I've often mocked the people who watch television shows that they know, beforehand, they're going to hate but go ahead and do it anyway just to wallow in their own distaste for it and then let that hatred fester before writing in to Points of View to complain about it. I've often mocked them, and with good reason. Nor have I ever quite understood the type of person who voices opinion (both negative and positive) without having, themselves, experienced the object of their opinion. So here, I fall between these two stereotypes, but so it must be.
Come Fly With Me...
The Daily Telegraph...
Debate on racism...
What debate? Is it inherently racist to 'black up'? Yes. Yes it is.
So let's move on. I watched the full half hour of this truly staggeringly awful show. I mean this literally. I was staggered at how awful it was. We are all used to the device in comedy of the stereotype. And honestly, it can be funny. If used correctly, sparingly, inventively, subversively it can be an excellent comic turn. Subtlety, here, is the key word. Come Fly With Me is perhaps the least subtle 'comedy' show in history. What humour there is aims squarely at the lowest common denominator, does not deviate from that course, and strikes with the rapid-fire regularity of a desperate lunatic throwing handfuls of shit at a wall, hoping in vain that some of it will stick.
The show could also be criticised for sticking too closely to its reality TV parallel, Airport, which ran for a terrifying ten seasons between 1996 and 2005. Mockumentary rarely works when it is simply a rehash of an existing documentary. The appeal (however lost on me) of the original was surely that the characters were real people, the situations, real situations, the comedy, real comedy and the tragedy, real tragedy. So in this respect, what Come Fly With Me is achieving is more of an exercise in mining a particularly narrow seam of comedy that has also already been mined to death. Had Airport been an early 90s flash in the pan, a fleeting fixation, fast forgotten, then maybe Come Fly With Me would not feel so tired and unoriginal.
But could it be, to use the turn of phrase of The Telegraph's Michael Deacon, that Come Fly With Me is an exercise not in comedy, but in baiting what he calls the 'wet left'? I am not comfortable with the notion that the BBC would commission a programme under the umbrella of mainstream comedy written by and starring two of Britain's most popular TV personalities for the sole purpose of pissing off their biggest supporters. Deacon does not suggest that was the case, but adds that it 'might as well have been so', which leaves us with a real question: what was the BBC thinking when they allowed this abomination onto the air? It is not, leaving aside the fact that from beginning to end we are faced with nothing but base homophobia, racism, sexism and an overall denegration of acceptable social values, funny. It is not funny.
Back to stereotypes. Back to subtelty. Back to all those things I was talking about before. Where is the subtelty of a gay, Irish air steward with eight brothers who are all gay and all air stewards? Why do we need to be told all of this information within ten seconds of the character's introduction? The art of a sketch-based comedy show with recurring characters, as the Fast Show demonstrated, is development. Also, we can see that he's an air steward, hear from his accent that he's supposed to be Irish and can imagine (perhaps wrongly...because there's the subtelty and there's the subversion that's possible with stereotypes) that he's gay.
WE ARE NOT STUPID.
I'm not even going to get into the other ways in which this show is profoundly offensive, there's just no point.
Also, Happy New Year to the three people who follow my blog. In 2011 I'm sure we can look forward to a lot more things really pissing me off.
