Benji Wilson

The Windsors - a real blast of punk comedy

I'm not bang up to date on treasonous acts and how to avoid them, but the writers and cast of The Windsors probably shouldn't expect an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party any time soon.

Flowers grows on you

True to its title, Flowers needed time to come in to full bloom. Channel 4 played out the first two episodes back to back last night, which is what broadcasters normally do when they want you to know they deem this or that drama or comedy to be An Important Event. In the case of Flowers though, it was a shrewd move.

McIntyre's brand is a finer art than late-night comedy

Michael McIntyre's brand of light entertainment is a finer art than expletive-filled late-night comedy.

The originalDanger Mouse was an Eighties cartoon on ITV that was essentially a rough parody of James Bond. DM, with his eye patch and his flying car, was charged with saving the world from a large toady Blofeld called Baron Greenback. David Jason used to voice the mouse with Terry Scott as Penfold. Now Alexander Armstrong is "DM" and the comedian Kevin Eldon as Penfold the hamster.

I also wondered what children would make of Danger Mouse v2.0's narrative style, which was so self-reflexive and knowing that at times it was like an episode of Sherlock. "Now, the world's 12th greatest sidekick Penfold will speak the first line of the new series," said our narrator early on, before going on to point out the show's improbabilities, saying "I'm sure the writers will have perfectly reasonable answers to these questions."

But just when I was about to get really angry about what had been done to another childhood memory I went back and watched a few vintage DMs. It turned out they were all pretty arch too.

My instinct was that all of this would go way over the heads of my kids, who tend to laugh at pratfalls and fart gags (and I hardly need stress that I have no idea where they got that from). But I have a feeling that the wordiness and the ironic humour seeps in. That might be one reason why I remember Danger Mouse fondly without, until this week, being quite sure what it was that I fondly remembered.

There are few real ratings bankers on television but Doc Martin is one of them. The cranky, haemophobic doc (Martin Clunes) in the chocolate box Cornish village has been around for more than a decade now, and is about as safe-a-source of 9  million viewers as a picture of Kim Kardashian's bottom.

Yet nothing actually happens in Doc Martin. It is a drama that negates drama. This new series opener managed to jemmy in a boat crash that was genuinely shocking, if only because so entirely unexpected. Yet within minutes the tone of gentle gaiety was re-established.

Looking at this week's offerings it occurs to me that there are really just three types of drama on television today - the ones where you know what's going to happen, the ones where you don't, and the ones where nothing happens. I leave you to draw your own conclusions from the fact that the dramas that exist mainly to reassure - New Tricks, Death in Paradise, Doc Martin - are by some way the most popular.

Danny and the Human Zoo was Lenny Henry being granted an hour and a half of prime time to cement his own myth. I mean myth as in idealised conception - given his first gig as a TV writer, Henry chose to cloak the story of his life growing up in Seventies Dudley in a veil of fiction ("Almost every single event in this story is... kinda true. Honest", read the opening caption).

Lenny thus became Danny, and unsurprisingly Danny came out of the whole thing rather well. The black country in the Seventies, the drama made clear, was a pretty horrible place, full of casual racism and terrible haircuts, but dear Danny was an irresistible talent. He only had to do his Frank Spencer impression and women fawned, the world laughed, and fame of the sort that would one day allow him to embellish his own story on BBC One beckoned.

Loose autobiography is generally bad biography. A combination of selective memory and latent narcissism means that given the option to be only vaguely honest about their past, few authors can resist the temptation to make themselves look better. That's not to say that playing fast and loose with the truth can't be fun, but if they're going to be "kinda true" stories, they had better be darned good ones. Danny and the Human Zoo was simply not that good a story, predictably told and unsure when to be serious, when to be funny. It trod similar sociocultural turf to Zadie Smith's White Teeth, both the novel and the subsequent Channel 4 adaptation, and it suffered by comparison.

Dare I say it, given that national treasure Henry wrote it, but I think the problem was in the script - it veered alarmingly from some quite brutal, prolonged fight scenes to a lot of plodding, sentimental schlock. The dialogue was workaday, and the supporting characters - Danny's close childhood mates, in particular - were barely fleshed out at all. The young actor Kascion Franklin made a good fist of playing the young Lenny Henry, doing passable impressions of people like Muhammad Ali and Elvis whom he can only have seen on YouTube. Yet he was being asked to play a character who, to all intents and purposes, was brilliant, unimpeachable, irrepressible, attractive and hilarious. That person doesn't exist, or if he does he's not a very interesting character to watch for 90 minutes. Then again, what did the BBC expect by asking Henry to write a drama all about himself: a self-administered hatchet job?

Cradle to Grave was, in comparison to Danny and the Human Zoo, a similarly refractive concoction, a picaresque of the young life of the DJ and celebrity Danny Baker, written in part by Baker and based on his own memoir. Once again we were thrust in to the so-bad-they-were-good Seventies, as the Chopper bike tootling past in the background made plain, but we'd shifted from Dudley to east London and from one wide-eyed Danny boy to another. Sensibly, Baker and his co-writer Jeff Pope used this young Danny as the window on the world, not as a protagonist - he existed mainly as a voice-over setting the scene for the various travails of the Baker family. Instead, the main character was Danny's father Fred, played by Peter Kay as part Arthur Daley, part Del Boy. Mostly, though, he was Peter Kay, barely bothering with a cockney accent but still blessed with the single funniest face on television, one of the few men who can make me laugh with the sound off.

Cradle to Grave was funnier than Danny and the Human Zoo, and it managed to achieve the crucial balance of being fond of its characters without ever worshipping them. Yet just as with Danny and the Human Zoo, and its association with Lenny Henry, I found the fact that Cradle to Grave was based on the life of Danny Baker a distraction. Essentially, both of these shows were self-congratulatory because they all came from the perspective of the viewer knowing that, ultimately, both of these Lenny/Dannys have done pretty good. Self-congratulation is what humour should be mocking, not the stuff of humour itself.

I found An Evening with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse by far the best of this week's trips into the past. This was a celebration of 25 years on the BBC for Enfield and Whitehouse, the sort of programme - filled with an audience of backslapping fellow celebs all praying that their "An Evening with" will come around soon - that would usually have me reaching for the sick bucket.

Enfield and Whitehouse, however, chose to celebrate their own splendiferousness by turning on themselves - the gurning celebs in the stalls were all played by Enfield and Whitehouse, and rather than asking "real" Harry and Paul the usual questions about how on earth did they ever get to be so funny or what's their favourite yoghurt they asked questions like, "Who do you vote for?", "Have you ever taken drugs?" and "Are you scared of making jokes about Islam?"

In other words this was Enfield and Whitehouse using one of TV's cosiest rituals to cause a bit of trouble. Yet at the same time it was interspersed with a greatest hits collection of their old sketches that made you wonder how sketch comedy ever died a death. The upshot of it all was that what could have been a wistful, pipe-and-slippers recollection ended up making Enfield and Whitehouse look current and fearless. In a week when everyone else was dawdling down memory lane, credit to them for trying to blow it up.

TV nostalgia ain't what it used to be

Benji Wilson reviews the week in TV, including An Evening with Harry Enfield and Paul WHitehouse, Danny and the Human Zoo and Cradle to Grave.

Interview: meet Simon Brodkin

Tossing $600 at the Fifa president has brought Simon Brodkin's pranks to world attention. He tells Benji Wilson how and why he does it.