Jerk
BBC1
★★★★☆
Narco Wars: The Mob
National Geographic
★★★☆☆
I missed the first series of Jerk and the loss was very much mine. I hadn’t expected it to live up to its reputation as Curb Your Enthusiasm with a disabled protagonist and in some ways it doesn’t. A poky deceased OAP’s flat in drizzly London is hardly a millionaire writer’s villa in Beverly Hills and Tim Renkow, who suffers from cerebral palsy, is not Larry David. Yet both series push the boundaries splendidly into dark, dark humour and political incorrectness and both have selfish, thrillingly unlikeable lead characters.
Renkow enjoys being an annoying arse (the titular “jerk”, I presume, working on two levels) who can get away with it because people tiptoe around his disability. Such as the preposterously woke student Bobbiey (Helen Monks), who is a “pansexual not attracted to women” and supports Renkow’s mickey-taking claim that he identifies as being able-bodied “so therefore he’s able-bodied”. Sharon Rooney as the carer who steals her clients’ steroids and Rob J Madin as Idris, the kindly, exploited friend who still thinks he must clap every “essential worker”, are terrific.
While making the point that disabled people are human and can be jerks too, Renkow also sends up able-bodied people’s crassness. It’s not every comedy that could risk opening the series with a passport control scene in which Renkow asks the officer, “Do I look like a terrorist?” and the official replies: “Yeah, you do actually. You look like you’ve been blown up by one of your own badly made devices.” Or Lorraine Bracco as his ball-buster of a mother who tells her son: “Don’t be getting anybody pregnant or it’ll come out like you.”
This is probably very wrong, but I laughed at the paramedic in episode two who attends to Renkow after he has been hit by a car. When told his patient has cerebral palsy, he says, “Oh thank f***ing God. I thought it was going to be complicated. I’m supposed to be knocking off in 20 minutes,” then shouts at the car driver involved: “It’s OK — he was like this before!” Wonderfully sick.
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This kind of chutzpah reminds me of that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Michael J Fox deliberately shook a Coke bottle so it sprayed over David and blamed it on the shakes caused by his Parkinson’s disease. I’m now watching series one of Jerk.
Say what you like about ruthless, evil mafia bosses, but they have fabulous names. Narco Wars: The Mob told the story of the New York heroin king Carmine Galante, who was shot dead in 1979 in the back garden of a pizzeria; a gruesome photo of the aftermath showed a cigar still clamped between his teeth. His bodyguards Baldassare Amato and Cesare Bonventre emerged suspiciously unscathed. A man called Anthony “Whack-Whack” Indelicato got 20 years for the murder. See? Dirty business, great names.
This documentary had ex-mafiosi associates as its talking heads — “There were 40 people at his funeral. There’s a reason for that. Nobody liked him” — but also Galante’s daughter, Angela Tucceri, who, despite having a psychopathic monster for a father, couldn’t keep the love and pride out of her voice. “What he did might be wrong,” she said, “but he excelled in it.” Well, I suppose it’s one way of looking at it.
