by Bent
Halo
"That Was Truly Diabolical"
It's asking for trouble with a by-line like that, don't you find? Just like Suede's 'Trash' or Neil Young's 'Piece of Crap', Dr Terrible's House Of Horrible is practically begging - admittedly in the most self-satisfied way possible - for critics to say "Ur, yes, it is, actually." The difference is that the first two examples are perfectly good in their own way and - Pinky & Perky vocals apart - escape the obvious remark. But Dr Terrible? No, no, no…
What is most peculiar about this affectionately written retread of Hammer film productions, is that the promotion has been so anaemic. Reading between the lines was hardly required when Jasper Rees offered up his two-page Radio Times feature on this new Steve Coogan vehicle, currently airing on BBC2. Arguing that the closeness of the parody (or 'homage' - or 'pile of cack' as we will deign to call it) requires a falling short of polish and a certain amateurism in the dialogue and delivery, they've pretty much hedged their bets on this all-out catastrophe, with Rees backing up their talk of calculated drivel by saying that "just as there is deliberately bad writing, Coogan has also had a go at doing deliberately bad acting . […] They are grasping to create something epic in the dialogue and haven't quite done it. If they're not watching closely, people could go 'This is rubbish; what are they doing?'."
This kind of double-talk - the quote-within-the-quote emanating from co-writer Graham Duff - is a major loser's crutch, suggesting second-thoughts about the final product rather than a deliberated-upon surprise for the comedy audience. The reason? Dr Terrible
offers little sophistication beyond the production values and editing, meaning little to anyone outside of the Hammer-savvy crowd who will inevitably tune in. The intended incompetence fails to come across as knowing and clearly-translated parody - thus, the programme has failed. Don't blame it on us; blame it on the originals. Has dark, parodic comedy really reached the point at which it is aimed exclusively at the relatively small band of people who grab the references and pat themselves on the back for recognising a throwaway line from Easy Rider
or The Terror of
the Tongs? To attempt an inept parody is fine and dandy - French & Saunders have spent rather too long at it to make it seem at all novel. But in a culture that now accepts Spaced
and The League Of
Gentlemen
as innovative attempts to integrate standard sitcom devices with heavy doses of metafiction, you begin to wonder where it's all leading. Step forward, Dr
Terrible's House Of Horrible.
Take episode 1 for example: 'Lesbian Vampire Lovers Of Lust' . It's a reasonable enough source to use, and has plenty of potential for a comedy. All of the instantly recognisable facets of vampires (mirrors, stakes etc) make the writing pretty shorthand and easy to pace. In fairness it's the best of a bad bunch, offering up the only good five minutes of the series (the climax), but the concepts behind Dr Terrible hinder any chance of it being great.
In many ways, the scripts share the same problems as the Tony Ferrino specials of a few years ago. When Coogan appeared in character at the Royal Variety Performance in 1996, the audience simply did not laugh. They were hardly a cross-section of the viewing public, but even laughter washes weren't going to help on that occasion. This says one or two relevant things about his understanding of parody. He seems to chase this need for accuracy combined with innuendo (something Ferrino did in spades), yet it all too rarely comes off. The Ferrino appearance in front of a stiff crowd suggested that when he appeared and introduced himself as a Julio Iglesias-type singer, they simply accepted him for what he was. 'Help Yourself' was hardly a funny record anyway (and the less said about the Jazz Café cancellations the better) but why should people assume that he's anything other than a lounge singer if the humour doesn't exactly hit you over the head?
Added to this was the problem with the two BBC2 Ferrino specials and the previous solo series, Coogan's Run . The former bombed horribly, the latter overstretched itself, but this was Coogan so he was forgiven. He disappeared for another year and returned with I'm Alan Partridge which, for many people, saw him back on track. And what happens? The BBC fails to learn their lesson and, after such a success, spunk budgets all over the place again and lets him get away with Dr Terrible , retreading the same awkward sense of parody which made the Ferrino mockumentary such an embarrassment. It again tries to stretch a style to breaking point, except this time it's British horror films. Again he tries to shove jokes in which are either lazy or simply don't fit in. Again attention is paid to making it visually interesting, rather than worrying too much about the script. And again - quelle surprise - it's shit.
The many faces of Steve Coogan, a new Peter
Sellers for the 90s
The leading problem in Dr Terrible is with our leading man, who hardly seems to stretch himself beyond what he has to go through in make-up. Acting badly, as Duff says? He's hardly stretching himself, falling back on the same old technique he's used in all of his characters - realising a stupid statement mid-sentence, stumbling over a Freudian slip and digging his own holes - there's not a great deal beyond that. We've been here far too often in the past and to argue, as Graham Duff does, that Coogan has something new and exciting to offer in this series is far from the truth.
