TV Review:'The question of what is funny is less important than the question what is not funny," said writer/director Graham Linehan, a quote worth bearing in mind in a week that once again saw RTÉ2 hanging up the Che Guevara posters and passing around the joss-sticks in an attempt to lure the comedy zeitgeist to its flimsy table, writes Hilary Fannin.
Yay-hey, laughter time on the sidekick station! While over on RTÉ1, the grown-ups got to watch a successful series of programmes designed to reduce our waistlines and expand our health consciousness, us funky monkeys who threw our diet sheets to the wind and stuck our Nicorette patches where the sun don't shine, tuned in to RTÉ2 to assess an equally serious state of affairs, the national broadcaster's uneasy - nay, somewhat alarming - relationship with humour. Two new comedies (and I use the word with the caution of a virgin skater on a thawing lake) splashed on to the screen at the start of this chilly new year, the first of a two-part bedsit epic, The Roaring Twenties, and PJ Gallagher's new series, Makin' Jake.
Gallagher is a popular television comic and also a successful stand-up. The eponymous Jake of his new series first came to prominence during Naked Camera when Gallagher, in the guise of his alter-ego, engaged unsuspecting members of the public in unwilling acts of comedy.
Jake Stevens is a clever and energetic creation - shiny suit, white socks and chunky catalogue jewellery, bound up in manic egotism and dangerous idiocy - and I defy you not to stumble across his like in stale bars the length and breadth of this island.
Makin' Jake sees the character, something of a Borris-in-Ossory Borat, travel around the US, starting this week with an attempt to crack Hollywood, albeit with the finesse of a sledgehammer to an egg. To this end, Gallagher employed various real-life personnel in his random quest for stardom, including a pathetically optimistic and surgically-lifted acting coach and a faded 1970s TV star, Erik Estrada (aka Poncherello from CHiPs), who emerged from his cactused terrace long enough to display his nervy embarrassment and fabulous teeth before a well-rehearsed panting ejection of our hero. "I'd rather give myself a wedgie," Jake concluded, finally abandoning the Tinseltown dream.
Makin' Jake is fine if chocolate-box anarchy and broad-stroke comedy is your thing, and there is certainly a large audience out there for Gallagher's ambush humour. The word "hilarious", in singing inverted commas, seems to follow the man from pillar to post; it wasn't the adjective that sprang to my mind, however.
SHOCKED FASCINATION THAWING to a seedling of sympathy was my experience of the second comedic offering from the channel, The Roaring Twenties, which is actually pretty awful, but which somehow, despite its naivety, held out a freshness or promise that seemed entirely absent from the deadening familiarity of Gallagher's mockumentary.
It has to be asked why the station presented the young film-makers responsible for this embryonic programme a gang-plank disguised as an opportunity. Is RTÉ really hell-bent on annihilating potential comic talent by throwing inexperience at the camera lens to see if it sticks? Truly, one had to dig deep to unearth the silver lining from this thunderously leaky cloud.
The Roaring Twenties concerns four friends, young archetypes living in bedsit-land, and their multifarious pursuit of sex, career and comfort. There is Kevin (Diarmaid Murtagh) the dilettante, Mary (Amy Kirwin) the ambitious journo, Ray (Jason Healy) the mysterious shaggable one, and Seamus (Darryl Kinsella) the tag-rugby boy.
The acting is frighteningly uneven, with one or two calm performances and one too many hysterical turns; the situation is hackneyed, an uneasy mix of Shallow Grave, Spaced and The Young Ones; and, at its worst, the script is hugely under-developed, with a conspicuous absence of wit. However, the programme is interestingly shot, and has some less predictable moments along with a hint of edginess or invention that might well be worth exploring with a couple of decent scriptwriters.
WHICH BRINGS US back to Graham Linehan. "There is a hunger from some executives to make hip shows and not to make good shows," he asserted in a fascinating Arts Lives documentary, Graham Linehan: Funny Business, which followed the writer/director as he made an episode of his self-penned sitcom, The IT Crowd. One of the most talented and influential comedy writers around, Linehan also wrote the tenderly funny Black Books with Dylan Moran, and, with his former writing partner, Arthur Mathews, spawned the iconic Father Ted (the pair also contributed to Brass Eye and The Fast Show, among others).
The programme was a comedy writing masterclass. Linehan, ruminating on his doggedly successful career and exposing aspects of his creative process, kept coming back to the same theme: writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting ("And not just tweaking," observed Matt Lucas of Little Britain, having been on the receiving end of Linehan's wisdom when the writer helped David Walliams and Lucas transfer their fantastic comic aria from radio to television).
Sometimes throwing out entire scripts, burning with anxiety and constantly chasing perfection, Linehan came across as a driven and authoritative presence even if, as he said, his ideas come to mind while reading a comic with his feet on the desk.
Central to his success as a writer would appear to be his relationship with Channel 4 and an editorial process that supports him in his mission to wring the best out of his material. It was interesting to observe the intensely focused IT Crowd cast receiving their scripts in a central London rehearsal room, all deadly serious about the business of making comedy.
ACTUALLY, THE (UNINTENTIONALLY) funniest thing I saw on the box this week was BBC's riposte to the catcalls of the housewives on Wisteria Lane. The Beeb's sexy new drama, Mistresses, is Desperate Housewives without the eating disorders; a pared-down Middle England take on four women teetering on the edge of middle-age.
The old college mates - Katie (Sarah Parish), Trudi (Sharon Small), Siobhan (Orla Brady) and Jessica (Shelley Conn) - who populate this raunchy-ette cupcake of a series should be congratulated for simply managing to get their lines out without falling over with exhaustion, so mired are they in the trappings of their gender. Episode one featured breathless and expensive underwear, ovulation predictors, secretary-shagging, nascent lesbianism, gold-digging strangers, disappearing husbands and demanding wine bars.
In this middle-class mascara massacre, which apparently takes a look at "complex emotional relationships" (or some such twaddle), only the frumpiest and least neurotic of the four gals, Trudi, has children. She also has a messy kitchen snuggled up in a Victorian redbrick and, surprisingly, no dog (although she may have baked it in the Aga).
The other three are career girls who hang around naked under other people's husbands' pyjama tops, leaning against door jambs with naughty cigarettes in their manicured fingers and the weight of the pretty world on their bony shoulders. Except for Katie, that is, a smouldering GP who, having helped her dying lover make a quick exit with a bag of morphine, has something to worry about - oh, and Siobhan the careerist married lawyer who showed her knickers to a frothy young colleague when he offered to siphon off her caseload. Ah girls, what are you like?
Mistresses is actually too dull to qualify as escapism and suffers from the grating inauthenticity of four brittle actresses bathed in smudge-proof eyeliner pretending to be soulmates. Like this biting cold, it will be long-forgotten by spring.
