TV Review: Some comedians can be a bit like senior flight attendants - they like to be taken seriously.
Some, on the other hand, don't mind us laughing at them. Both were in evidence in two British comedy series aired this week, which, perhaps depending on which side of the 1970s you got your marching orders from the womb, will either appeal or not.
Help, written and performed by Chris Langham and Paul Whitehouse and directed by the talented Declan Lowney (Father Ted), is an examination of that hotbed of neurosis, the therapeutic relationship.
Chris Langham plays Peter, an elegant, sympathetic, baggy-eyed psychotherapist, and Paul Whitehouse is his clients - all of them.
"I squat in other people's minds," one client tells Peter early on.
"Right. Did you take a lot of drugs in your youth?"
"Loads."
Whitehouse is staggeringly versatile, from Michael the hippy with the permanent wave who believes he can occupy the minds of others, to Clement the elderly chap who can't plonounce words ploperly because of plernicious blullying at his plublic school, to Johnny the God-fearing recidivist wife-beater ("may God cut off my hand if I strike her, chop off my foot, gouge out my eyes - doctor, this is not therapy, this is carnage").
Langham's tender exhaustion, meanwhile, is kind of perfect as he leads each client through the talking cure. The premise is brilliantly simple, making for a series of witty interlinked two-handers, with the character of each client gradually developed in the chair. Despite a slightly mawkish ending to the first episode, Help is clever and easy to watch, and its seemingly effortless humour makes you laugh. Out loud. Which is no mean feat.
CHRIS MORRIS (FORMERLY of The Day Today and spoof documentary series Brass Eye) has also been co-writing with his mate, Charlie Brooker, the six-part series, Nathan Barley, which he also directs. The eponymous central character is a vacuous, narcissistic 26-year-old Londoner working out of an East End media village ("a self- facilitating media node") and is the proud owner of a suicide-bomber Barbie. Nathan (Nicholas Burns) reads Sugar Ape, his bible of metropolitan cool. Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barnes) is a leading columnist at Sugar Ape and reluctant guru to a bunch of trash-loving idiots who find him "astonishingly cool". Dan has a sister, the earthy Claire, who also despises "cool" and is trying to finance her film about a choir of ex-junkies.
In one scene, Nathan and Claire have dinner in a "gastro-pub", where their food is chosen for them by having their electrolytes assessed through a sensor and where the beer is served in ethnic gourds with straws. Nathan, who has the attention-span of a gnat and the sexual sophistication of the Easter Bunny, laser-beams some insults on to the foreheads of a couple of hippies communing at the next table and succeeds in getting himself and Claire thrown out and back to his place (where he fails to score).
Morris has created an urban tale of the excesses of the Noughties - it's all very, very, very busy, and no doubt painfully accurate if you are a twenty-something pork-pie-hat-wearing epitome of cool. However, if you're not and wouldn't know a metropolitan media scene if it jumped up and bit you on the seat of your antifits, the satire can be tediously overwrought. You get the feeling that Nathan Barley, with its exhausting references to the zeitgeist and its surfeit of irony, will date as rapidly as its subject matter. However, as Nathan would say, for the next three weeks "it's gonna be totally f***in' Mexico" - so that's all right then. Isn't it?
NEITHER PSYCHOTHERAPY NOR psychobabble were to be found in the green fields around Gougane Barra, setting for Eric Cross's exuberant and controversial book, The Tailor and Ansty. Cosc ar Ghnéas examined the banning in the 1940s of both Cross's novel and Brian Merriman's sexual satire, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court). In 1967, when the Irish government decided to get writers and artists onside with tax breaks rather than subject them to the snowy peaks of censorship, there were 10,000 books on the banned list (if they could have resurrected and found all the authors it would have been quite a party).
The tailor on whom Cross based his book was his neighbour, a well-known raconteur and wit. He and his wife, we were told, were filled with wonder and a childlike fascination for life. Theirs was not the narrow and bleak view that saw the Seanad debate for four gruelling days the merits and demerits of Cross's book ("a slow swim through a sewage bed", as Frank O'Connor described the proceedings), nor the impoverished view of the parish priest of the beautiful St Finbarr's Church, who marched to the tailor's house with two of his curates and forced the old man to burn the book of which he was so proud. The tailor died in 1945, a year before the ban was lifted, and Ansty joined him a year later.
The Midnight Court, with its poetic description of a young girl's desire for sexual fulfilment and its wrath towards the bevy of well-built male virgins queuing up for the priesthood, was apparently a favourite of Dev's (although he didn't revoke the ban) as a handy starter reader for compatriots who had thought the only mentionable mounds in Irish literature had sheep on them and who had yet to encounter the liberating heritage of Gaelic culture.
In a week when TG4 has been granted permission to broadcast in Northern Ireland, it has once again produced an engaging examination of Irish cultural life, and if it sometimes feels a little bit teacherly that's probably just a hangover from 1979 when the textbooks were still leaving out the good bits.
INSTEAD OF PROVIDING a unique insight into why a family GP murdered at least 250 of his patients, To Kill and Kill Again: Dr Shipman, what the programme in fact did was stretch a flimsy caul of explanation over his shadowy life.
When Harold Shipman was found hanging in his prison cell in January 2004, it was, we were told, the final expression of his controlling personality.
The documentary explored Shipman's life from the age of 17, when his mother (with whom he had an apparently close and loving relationship) died. Suffering from terminal cancer, her death occurred soon after a morphine injection administered by her GP. Shipman, an athletic teenager, obviously shocked and grief-stricken, ran that night for 10 miles through the rain, and from that point on decided his vocation was to be a doctor. The programme offered no other family background, nothing about his father or siblings (if there were any). What it did claim was that the moment of passing from life to death became an obsession for Shipman.
He met his wife, Primrose, when she was 17 and he was 20, and within a year she was pregnant. As a student doctor, Shipman was apparently over-taxed by a combination of domestic responsibility, study and work, and began to abuse the drug pethidine. It is now believed that he also began killing at this time by injecting his victims with large doses of diamorphine. These people were generally elderly and some were terminally ill, though most were not.
Having received a warning about his drug use in the 1970s, Shipman revived his career, his bedside manner so good he even showed up in a TV documentary extolling the virtues of community care for the depressed. He was finally caught in Hyde, Greater Manchester, in 1998, and were it not all so appallingly tragic for the victims and their families it could appear like a very black cartoon.
"It's another one of Shipman's," the local undertaker would say as he went to collect a corpse sitting in exactly the same position as the 30 other corpses to which the doctor had called him out in a single year. A local taxi driver became suspicious when, on noticing the decline of his client base, he began compiling a list of names, all suddenly deceased, all patients of Shipman.
At one point Shipman killed three patients in one day. When he was eventually arrested, his arrogance and lack of empathy marked him out, in the eyes ofthe police, as a serial killer. During his trial he wrote to a friend describing the witnesses as "bit players" and promising that "the big star is yet to come".
This mild-looking man, who you would expect to see putting dubbin on his walking boots or trimming the wisteria, was Britain's most prolific serial killer. But what the psychological imperatives were that drove him to his horrific actions is a story yet to be told.
