For anyone who entered the new year swearing a period of humble enjoyments and plain fare, Stephen Poliakoff’s Friends and Crocodiles (BBC One, Sunday) was like being slipped a slab of foie gras. If television had a calorific content, the audience would have put on a stone after the first 15 minutes.
The film’s first half centred on a series of spectacular parties, held in a sprawling mansion in the early 1980s, and conceived as a sequence of visual lavishness. Riverside trestle-tables heaped with champagne and oysters. Perspex swans floating on the lake. A thousand Chinese lanterns at dusk. It was a bit like a documentary on a rough and ready Elton John barbecue. Christ knows what’s left of the BBC’s drama budget, but I expect to see a lot of one-man monologues set in caves during the rest of 2006.
Revolving around the mysterious, Gatsby-like Paul (Damian Lewis), Friends and Crocodiles charted the relationship between the charismatic, eccentric millionaire and his secretary (Jodhi May). For atmosphere, surely very little will rival it in the coming year — not only did it look as if it was filmed in the 1980s, but it smelt of the 1980s, walked like the 1980s, and made you think thoughts that you had in 1984, all over again. By the end of it, you felt as if you’d had a holiday down a wormhole. Indeed, in the main, it was more 1980s than I remember the 1980s actually being at the time — mainly because, for most of the country, the 1980s were a continuation of the 1970s, but with a thin layer of hairspray and Spandau Ballet floating on the top. Still, no one would question for a minute why when, in the middle of a slough of despond in the 37th minute, Jodhi May gets herself a terrible perm to cheer herself up. In 1984, the logic was clear.
Of less clear logic, however, was the casting. Damian Lewis — who has a very attractive knack of being both attractive and, erm, making me think about him in the knack — just didn’t convince as a stoner-guru and polymath. Lewis’s speciality is up-tight, over-schooled men who have it all going on beneath the surface — not the kind of spiral-eyed visionary who would order a Perspex swan or, in one of Friends and Crocodiles’s less believable moments, take a moment out in 1984 to invent the concept of Waterstone’s.
But whatever the slip in the plot, or the errors in casting, Friends and Crocodiles’s spectacle had an undeniable power. The brain might have occasionally rebelled, but the eyes had it.
Advertisement
As I was watching An Audience with Joan Rivers (ITV1, Sat), I started to wonder, who makes the best Joan Rivers? Joan Rivers — or Pete Burns on Celebrity Big Brother? Both have the same shtick, after all — plastic surgery, fabulousness, joy in the brutality and freedom of “the truth”, more fabulousness, more plastic surgery: basically being a bitch with a tight face. On An Audience With, Joan certainly was a bitch and certainly had a tight face. Her impression of women with Botox trying to blow out the candles on a birthday cake, while funny, was also a bit like watching a pot screaming “BLACK!” at an impassive kettle.
Joan’s still got the lines, though: “Judy Garland — she sang Over the Rainbow under the table for the last ten years. Yes!” “My first sexual experience was a rape. A rape! Luckily he didn’t press charges.” “Madonna! You don’t think Madonna doesn’t sleep around? Please! When she was growing up, her role-model was a mattress.”
The comedians in the audience — Hale, Corbett, Pace — laughed appreciative, peer-to-peer laughs at how difficult this level of continuing, roiling anger in a performance is to carry off. The comedians’ wives however, almost without exception, sat there po-faced — clearly thinking, “Why does she have to be so negative? Why doesn’t she just take up golf?”
Actually, now I look at Joan’s line on paper, they don’t look as funny as when she says them — a similar affliction that besets the spoken bitch-oeuvre of Pete Burns. During his sojourn in the Big Brother house — spent smoking imperiously, wearing a coat allegedly fashioned from gorilla pelt and applying make-up — Burns has been a real tonic for the black-hearted couch-potato. His straight-man has been the unwitting Rula Lenska, who’s terribly earnest about everything. Instance one: Rula, a Buddhist, is chanting. Burns: “Oh, I chant too.” Rula: “Really?” Burns: “Yeah. F**k off f**k off f**k off.” Instance two: Rula, compiling the shopping list: “Shall I get some bananas?” Burns: “Yeah. I need some for me coat.”
The other thing I love about Pete Burns is that, in the Telegraph’s type-face, his name looks like “Pete Bums”.