A sarky swipe at cancel culture? What took so long? This subject has been crying out to be skewered on telly. Now Steven Moffat has done it with Douglas Is Cancelled (ITV1), a spiky satire about sexism, hypocrisy, confected outrage and stellar careers being toppled by a single tweet.
Ah. I see from an article that Moffat wrote it “six or seven” years ago but no one would touch it. That figures. Initially it was written as a play, but the theatres that bothered to reply to him either said “no” or “ew”. Maybe they feared that they too would be cancelled along with Douglas. Never mind. ITV is running it as a four-parter (it’s all out on ITVX). It’s not perfect and sometimes very “on the nose”, but mostly it is clever and sharp, managing to nimbly shift from being farcical to serious and back again. Plus the denouement is unexpected, which is always a bonus.
Karen Gillan is excellent as Madeline Crow, a journalist of steely eloquence who presents a 6pm TV news show with the avuncular national treasure anchorman Douglas Bellowes (Hugh Bonneville). Drunk at a family wedding, Douglas is overheard making a “sexist joke”, someone tweets about it, and then the shit hits the fan — which is exactly the sort of thing that could and does happen. He says he can’t remember what he said, but he seems to have form. “Probably one of your usual misogynist ones, yeah?” says his comically useless agent (Simon Russell Beale). Things get spicier when Madeline, his trusted colleague, tweets something ambiguous: “Don’t believe it. Not my co-presenter.” Which could be read as supportive or a stab in the back.
• Steven Moffat on Douglas Is Cancelled: ‘People’s lives have been destroyed’
What the viewer wants to know is a) what is the joke? and b) will Douglas be exonerated or defenestrated for what appearsto be a crass, unpleasant but not criminal remark that seems to have been blown up out of proportion? The answer is more complex than you’d expect. Oh, and you don’t discover what the quip was until the final episode, which is the best one in my view.
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Bonneville plays his character well, but I do doubt that a seasoned veteran journalist would be so wimpish, bossed around by his angry newspaper editor wife, Sheila (Alex Kingston), and controlled by Madeline (why does she hold Douglas’s hand in a way that would be deemed creepy if it was the other way round?). He also seems terrified of his humourless, teetotal, right-on daughter who sees microaggressions everywhere.
Sheila tells Douglas to cheer up — an atrocity might knock his story out of the papers, by which she means “someone off Blue Peter having a wank on webcam”. She reminds him that a newsreader’s arse “can push a war off the front page”. I sense that Moffat doesn’t much like journalists.
What Moffat does very well is satirise the cowardly pant-wetting that ensues when someone is about to be cancelled. Toby the producer (Ben Miles) cravenly apologises for referencing Michael Caine in Zulu lest anyone thought he was racist. (Keep your eye on him — his story arc is interesting.) Bently the “loyal” agent warns Douglas that he may have to drop him. And episode three delivers a change in tone that gets really quite dark but is horribly realistic.
Yes, it is repetitive at times, but the pacey dialogue fizzes. It is a parable for the age that should perhaps be put in a time capsule for historians to ponder 200 years from now.
★★★★☆