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The director of the series is Matt Lipsey. He has a reasonable pedigree, credited for Border Café and a few Absolutely Productions efforts here and there, but his composition of Dr Terrible is a curiously mixed affair. It's not quite the Hammer xerox it wants to be (ie. way over budget) but the colour scheme is effectively uniform and reminiscent, which helps add to the atmosphere of later series entries like 'Scream Satan Scream!' or 'And Now The Fearing…' . Both of these, like much of the series, have an attention to detail within the frame that frequently impresses. Look closely at the offices in 'Curse Of The Blood Of The Lizard of Doom' and there's an extraordinary amount of detail, with Lipsey opting for a minimum of lingering shots on objects and background texts. Also keep a close eye on Coogan's roadside misadventures in 'Fearing…' where the insignia on the car reads 'F4TE'. Unlike the jokes, the visuals are rarely overplayed. Compare this to the we've-spent-all-this-money-so-let's-needlessly-extend-the-sketch mentality of The Armando Iannucci Shows and a creditable amount of economy shines through. Sound design compliments the relaxed, thoughtful editing in Dr Terrible too, although the music is far too anonymous. Mind you, what do you expect from an ex-member of Chelsea?
Oh, now...hang on, isn't that whatsisface out of
thingy?
As for the cast, Lipsey affords us with initially unrecognisable guest actors - Ben Miller, Simon Pegg, Mark Gatiss - which sidesteps the saddening inevitability of their contributions by provoking notably original performances from each. Mind you, Ben Miller as a homosexual is scarcely a revelation, and Pegg succeeds in leaving almost no impression whatsoever. It's a strange mix, especially accepting the fact that the script is stuffed to the gills with tedious malopropisms (eg. "excrement" in 'Frenzy of Tongs') and may-as-well-have-a-tattoo-on-their-foreheads-spelling-it-out innuendos that pointlessly collide with character confusion and embarrassment, on the assumption that the viewer is too thick to work it out for themselves.
Interestingly, the older guest actors carry matters off far better. Honor Blackman's contribution to 'Lesbian Vampire Lovers Of Lust' is well judged, as is Graham Crowden's in 'Curse Of The Blood...'. Blackman and Crowden retain their dignity throughout, with Honor managing to breathe a bit of life into her lines, but otherwise the smug inconsistencies of the writing cause rifts with the performances themselves. The fact that these two guest performers pitched their lines so well suggests that they followed their own discipline, rather than Lipsey's foggy equivelent that rendered his ensemble cast worryingly out of key.
At many points during the series certain performers accentuate the bad acting whilst others leave no such impression. 'Lesbian Vampire…' suffers from this, with Coogan deliberately going overboard as Hans Brocken (note the flick of his hair after "straight from the wedding ceremony" ) whilst his wife fails to bring the same effect over to the viewer. She instead offers up a performance that is a stereotypical comedy female character (with slow double-takes et al) rather than the Hammer duplicate that could have surfaced if the dumb humour was toned better. Related to this is the irritating dilemma that the rest of the characters are given roles which compromise the integrity of the homage throughout, failing in all the respects that Murder Most Horrid might have succeeded with similar material. A high percentage of the humour is an absurdity too far, undermining the parody which attempts to be so accurate in many expensive ways yet suffers from a script that's like an embarrassing relative at a Christmas party. Would the leading character in Witchfinder General really have said "completely forked" as in 'Scream Satan Scream!' , or played so obviously with the "punished in the ring" remark? Would he have been quite so brazen in front of his employees with thinly veiled attempts to shag his way through the kingdom? There we have the indulgence of any parody, but if these are the only types of joke that surface throughout the whole series, with a terrifying amount of misjudged, staple Coogan behavioural ticks in tow, then where the hell is this accuracy that we are told about? Is it only in the mixed metaphors? Aren't they just drowning an otherwise well-judged retread of the horror classics with bad comedy that only serves to ruin the show? Does this make it unnecessarily 'comic'? Yes, but this is in the Comedy Zone remember…
For the layman Dr Terrible ought simply to be treated as a telefantasy show, mocking as it does standard horror tales within capsuled stories, all of which take themselves relatively seriously. By that token, comedy shows that opt for fantasy elements are notoriously difficult to achieve. Only The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Red Dwarf, Goodnight Sweetheart and The League Of Gentlemen have been the great successes (with Spaced just about scraping it), suggesting that such shows need to be very carefully thought through or not commissioned at all. Lesser series are eminently forgettable - Not With A Bang, Come Back Mrs Noah and My Hero spring readily to mind. It's quite rare to achieve reknown with telefantasy comedies, and what's most interesting is the fact that they are becoming much more common. But we'll come to that later on.
