Television
Call Maddy
Simon Hoggart
Plot is not terribly important in Jonathan Creek. The ideal story line would go something like this: `Look, Jonathan, a man literally disap- peared up his own orifice, in front of 12 sober, reliable witnesses. How do you explain that?'
`Oh, that's the easy bit. What I can't explain is why he needed to buy the Fisher- man's Friends in the first place.'
Everything about the series is ridiculous. Alan Davies plays the eponymous hero, and he's a sort of magician. Caroline Quentin, of Men Behaving Badly, is Maddy and she, well, she does something or other, mainly investigating cases which seem impossible. Last week someone was eating a Wimpy in Bishops Stortford while he was simultaneously in New York. The week before a man vanished inside a locked garage. The premise is that when some- thing inexplicable happens in your life, you call Maddy. It's vaguely assumed that peo- ple know about her, like all those anxious country squires knew the name of Sherlock Holmes.
She then drafts Jonathan — if be can be bothered, since he's often in bed either fast asleep or else getting his leg across, last week with a bald tax inspector. (Female, of course. There's nowt strange about our Jonathan.) Yet it all works. The series has enormous charm, and is one of the BBC's few popu- lar dramas apart from Casualty, which it follows. It's really a sitcom with crime, and there are three vital ingredients to a suc- cessful sitcom, or so I am told by an expert: `Character, character and character. And, if you insist on a fourth, the relationships between the characters. Everything else is just scenery.'
For some reason we care about Jonathan and Maddy. We like her because she resembles her character in MBB. She ought to be on Oprah, and have a caption under- neath: 'Caroline. Otherwise Sensible Woman Who Falls For Feckless Men.' We like Jonathan, too, because he's lazy and affable and smiles a lot. (Nor is he just a smile. Davies is also very funny on The Best Show In The World . . . Probably, which is the latest Hat Trick quiz, requiring a knowledge of adverts. This show hovers on the brink of self-parody — no, my mistake, it is self-parody. Round about the year 2037 someone at Hat Trick will come up with the idea of a wacky comedy quiz about thy cleaning, with a specialist round on stain removal. Plenty of double entendres there!) Sexual tension is always important in a sitcom, either because of a relationship, a rivalry, or because the characters aren't getting enough, like Harold Steptoe and Frasier. The wrinkle in Creek is that Jonathan and Maddy used to be lovers and occasionally still are. This removes the `will-they-won't-they?' plot line but substi- tutes the more intriguing: 'will-they-meet- someone-else-or-just-pile-in-with-each - other-again?' The other characters are cardboard, though it was good to see Deb- orah Grant, whom some of us remember with moist eyes from A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, looking as lovely as ever and squeez- ing something worth watching out of the otherwise dreary figure of the Wronged Wife.
I've said at tedious length that all suc- cessful television formats end up as self- parody, and I think we've reached that stage with fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Pleasure Beach (BBC 1) was just not inter- esting enough. The genre works best with settings which ought to be dull — a driving school, a hotel — but which turn out to be packed with unexpected drama. But Black- pool Pleasure Beach is a place where peo- ple go for ersatz thrills. We were supposed to get terrifically excited this week when The Big One roller-coaster stopped in mid- flight for 65 seconds when a safety device was tripped. But people pay £4 a time to be excited on the ride. Why should we be excited because they got slightly • more excitement than they expected? The mak- ers are clearly building up the park manag- er, UR', into their principal character because he shouts a lot and is rude to his employees. I just marked him down as a loud-mouthed Northern bore, of whom knew many in my childhood.
And the commentary, read out by the otherwise hyper-cool Nick Hancock, veered between Rank Cinema's Look at Life and an early Blue Peter. 'There are always a few who want to spoil the fun. They won't suc- ceed, if security guard Bill Mullin can help it!'
Ice Warriors (ITV) has temporarily replaced Gladiators in the Saturday night kiddie slot. It's incredibly camp. The mise en scene is a world of the future — Mad Max meets Torville & Dean. City states battle against each other, under the com- mand of the booming Ice Master, Shen Jadir. The trouble is that the combatants turn out to be nice young men and women whom you might meet at your local ice- rink. And I met the Ice Master at a party just before Christmas. He's an amiable actor called Phil, who lives with his wife, an opera singer, in connubial bliss in Bayswa- ter. Spoils it, really.
Previous page
