TV Review: PETER KAY'S CAR SHARE + BUCKET

This article was originally published in The Courier on 15 April 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

PETER KAY’S CAR SHARE: Tuesday, BBC One

BUCKET: Thursday, BBC Four

Like a great phoenix night rising from the ashes of obsolescence, the artistic rebirth of Peter Kay has been something to behold.

Despite his continued draw as a stand-up, his reputation as a great observational character comedian had become tarnished – seemingly forever – by years of cynically repackaged DVDs, slapdash memoirs, self-serving chat show appearances and turkeys such as Max & Paddy’s Road to Nowhere and that mirthless X Factor parody.

Even previously loyal fans had begun to regard him as a lazy sell-out.

But then – as Adam Curtis would say – something happened that nobody expected. In 2015, Kay returned with two delightful hit comedies.

In Danny Baker’s Cradle to Grave, he focused solely on acting to marvellous effect. Even more impressively, the BAFTA-winning PETER KAY’S CAR SHARE proved that Kay could still co-create a warm, rich, laugh-out-loud sitcom.

Any concerns that he couldn’t sustain this comeback were cheerfully vanquished by Car Share’s return. It’s just as charming and funny as before.

Picking up where series one left off, it gently toyed with the burgeoning romance between bumptious supermarket manager John (Kay) and his sweetly daft, naïve employee Kayleigh (Sian Gibson, who co-writes with Kay and Paul Coleman).

Though set almost entirely within the confines of John’s car, the series occasionally finds new wrinkles in its premise. So, John and Keyleigh spent most of episode one chatting via phone on their respective journeys to work. These subtle difference are seismic in Car Share’s little world.

Kayleigh’s new digs might’ve scuppered their old routine, but they clearly can’t live without their daily conversations.

John was reticent to admit that his heart was lifted by Kayleigh’s gift of a Now 48 CD – only Kay could derive cockle-warming mileage from Pure and Simple by Hear’Say – but that didn’t dent their natural chemistry. It was like being reunited with two old friends.

And that’s the modest magic of Car Share, it’s a pure and simple comedy about two likeable characters shooting the breeze.

Even the broader sitcom twist of John’s altercation with a belligerent cyclist going viral on YouTube didn’t feel out of place, as it supported the show’s basic humanity: in its unfussy way, it showed how innocent people can become internet villains/laughing stocks by being subjected to duplicitous editing.

If Kay and Gibson make it look easy, new sitcom BUCKET proves just how hard it is to get laughs from two people talking almost uninterrupted.

Writer Frog Stone co-stars as Fran, the reserved, virginal daughter of Mim, a septuagenarian free-spirited hippie played by Miriam Margolyes, an actress upon whom the euphemistic terms “irrepressible” and “redoubtable” are permanently affixed like warning signs.

Their dysfunctional relationship is driven by one joke, hammered into the ground: Mim won’t stop talking frankly about sex, much to Fran’s understandable exasperation.

Old women saying “hilariously” inappropriate things is one of the laziest comedy clichés, but I suppose we should be grateful that she didn’t get high or do a rap. Not yet anyway.

Another insurmountable problem: their nasty bickering is depressing, and no amount of laboured, unconvincing, last-minute pathos can atone for that.

I’m all for black comedy, but Bucket reminded me of how much Steptoe and Son made us care about those characters, even when they were behaving despicably to each other.

We’re supposed to find Mim charmingly eccentric, but she just comes across as an unbearable nuisance. Bucket is inept, a clumsy stab at rude, broad comedy with delusions of depth.

TV review: CRADLE TO GRAVE and DANNY AND THE HUMAN ZOO

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 5 September 2015.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle

Cradle To Grave: Thursday, BBC Two

Danny and The Human Zoo: Monday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

Innit typical? You wait ages for an autobiographical account of a popular entertainer growing up in 1970s Britain, then two come along at once.

Barrelling out in front, Cradle To Grave is a serial adaptation of Danny Baker's hilarious memoir Going To Sea In A Sieve. One of our greatest radio broadcasters, for years he's regaled fans with picaresque anecdotes from his whiz-bang youth, many of them revolving around his father, Fred.

Better known as Spud, this atom-powered character was a docker by trade Regardless of size, quantity and dubious provenance, everything that passed through Millwall Docks was fair game as far as Spud and his workmates were concerned. An incorrigible wheeler-dealer, he made Del Boy look like a rank amateur.

Spud, played with an uncertain South London accent by Peter Kay, is the star of the show. Danny and the rest of the Baker brood barely registered in episode one, as we plunged pell-mell into Spud's chaotic world of scams and fiddles.

Funny, charming stuff, but its energy was slightly exhausting. Kinetically edited like a cockney Goodfellas, it was overloaded with dizzying incident. It's as if Baker and co-writer Jeff Pope (Cilla; Philomena) were afraid of pausing for breath. They needn't have worried; these wonderful stories don't require the hard sell. Thankfully, it settles down next week to allow more room for nuance.

A genuinely warm, cheering comedy, this Polaroid-tinted labour of love is suffused with all the wit, warmth and attention to detail you'd expect from Baker.

By curious coincidence, Lenny Henry named his barely disguised alter ego Danny in self-penned biopic Danny and The Human Zoo. That wasn't the only curious thing about this uneven story of a working-class boy from a first generation Jamaican family breaking into the predominately white showbiz world of the 1970s.

Lenny has described it as “a fantasy memoir” due to certain fictionalised elements. So, while the details of his family situation were essentially true – as a teenager, he really did discover that the man who raised him wasn't his biological father – this version of his early forays into comedy felt like retroactive wish fulfilment.

