just one wrong, they lose
everything. And that’s it.
Or
rather, it would be were it not for the presence of a bunch of jobbing actors
playing Noel’s wacky staff. Without them the show would last ten minutes. Not even
Noel, who did an undeniably stellar job of milking tension from thin air in Deal or No Deal, could keep this flimsy
conceit going on his own.
These
characters, these refugees from a bad children’s show, allow Noel to do his
patented “What’s going on? This is crazy!” hapless straight-man act whenever
they interrupt him. Which is often.
He
also does a lot of fake giggling at risqué gags, another one of his key
talents.
It’s
all very knowing, of course. No one, not even Noel, thinks this is a clever
high-concept game show. It’s just a bit of self-consciously stupid fun.
Except
it’s not. It’s neither funny nor involving, and doesn’t even succeed – as we’d
all hoped – as a bewildering orgy of must-see Edmonds madness. It’s just
boring.
The
lack of studio audience gives it a dead-air atmosphere that no amount of
desperate Noel corpsing can cover up. It drags on forever.
If
Noel Edmonds want to host a bad quiz show in a pretend shop, he’s more than
welcome to do so. But did he really need to film it? He doesn’t need the money,
he could’ve staged this in the privacy of his own enormous home.
Then
everybody would be happy. Then we’d all be winners, cosmically ordered for all
eternity. Isn’t that what you want, Noel?
It’s
a scene familiar from so many dark 19th century period dramas: a
dashing surgeon performs a grisly yet pioneering operation before an astonished
audience of scientific minds and gasping women. QUACKS, a new historical sitcom starring Rory Kinnear and written
by James Wood of Rev renown, takes
that scene and runs with it.
It’s
broader and sillier than the understated Rev,
but similarly witty. Wood has fun mocking the violence, ugliness, prejudice, propriety
and repression of Victorian society, but never in a sneering way. The tone is
rather jolly.
It
also looks like an actual BBC period drama, albeit one in which a surgeon
accidentally amputates a patient’s testicles and an arrogant doctor refuses to
examine anyone.
It’s
the best new British comedy of the year so far.
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