One of the purposes of psycho- therapy is to grant patients better conversations than they are capable of having with themselves. One of the central jokes in Help (Sundays, 9.30pm) is that the clients who turn up in Peter the therapist's office are all but incapable of conversing with anyone. Each is a skilled, obsessive monologist capable of holding forth about himself in 50-minute tranches, without ever listening to what he is saying. Peter's interruptions are just that.
Starring Chris Langham (Roy Mallard from People Like Us) as the therapist and Paul Whitehouse in seven different roles as his patient, Help owes something to the dialogues between the two Johns, Fortune and Bird, on Bremner, Bird and Fortune. It owes even more, however, to The Fast Show, which, with Whitehouse to the fore, placed an extraordinary importance on character. This show slows things down a little and places even more on it. In a sitcom landscape still dominated by situation, this is a diversion in the right direction, even if placing creatures in the specimen jar of psychotherapy seems a bit of a short cut to those of us brought up to believe that character manifests itself in action and that thought bubbles are for Snoopy cartoons.
The trick that Whitehouse (who wrote the scripts with Langham) must pull is to expose his characters, while leaving them impregnable to Peter. In two instances, the barrier is language itself. Clement, an old pukka public school boy with an uncertainly tied bow-tie and a handkerchief dangling two-thirds out of his top pocket, has a problem pronouncing words containing the letter "r" "plopelly". The disability makes him, he thinks, sound like a "cletin", and he is convinced it is the result of years of being buggered at school. Having satisfied himself with this narrative, Clement is immune to Peter's counter-suggestion that what he really needs is speech therapy. His means of not listening, aided by genuine deafness, are to bark "yes", "yes" and, finally, "pardon?" whenever Peter speaks. As a comic creation, he is the near-equal of Whitehouse's Rowley Birkin QC, whose anecdotes always ended with the explanation "we were veh, veh drunk".
The Greek wife-beater Johnny - short, presumably, for Johnny Foreigner - also uses his uncertainty with the English tongue as a protective shield. He says that his daughter wants to get "pierced". Peter thinks he said she wants to get pissed. It is, he says, a "racialist" society, when he means (or does he?) that it is a multiracial one. Peter stumbles over some of Johnny's metaphors - "I am like a lost snail in the night" - but Johnny stumbles more over Peter's therapy-speak. Told that psychotherapists are not comfortable with the word "crazy", Johnny says that is like a butcher not wanting to say "pork".
Other avoidance techniques are demonstrated by an aggressive, nasty Irishman who pretends to be a dog to illustrate that he is not "barking"; a damaged drug abuser who makes up a story about being able to squat in other people's minds; and Gary, a chirpy cockney who is there only to mollify his wife, who turns everything into a disorientating joke. Kelvin, meanwhile, presents his sex addiction as a boast: he has sex four or five times a day and is not sure if this is "normal".
Whitehouse's inventions are not all equally strong. Kelvin looks like a one-joke Scouser. The druggy's fantasies are too realistically laborious (and derivative of Being John Malkovich). There are also a few too many straight-down-the-line gags for my taste: Johnny, the violent father, wants Peter to guess where his teenage daughter wants to be pierced. "Her belly button, tongue?" he suggests. "No, in Hounslow," he replies, a Two Ronnies line that is unworthy of the rest of their dialogue.
In one character, however, Whitehouse hits a seam of pure gold. This is Monty, the kind of wisdom-filled cabby who tends to ring LBC late at night. "I am an old Jew with bad knees," he explains, "whose wife is tragically a shadow of her former self, driving a cab that has seen better days. It's not a bed of roses, but it could be a lot worse." Monty, who cares for his wife, who has severe Alzheimer's, in effect self-medicates his depression before it has a chance to develop, by cheering himself up with old holiday photographs and cheating London's traffic with crafty short cuts. Told by Peter that he has been a carer all his life - first of his mother, traumatised by the Holocaust, then of his feral younger brother and now of his wife - Monty gently says "carer" is a new word: he has always considered himself a son, a brother, a husband. In his self-completion, Monty utterly defeats Peter, rendering him redundant except, embarrassingly, as a friend.
Whitehouse's Monty is an invention of sheer brilliance, both entirely naturalistic and a calculated attack on therapy culture. Peter notches up a trivial victory, next to Monty's stoicism, when chirpy Gary unexpectedly breaks and admits that, beneath his facade, he is a lost soul.
At first I thought this oddball show was just a platform from which Whitehouse could show off. But Help, perhaps like psychotherapy itself, is more rewarding than it seems. And the make-up artists deserve Emmys.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