To his eternal regret, Lenny appeared on The Black & White Minstrel Show after winning New Faces in 1975. However, unlike Danny he didn't rebel against its offensive outdatedness by appearing on stage naked daubed in tribal markings. I understand why he felt compelled to rewrite history; it must've been cathartic. But the honest truth – that he was young, naïve and eager to please – is less heroic, more complex, and therefore more interesting.

The film was more assured when dealing with Danny's relationship with his parents (touchingly played by Cecilia Noble and Lenny himself), his search for an authentic identity, and the racism he encountered almost daily. It didn't ignore the painful fact that he had to make self-mocking jokes to win audiences over. “You may have seen some of these impressions before, but not in colour!” ran his catchphrase, pointedly repeated throughout the film with needling discomfort.

Despite its awkward mix of fact and fiction, plus newcomer Kascion Franklin's inability to convincingly impersonate Lenny impersonating Frank Spencer et al, it did succeed as a unflinching record of the bigoted attitudes that once festered on the surface of British society.

Things are different these days, of course. Now they fester more subtly. Plus ca change, Len.

TV Review: THE GAME and PETER KAY'S CAR SHARE

A version of this article was originally published in The Courier on Saturday 2nd May 2015.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle

The Game: Thursday, BBC Two

Peter Kay's Car Share: Wednesday and Thursday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

Union strikes and power-cuts. Soviet spies and government traitors. A dingy, orange-brown Britain choking to death on the thick sting of Capstan smoke. The Game sometimes feels like an unlikely Peter Kay routine: “The Cold War, eh? What were all that about?”

Set in 1972, this six-part thriller is mired in a kind of perverse nostalgia for an age when paranoid East/West enmity threatened to spill over into all-out nuclear annihilation. Those were the days, my friend.

Yet despite being shamelessly derivative – it wouldn't exist without the work of John le Carre and Tomas Alfredson's 2011 film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  – The Game has just enough character of its own to deflect accusations of irrelevance. At least so far.

Written by Toby Whithouse (Being Human; Doctor Who), its sardonic sense of humour is a saving grace. Steeped in neo-noir trappings and an ominously jazzy John Barry-esque score, The Game blends knowingly fond pastiche – the nasty chief villain is defined by his unerring ability to peel apples sinisterly – with violent severity. It's also handsomely, gloomily stylised without drawing too much attention to its handsome, gloomy style. That's a tricky balancing act, but Whithouse at his best is an assured purveyor of black comic drama.

Our idiosyncratic team of MI5 anti-heroes are headed by a world-weary chief codenamed 'Daddy' – Brian Cox in careworn teddy bear mode - which none too subtly heightens the notion of them as a dysfunctional family.

Chief among them is a Bowie-boned young agent whose carapace of ruthless, almost catatonic efficiency masks an impulsive broken heart, a terribly nice wire-tapper who is so socially inept he keeps a list of possible conversation topics in his pocket, and, via a wonderfully arch performance from Paul Ritter, a barely-closeted establishment kingpin cruelly domineered by his monstrous mother. They're typical Whithouse creations – flawed, odd and intriguing.

The saga began with a defecting KGB officer informing MI5 of a potentially devastating Soviet plot. What this involves remains unclear, but already the body-count is rising. Throw in the usual paranoid spy themes of strained loyalty and creeping mistrust, and the potential is there for a compelling yarn told at a suitably deliberate pace.

In a way, I don't blame Whithouse for indulging himself in this familiar milieu. As a petrified child of the Cold War myself, I admit to being similarly obsessed with the era and its chilly accoutrements. Doom-caked BBC classics such as Edge Of Darkness and Threads are part of our collective DNA. With good reason, they still haunt our dreams.

Plus there's no reason why a talented dramatist shouldn't be allowed to play a brand new game using the Tinker, Tailor toy box. I remain cautiously optimistic.

Peter Kay's last sitcom was the best-forgotten Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere in 2004. Since then he's coasted along on an increasingly flimsy raft of good-will, his best years seemingly behind him. Hence why Peter Kay's Car Share is such a pleasant surprise.

A low-key sitcom in the claustrophobic mould of The Royle Family and Rob Brydon's Marion & Geoff, it's set almost entirely within the confines of a car belonging to assistant supermarket manager John (Kay) as he drives to and from work with employee Kayleigh (Sian Gibson, a revelation).

The company car share scheme has thrown these two together. John is an affable curmudgeon, Kayleigh a naïve chatterbox. The pleasure derives from watching their relationship gradually blossom from initial reluctance to comfortable co-dependence. While their arc, complete with will-they-won't-they romance undercurrent, is predictable, Kay and Gibson share sweetly convincing and often very funny chemistry.

After years of cynical laziness, Kay has remembered what he's good at – broad-appeal observational comedy fused with subtlety, detail, warmth and pathos. Granted, the spilled urine gag in episode one was hammered into the ground, and the incongruous musical fantasy sequences are pure padding.

But his ability to weave revealing threads of backstory into John and Kayleigh's conversation is impressive, as is his use of the car stereo – which spews forth an acutely-observed parody of banal commercial radio plus a “timeless” roster of semi-obscure hits, while triggering and commenting upon the surface duologue.

That all of this is achieved using two characters who barely depart from a confined space is testament to the effort that Kay and his co-writers – Gibson included – have put into this show. It's an impressive piece of writing, beautifully performed.

Against all odds, Car Share is a thoroughly charming affair that returns Kay to his oft-overlooked character comedy roots. I was wrong to write him off, and I'm delighted about that.