Benji Wilson

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Life's Too Short and Rev reviewed

Benji Wilson gives his verdict on the first episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new mockumentary series Life's Too Short and the return of the sitcom Rev.

In the big-name ya-boo-sucks stakes, Life's Too Short will probably prove unsurpassable. Rev, however, was much funnier. Anchored around an impeccably turned performance from Tom Hollander as the vicar whose conscience and the real world don't get on, there is a timeless quality to this series.

This may be because the Rev Smallbone's struggle with himself and the world is essentially the struggle faced by folk of faith for all eternity; theologians call it theodicy and take it very seriously: writer James Wood has worked out that precisely because it is usually taken so seriously, it can also be very funny. Rev's standard mode is to undercut moments of seriousness, sublimity or sentiment with a comic sucker punch. The Rev's internal monologue last night (trying to think Holy Thoughts while being unable to stop himself wondering whether it would be that weird-tasting cauliflower cheese for lunch) was a classic example.

The plot was old-school sitcom with Smallbone emerging from last series's crisis of faith to foil a mugger. He had merely bumped into him but this spiralled into a Pride of Britain award nomination for the "Kung-Fu Vicar", which prompted the intervention from Lord Voldemort, a crisis of conscience and so on. People talk about what Rev has done for the Church. But it has also done much to prove that sitcoms can be warm-hearted, current, and still make you gag on your risotto with laughter.

Gervais and Merchant's comedy is generally held to be the antithesis of this kind of thing - it's known as the comedy of embarrassment, because it creates characters so deluded they are unbearable to watch. Their new Walter Mitty is Warwick Davis, "Britain''s go-to dwarf" as he styles himself, who still thinks he's a big shot (dwarf puns being unavoidable in Life's Too Short) after starring as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi in the Eighties. The joke is that he's not a big shot at all, and all it takes is a camera trained on his existence for a few hours to show that his life is rubbish.

You feel a little bit sorry for Davis, not because he is portrayed as both feckless and conceited but because he has big shoes to fill (pun two). In Gervais and Merchant's previous two hits, Gervais was front and centre. His performances as David Brent and then Andy Millman are easily overlooked, because, aside from all the funny lines, they were really good. He invented a whole new screen language for faux documentary - a pained lexicon of glances and gurns, saying a dumb thing to camera and then realising it was slightly dumb but windmilling on anyway.

So when Warwick Davis starts blundering on about how he is not homosexual, and that in fact he has many a notch on his bedpost, that's a Brent-ish line delivered in a Brentish cadence and prompting a distinctly Brentish wince. And Davis is not as good at it as Gervais. I dare say had you watched Life's Too Short a decade ago you would have thought it matchless revelry. Now it's just not as good as The Office.

At least not yet. Gervais and Merchant's comedy does have a habit of growing on you (dwarf pun three. My sacking imminent). Extras, in particular, was sold to us as a series of celebrity spoofs and ended up being an affecting character piece about what happens when your friends make it and you don't. As that series proved, Gervais and Merchant have a gift for human drama as well as sometimes inhuman comedy. They have earned the right for us to see how Life's Too Short plays out.

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