Television - Forget education, education, education: comedy is king, writes Andrew Billen. Little Britain (BBC3) My Life in Film (BBC3)

Professor Patrick Barwise, in his review of the BBC's digital-only television channels, concluded that BBC3 was not good value for money because it reached too few people. His solution was for it to loosen the remit that requires it to entrance the 25- to 34-year-old audience. Doubtless the professor was thinking of its celebrity-obsessed, Heat-style shows Liquid News and Celebdaq, which, before being culled in January, was attracting only 25,000 viewers of any age.

But as so often with reports, there was a professorial lag between the research and the publication of the conclusions. In the meantime, the BBC's crafty new director general, Mark Thompson, had already addressed the problem. In his deliberately opaque lecture to the Edinburgh TV festival, media Kremlinologists finally discerned a new BBC commitment to comedy. "Ha, ha, ha" would be Thompson's equivalent of Tony Blair's "education, education, education". BBC3 has turned out to be the comedy chalkface.

I am not complaining. We all need a laugh. It is interesting, however, that the transition has come about not by minis-terial diktat or through consultation with the regulator, Ofcom, but by a logic that any commercial broadcaster would recognise. BBC3 was not great at attracting 25- to 34-year-olds partly because the programmes it aimed at them, such as Celebdaq, were amateurish, and partly, no doubt, because 25- to 34-year-olds have other things to do, such as clubbing and changing nappies. But BBC3, like the rest of the corporation, is rather good at comedy. Its hit of last year, Little Britain, won audiences of up to 453,000, and many more when it was repeated on BBC2.

The opening episode of the second series (19 October) reached nearly two million viewers, a result that Sky One and E4 would kill their best Friends reruns for. Little Britain is derivative and less inspired, not to mention less fast, than The Fast Show, and less wicked than The League of Gentlemen, but there is no disputing that the sketch show from David Walliams (surely a typo at the register office) and Matt Lucas has added to the national stock of characters. In the first episode of series two, the nightmare teenager Vicky Pollard ("Yeah but no but yeah but") was caught stealing a whole cash register from the local supermarket, and virginal Dafydd, who wrongly claims to be the only gay in the village, came out to his parents, leaving his mother to ask kindly: "Have you had no arse action at all?"

We also got some new characters. These included a hideously obese woman named Bubbles who, overconfident of her charms, revealed herself in full-frontal glory; a wet called Harvey who, at 30, still suckles from Mummy's breast; and two village bigots, one of whom showed expertise at projectile vomiting. The new additions are crude inventions, straight out of Viz magazine, but an antidote to the bathos of much of Little Britain. Unlike Royston Vasey, Little Britain is peopled by characters less exotic than they seem: Dafydd may not be gay; Andy is not really disabled; the community smiles upon Emily even if she is a rubbish transvestite.

After Little Britain on 19 October came a new series starring Kris Marshall called My Life in Film. Its premise is dire: a daydreamer called Art, who sells tickets at the local fleapit, has aspirations to be a screenwriter but, instead, finds his life resembling classic films. Walter Mitty meets French and Saunders. But the first episode, a parody of Top Gun, was a gem. Beginning with the portentous caption "Three per cent of motorists fail their test five or more times", it had Art spending a week on an intensive driving course that doubled as pilot school. He is soon locked in rivalry with a boy speeder and in love with his instructress, a Nicole Kidman substitute played by Anna-Louise Plowman. Tom Cruise - I mean, Art - soon crashes, loses his nerve and threatens to quit. In a very funny scene, he visits Jones, one of the passengers, in hospital and addresses his apologies to a patient bandaged head to foot. When Jones, who is making a full recovery, hails him from another bed, Art marvels that he can throw his voice.

This second episode, a spoof of Rear Window, was less successful, and another coming up, based on The Shining, is contrived beyond belief. But the series works because it is obviously a labour of film-love, and also because Marshall is an attractive performer whose gormlessness never grates. His character, moreover, has its own fascination. Art seems to be in platonic love with his flatmate Jones and in denial of Jones's girlfriend, while himself being petrified of relationships. As he says of the glam driving instructor: "I prefer a different type of woman - more unattainable."

Incidentally, I was glad that BBC3 showed the real Top Gun the other week. Marshall's parody revealed what a good bad film it really is. I just hope that when we get to his take on Federico Fellini's 8f, the channel will show that, too - or I'll be as lost as the 25- to 34-year-olds. Incidentally, also, the mutation of BBC3 is not yet complete. It is still, at times, a dumping ground for the corporation's charter-review worthiness. In the past week, it has been full of programmes about cancer, culminating in a three-hour mastectomy session. Its puzzled viewers must sometimes wish that BBC3 followed commercial logic a little more rigorously.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website