The Stage

TV Review

Published Thursday 25 August 2005 at 15:40 by Harry Venning

Meet the Magoons has lots of energy, great opening credits and an engaging cast. This, in case you have not already guessed, is me trying to find something positive to write about.

A sitcom set in a Glasgow curry house is an original and intriguing prospect, with plenty of cross-cultural comedy to exploit, but Meet the Magoons opted instead for lowest common denominator laddishness combined with the laziest kind of slapstick. That the show’s comic climax featured men with their arses out having a food fight in the kitchen says it all. Take away the tirade of profanity, the tiresome homophobia and the naked arses and you could have been watching the Chuckle Brothers - a comparison the Chuckle Brothers would probably object to.

Conspicuous swearing usually flags up a problem with the script and the swearing came thick and fast from the off. The total absence of wit was stunning. I cannot remember one funny line - and believe me I looked for one. Quite why homophobic jokes should be any more palatable coming from the mouths of Asian actors is also a mystery to me, especially when the jokes are so ancient.

“Put in some effort,” urges a team mate at the West of Scotland Curry House five-a-side tournament, “or I’ll pull you off at half time”.

“I bet you would, you fucking faggot!” comes the rapier-sharp reply. Nice.

I first heard that joke when Paul Gascoigne moved from Newcastle to Spurs in 1991, when the punchline was far wittier”: “Crikey boss, at Newcastle we only got oranges.”

Recycling old jokes is one thing but actually making them worse in the process is quite another.

What is most frustrating is seeing good actors wasted. The four principals are charismatic and watchable but the writer has forgotten to provide them with any characterisation to work with. At the end of episode one they remained The One With The Glasses, The One With The Turban, The Welsh Homophobe and The Exasperated One. Bad sitcoms always seem to have The Exasperated One.

Meet the Magoons enjoys a primetime 9pm slot in Channel 4’s Friday night comedy strand, while Bromwell High is shunted to the very edges of the twilight zone with an 11.20pm scheduling. This is outrageously unjust, since the show is a brilliantly written, well acted, keenly observed and genuinely subversive comedy that deserves a big audience.

Despite the universal and continued success of The Simpsons, British TV is still suspicious of animation and invariably sidelines it as either a late-night novelty or as specialist interest - the fools. Don’t they realise that an animation can get away with gags that a live action sitcom can only dream of?

Bromwell High is a case in point, boasting some truly outrageous plotlines, characters and gags. Set in a south London comprehensive, it follows the misadventures of three schoolgirls and their teachers. Episode one mixed together plotlines featuring an abandoned infant, a posh new girl and a visit from a sex education specialist.

Everybody behaves with unconstrained stupidity, cruelty and spite, yet the show is pervaded by a perverse sweetness. And the script is a knockout. Great lines occur at an astounding rate, with the jokes divided between the shocking, the sweet and the surreal, the broad and the sublime. For those with a specialist interest in the genre, the animation is pretty good as well.

My thanks to the producers of E=mc2 for trying to make physics, and its most celebrated theory, accessible to a scientific ignoramus like myself. E=mc2 was a fabulously lavish costume docudrama about Einstein, his theory of relativity and the scientists whose shoulders he had to stand on to make his observation.

So as well as Albert circa 1905, we got to meet lowly-born British genius Michael Faraday shaking up the 19th century, French physicist Lavosier, whose brilliant career was cut short by a guillotine, Lise Meitner, theoretically splitting the atom in pre-war Germany and, most impressive of all, 18th-century clever clogs Emilie de Chatalet.

A teenage prodigy, Chatalet translated Newton, conducted experiments, ran a chateau, took lovers the way others took snuff, created a scientific academy, championed Voltaire, established a theatre in her home and had four children. Me, I have one child, and I’m lucky if I find time to brush my teeth.

I was entertained for the duration of its two hours but the film never really worked as drama. The scientific dialogue was far too clunky and the array of ‘Allo ‘Allo! accents bordered precariously upon the ridiculous. But it did look fabulous.

And did any of the physics penetrate my thick skull? Of course not.

DETAILS

Meet the Magoons - C4, Friday, August 19, 9.30pm

Bromwell High - C4, Friday, August 19, 11.20pm

E=mc2 - C4, Thursday, August 18, 9pm