Right now I want to discuss something I touched upon earlier. It's this whole business of referencing in comedy shows which has altered radically in the past decade. In the old days all you needed was Morecambe & Wise corpsing through their reworking of a well known show, a sketch like Rutland Weekend Television's Hawaii 5-0 parody, or The Goodies throwing a hundred film-specific sight gags at the viewer, and you had a thirty minute show. No one was particularly lost with any of this either. It didn't actually matter whether you'd seen Sheba of the Desert; Tim Brooke-Taylor fighting a stuffed lion was more than enough.
Standards inevitably changed. The past habits remain, but have rather faded from fashion - look at the sodding News Huddlines for proof. Take Murder Most Horrid, which has withered on the vine since its second series, yet what's always validated it is the fact that the production values (equal to Dr Terrible) are always treated as secondary to the generally good scripts, be they from Hislop & Newman or Steven Moffat. Nor does it matter whether you understood the sources particularly well - it allows for newcomers in an act of showmanship that keeps to the generally accepted dictates of mainstream comedy. Ripping Yarns is another obvious precursor. Was it essential to have read Tom Brown's Schooldays in order to enjoy that rip-snorting pilot episode?
The sea change was with the more recent series The League Of Gentlemen and Spaced. Both have been heavily criticised in the past by SOTCAA writers for their reference comedy threatening to outweigh the straight jokes, with The League Of Gentlemen Christmas special of 2000 capping it off. Their more obscure cinematic / televisual nods have the effect of their being described as innovators, when a lot of this can simply be reapplied to the more obscure sources they select.
Take series two, where the three business men are trapped in a forest on their way to a conference. It scarcely dominated the story line but people generally took it to be a faint reference to Blair Witch and thought the barbarism sequence was simply an invention of their own. It wasn't. It originates - shot by shot no less - from a 70s BBC adaptation of the M.R. James ghost story, A Warning To The Curious. For once I felt part of the club - I could pick up on the finer points of Mark Gatiss' misspent youth watching British telefantasy and did chuckle at the reference, but few others could. Mutiply this by one hundred and you have their festive edition - a tapestry of references (even to specific productions of old standards like Dracula) with few jokes.
Spaced is almost as irritating in this respect. There is the basis of a great sitcom in this particular series, but if you happen to be a novice about the films they make heavy spoofery of then where does that leave you? In my case, not laughing a great deal and wishing they'd just get on with things. It starts to outweigh the more prosaic comic aspects of the series and, as I've always found, lets it down considerably. The heavy stylising of Spaced points to the obvious fantasy land that the central characters live in, but all too often this gets in the way and fails to make much sense.
Simon Pegg hanged by the neck - the
SOTCAA
coverpage that never was.
Edgar Wright, the director of Spaced, recently made a dry cameo appearence in a series developed by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz which will surface on television soon. It's called Look Around You and is extremely funny. Directly parodying schools programming of the late-Seventies and early-Eighties, the accuracy of the parody, I'm assured, is terrific but, thankfully, you don't need to take a crash-course in that sort of programming in order to understand it. This is how it should be. Using a similar philosophy to Dr Terrible, it aims for a pitch perfect rendition of the original template, right down to the counter-clock with acoustic guitar backing prior to the opening credits. There are no actual jokes in it, but the comedy rises from the source with astonishing discipline. The rhythm of the inherently didactic style becomes funny in itself, allowing for comic repetition and exaggeration without ever compromising the premise.
These screengrabs have been heavily compressed to
avoid the dangers of Helvetica
Dr Terrible is therefore the poorer cousin in this new trend within parodic comedy. Pushing the envelope a little further than before, it fails to bond the source with the scant comedy and comes across both as awkward and, because of its graceless exaggeration, redundant. It's not "spoof plus" as Radio Times claim. It's simply a spoof too far. These people have decided that they're 'above' comedy.
I would say that the series would work far better if it wasn't a comedy, but I'm not so sure. It sets itself up as an homage for homage's sake where the cast and script are intent on gently mocking the standard tales of horror in the most laboured and scarcely amusing way. Of course it wouldn't work as a straight show, but the standard of Lipsey's direction and Duff's understanding of the genre point towards an ability to carry off a pure telefantasy series if they really wanted to. The muddled script demands instead that the series has to be undermined with an ironic slant, a raised eyebrow from the continuity announcer and a hesitant write-up in Radio Times .
A quick word about telefantasy then, seeing as though we're talking about good things. Oddly, for a term that is commonly used within its own fan circles, the word is alien to virtually everyone else. Originating from a French magazine of the 1970s, 'telefantasy' basically defines the type of programming that clearly takes part in a world not accepted as our own. Stopping short of the argument that all fiction exists in another world - there is no court lawyer named Rumpole, nor a secret service agent called David Callan - such terminology applies exclusively to fictions which adopt the trappings of the unreal and non-naturalistic: spectres, aliens, experimental science et al. The most obvious cases are Star Trek, Doctor Who, The X-Files and its ilk, right down to deceptive examples such as Press Gang. The term embraces anything that includes even minor plot elements which betray signs of the fantasy or science fiction genres, even on an intermittent basis. So, Northern Exposure counts because in one episode Ed holds up a camera and sees Fellini through his lens, and in another Maggie meets a ghost. As a result, Press Gang also counts because Steven Moffat occasionally plays around with fantasy elements. Star Trek counts because it always features aliens with putty on their foreheads, but that hardly needs stating.
