AA Gill

Seasoned sitcom writers no. 2 - Pete Sinclair

I first met Pete Sinclair in about 2002, when we were both writing episodes of the largely forgotten, temporarily loved (and critically disliked) My Hero. This was not the first sitcom Pete had worked on. He'd created two of his own and went on to co-write four series of the much loved, critically-acclaimed Lead Balloon. Even AA Gill liked it, and he hates everything.

So the how-it-all-started flashback for Only Fools and Horses, Rock & Chips, kicked off hobbled by its grown-up self. And it wasn't helped by being about a 20-year-old sitcom that, though much loved in its time, is now nostalgia television. Nobody who's watching Glee is going to care what Trigger was like as a kid - the answer is: just the same, but younger. It was all utterly ­predictable, and predictably utter, an immeasurably long and plodding series of inevitable scenes set in 1960. The styling and sense of time was about as convincing as a junior-school history project. The amusing cameos had all the grim innuendo and constipated double entendres of an old Arthur Askey movie.

What was a dramatic surprise, though, was the lighting. I can't remember a BBC drama that looked quite this dreary and inconsistently illuminated. It must have been lit by two boy scouts with a torch and a halogen lamp. This was the laziest and most cynical and misbegotten use of a shrinking drama budget, a miserable example of licking an empty bowl. I expect, somewhere, someone imagines they're going to get a series out of it. I dearly hope not. This was The History Boys written by Chas and Dave.

Bellamy's People was originally a very funny radio satire about radio phone-ins, a simple idea that nailed a whole host of subjects and bigotry. Transferring it to television has one innate and possibly insuperable problem: the pictures. Watching a radio show is not a lot more exciting than watching rocks grow. So they dispensed with the radio bit, just keeping the phone-in host, a forgettable lad who goes out to meet English characters, mostly played by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson in rubber prosthetics. They ran through the familiar gamut of their characters for no apparent reason except amusingly to enunciate and repeat familiar clichés. After half an hour, they stopped, which was a relief.

This is The Fast Show remade as Little Britain. It's the flaccid end of a series of strained stereotypical impressions that were once immensely funny and original, and are now annoying and repetitive and reminiscent of a time in your life when this was where real catchphrases came from. The whole genre of characters without purpose needs to be revitalised, retuned, rebored and recalled.

The Fattest Man in Britain was all about the suit

Should a thin man ever put on a fat suit? Is it acceptable for a skinny actor to play an obese character, given that it is no longer accept­able for a white actor to black up as Othello, or even for a white singer to black up as a white singer, in the case of Al Jolson? I ask this because last week's big ITV drama had Timothy Spall inhabiting The Fattest Man in Britain. He wasn't so much playing him as playing an enormous prosthetic suit. He looked like a small boy smothered by a collapsed dirigible. He was a squeaking bouncy castle.

Gavin & Stacey are back for what they say will be the final series of this immensely well-written and properly amusing sitcom. The unamusing truth about comedies is that they generally die half a dozen episodes before keeling over, and Gavin & Stacey is a dead sitcom walking. Everybody has that distracted look of actors in the middle of contract negotiations, talking to their agent between takes.

This series has made a handful of them stars, but the drive and the energy are dissipated. In place of sharp observation and dialogue based on a handful of cleverly defined and delivered characters, we're left with lazy ciphers who have fallen heavily back on the sofa of cliché and the scatter cushions of repetition. The easy yuk-yuks are predictable. Nobody means it any more or even really cares. Nobody's listening.

This doesn't detract from the brilliance of the original scripts and production, but it is a salutary example of how slight is the distance between brilliance and mediocrity. Television is such an intimate medium that it can't paper its cracks with special effects or money. It relies on the belief and commitment of performers. The audience can instinctively tell when they've lost concen­tration, when it's being phoned in. So it's interesting to see Gavin & Stacey, the third series - interesting, but not very funny.

The Thick of It reaches the thin end

Peter Capaldi has invented a great comic character, as memorable as Alf Garnett, Victor Meldrew or old man Steptoe.

More mad, bad-hair acting was available in Micro Men, a faction drama based on the competition between Clive Sinclair and someone who wasn't Clive Sinclair but was very similar. Both of them made crap computers that weren't anything like as good as American ones or Korean ones or Malaysian ones. They finally went bust and were sold to Alan Sugar.

