T.W.
Friday 15th October 2010 10:56pm [Edited]
15,786 posts
Can anyone identify the exact point when Rob Brydon - the very talented writer and comic actor in shows Marion and Geoff and Human Remains - decided to jack-in humour with any kind of subtlety and depth, to become a rather creepy parody of his own celebrity persona? Which is all-the-more bizarre because he never actually had a celebrity persona to begin with? On shows such as this, Would I Lie To You? & Annually Retentive he has knowingly poked fun at a public image which exists, one suspects, only in his own mind.
Erm...
I'm too confused to be able to explain myself any more clearly than I have above, but it's just that something... Well, something went weird somewhere along the line with Rob Brydon... Either by accident or design, he seems to have made a conscious decision to assert a comic persona since he became famous. Problem is, he was never really that famous when he started to do this. He (whispers) really isn't that famous now.
If I was being disingenuous (which fortunately I never am), I might suggest that he's trying to deliberately nurture this whimsical, buffoonish "act" to bolster the view of himself as a serious, mysterious, multi-layered person "behind the greasepaint". (As mates with Steve Coogan, who also seems to have attended 'The Peter Sellers School For Taking Yourself Very Seriously', it might be that something has rubbed-off on him that way.)
Part of the point of this confusion is that I feel this kind of show is a waste of his potentially great talent.
*goes away to lie in a darkened room, brain throbbing from trying to untangle torturous mental spaghetti*