What this is all leading to is that there apparently was a complete dearth in home-made, and let's be jingoistic for a second, British-made telefantasy programming during the 1990s. It may not seem important, but one of the earliest TV plays was R.U.R. on BBC-TV in February 1938, concerning robot engineering, and from that point on until the late-Eighties there was a steady flow of the recognisably telefantastic on all the main terrestrial channels. Listings have been compiled, so we know that the BBC alone would produce at least a dozen or so series, serials or plays in each year that would fit comfortably into this genre mould and would be explicitly promoted as such. "And now more time travelling with the Doctor…" was a common enough by-line of BBC continuity across three decades of broadcasting.
By the late-Eighties of course, America's adoption of telefantasy had superseded the British by a frightening distance, in a steady development that can be confidently marked out from Star Wars onwards (1977, if you don't know or can't be bothered to look it up). Nothing wrong with that in itself - in truth, it was inevitable. Yet the knock-on effect was that the BBC were scared off by such programming and made ever more grand follies throughout the Eighties (The Tripods) , with the schizoid concerns of their flagship telefantasy show becoming ones of sheer desperation (Doctor Who), to the point where it was cancelled after several years in the death slot. Pressured by the big budget resources of sausage-meat, year in, year out, 26-part series, the BBC effectively abandoned telefantasy and bought the imports instead. The genre, in any truly recognisable state, migrated to children's programming (Dark Season, The Demon Headmaster, The Queen's Nose) and stayed there.
Where Dr Terrible fits into this is simple enough. Nineties telefantasy on the BBC was characterised by the need to mix styles and, chameleon-like, blend into its background. No expressly telefantasy shows have appeared in the BBC peak-time schedules for the past decade, bar the disastrous Invasion: Earth, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and the absurdly up-its-own-arse later series of Red Dwarf. Scratch your head and you may be able to come up with only a couple more.
The rest of it has actually been widespread, but not so you'd noticed. Goodnight Sweetheart and the wretched My Hero were painted more as romantic comedies, rather than the desperately formulaic science-fiction series that they truly were. Also in the comedy field were Mulberry and So Haunt Me, both peak-time series dealing with the supernatural under the guise of whimsical sit-coms. In drama there was Moon & Son (Millicent Martin's misguided effort of 1992) and Jonathan Creek, which is promoted more as a star-led drama series rather than the resourceful fantasy series it has often proven to be. But nonetheless, all of these shows are watered-down concoctions promoted as a not-so-isolated strain of fiction - something much more familiar, cheap and cheerful.
Such a device now applies across the board - it's a common cross-pollination of genres to create harmless, interchangeable programming. You can see it on the lips of Jo Brand when she offers up an opinion on Question Time, when two tedious homosexuals bicker on Big Brother and the whole country treats it like a soap opera, or when Jamie Oliver decides to do a pop video in the middle of The Naked Chef. Such fudging of genres, again, is not a new thing or necessarily bad but it has now stewed the current televisual landscape into a pale, ersatz soup. Absolutely nowhere is Terry Nation running down a street naked, screaming "I've got ten ideas for a new SF series! Have me!"; partly because he's dead, and if he wasn't all his ideas would be crap, and also because if he did flap his Dalek-creating winky all round London town, he'd only be mistaken for Dom Joly in a novelty wig anyway.
It is into this TV culture that Dr Terrible offers itself up, so earnest to mix comedy with fantasy and horror that it appears to punch itself out. It's completely ineffectual for this very reason, falling back on past texts and archetypes of Hammer horror so as to stake out its humour - something it delivers with utter incompetence. It wants to be so many things at once, yet the end result adds up to nothing. Jack of all trades and master of none.
The real problem is that it should be fantastic. All comedy shows should be fantastic. But what we have here is an abortion. Dr Terrible sets out to be an opulent attempt to simultaneously pay tribute to Hammer whilst letting a little comic blood ooze out of it as well. Coogan, Normal, Duff and Lipsey have all fucked up by, as far as I can gather, realising this wasn't going to work during pre-production, and tacking on a frightening number of nob gags at the very last minute. The most frightening aspect to this series is that it could spawn more - even more feeble imitators, expounding a new strain of comedy that ought not to be followed up, but will be nonetheless imitated to the letter.
Bent Halo, 10/11/01