The initial problem with this drama was that soldering as a central activity really isn't very dramatic, though marginally more exciting than men who solder. While factually based on the cut-throat race to be the first official computer to be put in schools, the plot wasn't quite as nail-biting as it sounds. The producers obviously gleaned that the dullness of their contestants might be a stumbling block, so they cast a pair of comics, Alexander Armstrong as Sinclair and Martin Freeman as not-Sinclair. They did what comics invariably do in dramas: they stopped being funny. A comic who's not being funny is like a rubber tin-opener.

All was not lost, though. Riding to the rescue was Armstrong's wig, a thing of radiant, relentless hilarity. Imagine one of those "hey you, Jimmy" Scottish tam-o'-shanters, available from joke shops, with the orange hair attached. Now imagine it without the hat. There was just a shiny, bald, plastic pate with a marmalade nylon fringe. It gave an award-winning performance. When the hair was on screen, you couldn't take your eyes off it. Neither could the rest of the cast. They watched Armstrong's head with fascination. What would it do next? Well, we know what it did next. It invented the C5 and had affairs with ridiculously young girls, revealing a great and comforting truth that there is no dumb idiot like a really clever dumb idiot.

I was flicking around the iPlayer this week and I settled on Mock the Week. I don't know if it was this week's or last week's or a repeat from last year. The news it's supposed to mock is so nebulous and incidental, it doesn't register as current affairs. The presenter is that moon-faced Irishman who was christened by a dyslexic priest. Whenever I see him I can't help thinking: "You really ought to be doing something better with your life." The show is a masterclass in too competitive joke-telling and trying too hard. The joke is always the same joke and the guests are always the same people wearing different ugly prosthetic Hallowe'en masks with comedy beards and character hair. It is a show of the most abject oppression. Grown-ups desperate for attention shout pathetic inanities and slight obscenities, falling over one another to garble payoffs that are more like IOUs or begging letters. If you changed the set a little and made it, say, a National Health Service waiting room, it would be easier to believe this was a documentary about special-needs ADD patients. This is only one of a whole slew of late-night comic quizzes that lack any purpose or self-belief. This isn't satire or anger; it's not even irony. It's comedic lap-dancing with ugly men.

There is a moment at the start of all of these shows when the compere introduces the teams to the audience. As each name is spoken, the person to whom it belongs knows that they're in close-up and reacts with a little cameo of hilarity. They'll do a small gurn, make a gesture, as a reaction to their own names. It's such a pitiful moment of insecurity, such a naked insight into despair and neediness.

What humorous little mime do you pull when you hear your name called? Perhaps we should all work on one in front of the mirror, so when we're introduced to new people we can flash a surprised guffaw and point our fingers like invisible revolvers, or make a show of glamour and run our hands through imagined big hair. And then people who didn't know us before would know right away that we're really, really, very, very funny.

Getting on: another reason to adore Jo Brand

What I particularly liked is that the humour has a purpose that isn't simply the sound of its own cackling. It's potentially as good and barbed as The Thick of It.

Taking the Flak is Drop the Dead Donkey stuffed with Broadcast News and a wishful pinch of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Whenever television examines its own hubris, you tend to get more navel-gazing than forensic insight. Foreign newsgathering is a subject that's gagging for a good satiric seeing-to. This script came across like a string of well- sucked traveller's tales from the foreign desk. I have covered stories with news teams and, superficially, this was really not a million miles from the reality. But it suffered from what it was attempting to lampoon. It never looked beyond the obvious and went for the jokes that were easiest and simplest.

It was shot on location - when real life intervened, they had to flee from Kenya to Tanzania - but was set in an imaginary African country suffering a farcical civil war. The ineptitude, ruthlessness and crassness of the news teams might have been roughly authentic, but depicting this made-up nation as a tinpot comic turn of eye-rolling natives and Third World clichés really wasn't fair or funny. It's always Africa that's traduced as bongo-bongo land, never given the dignity of being a real place. African wars aren't funny. The suffering that, far too rarely, attracts the world's news isn't intrinsically amusing.

Neither can it be diminished to a backdrop for white men behaving badly, just as the danger journos put themselves in isn't imaginary or laughable. This series would have been brilliant had it not given up at the first sentence to mock the afflicted and traduce the brave, and had it, like Getting On, allowed the comedy to arise out of the pity and the stupidity. What this should have been was hard satire. What it was was racist farce.