The Stage

TV review

Published Monday 6 October 2008 at 13:25 by Harry Venning

Once you have got over the shock of realising that the late nineties are now considered fertile ground for nostalgia, there is a great deal to enjoy about the new BBC sitcom Beautiful People.

Written by Jonathan Harvey and based upon the childhood memoirs of Simon Doonan, creative director of Barney’s department store in New York, Beautiful People uses flashbacks, narration and fantasy sequences to show just how awful it is to grow up in Reading. Especially if you are a gay, adolescent boy desperate for glamour, excitement and exoticism.

Reading doesn’t come out of the show very well - a day trip to Slough is regarded as an exciting excursion - but young Simon’s reminiscences are a little more forgiving towards his slightly eccentric family, who are portrayed with a warmth and affection that is wholly endearing. Apart from the occasional incident of blackmail, brawl in the street, accusation of adultery, experiment in transvestism or drunken debauch on homemade cucumber and gherkin wine, the Doonans are as normal as the next family. The next family being Simon’s irrepressibly camp best friend Kyle and his sexually rapacious mother.

The humour is gentle rather than hysterical, but the jokes are clever, unforced and in plentiful supply. Great performances too, particularly from its young stars Luke Ward-Wilkinson as Simon and Layton Williams as Kyle, aka Kylie.

Apart from some transatlantic locations and a couple of new accents, Little Britain USA was mostly more of the same old jokes recycled. Which isn’t entirely a bad thing, familiarity breeding contentment among the modern sketch show audience.

Under the auspices of prestigious US channel HBO, Walliams and Lucas were invited to showcase some familiar characters stateside, and introduce a couple of brand new grotesques. These included the deeply embittered eighth astronaut on the moon, a state trooper who becomes sexually aroused whenever he handles firearms and Rosie O’Donnell, who guest-starred and gamely allowed Marjorie from FatFighters to torment her for being large and lesbian.

The Art of Arts TV documented the many attempts of television to cover the arts, and their inevitably unsuccessful efforts at striking a balance between the pompous and the patronising, the populist and the portentous.

Beginning with the condescendingly avuncular Huw Weldon on Monitor, and ending with the “conspicuously unintelligent” Culture Show - Germaine Greer’s description, not mine - The Art of Arts TV served up a spectacular feast of archive clips, the most enjoyable of which invariably involved panels of eggheads furiously locking their intellectual antlers in unedifying shouting matches. Not to forget a drunken Tracey Emin staggering around a televised studio debate, trying and failing to find the exit.

Melvyn Bragg popped up with such regularity that you could easily believe that he was personally involved in every single arts programme ever produced. Arena, The South Bank Show, Omnibus and The Late Review were all covered, as well as the short lived and long forgotten seventies offering Mainstream. As anodyne as its title, the most disturbing aspect of Mainstream was presenter Susan Stranks’ canary yellow dungarees. Damian Hirst certainly never produced anything as shocking.

DETAILS

Beautiful People - BBC2, Thursday, October 2, 9pm

Little Britain USA - BBC1, Friday, October 3, 9.30pm

The Art of Arts TV - BBC4, Monday, September 29, 10pm