Ricky Gervais

Derek and the enigma of Ricky Gervais

Just when I think I've got Ricky Gervais figured out, he undertakes a new project that turns my preconceptions on their head.

Opinion: Hang on, Derek is very good after all

When Derek started on Channel 4 a month ago I was fairly indifferent to it. After the controversial one-off last year and the disappointingly broad Life's Too Short it looked as if Ricky Gervais had maybe mislaid his mojo. Four episodes in, however, I'm wondering if he has found it again.

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It's around the time that Coldplay's Paradise is used to soundtrack some guileless hi-jinks on a beach that we seriously start to wonder. Might Derek actually be a spoof, a subtle piss-take of the 'big-hearted', 'down to earth' comedy drama? Because the alternative is too grisly to contemplate.

Derek is so flimsy, it's in danger of floating away on the next light breeze. The music manipulates the emotions shamelessly. Character development is ignored in favour of clunky pieces-to-camera during which we're reminded that yes, Hannah is very kind and yes, Derek is very well-meaning. Meanwhile, the plotting is little more than a delivery mechanism for the kind of moral lessons that Jackanory might have rejected as a touch simple-minded. An increasingly baffling affair - we can't wait for Ricky Gervais's triumphant reveal in ten years time.

I could be wrong but I think the message Ricky Gervais wants us to take away from this episode is that selfishness is a bad thing. It's a sentiment rammed home in every other scene and backed up with nuclear levels of Coldplay. As the old folk go for a trip to the seaside, sweet, selfless Hannah stays behind, because someone has to help a new resident settle in. Then the week's glaring baddie hoves into view as a snooty relative (a former schoolmate of Hannah) daring to sneer at her job.

Would anyone, however self-centred, walk into a care home and sneer at the staff for being failures? Luckily, there are better helpings of comedy at the beach.

There are some lovely moments in Ricky Gervais's gently observed comedy tonight as Derek (Gervais) and the residents of Broad Hill nursing home enjoy a day trip to the seaside with the compliments of the long-suffering Dougie (Karl Pilkington). While they are away attention turns to soft-hearted care assistant Hannah (Kerry Godliman), forced to reconsider her own achievements when an old, and far more successful, schoolmate turns up at the home to her relegate her mother to the sidelines of her life.

Ricky Gervais's programme continues. Tonight, Derek is played by a sad-eyed puppy in a paper hat. He calls an ambulance when he finds an injured baby bird in the garden, and later there's a death for him to get sad and sweetly confused about. The character of Kev, with his exact mimicking of Gervais's stand-up voice, is a constant reminder of who you're really watching, so it's impossible to feel anything but bowel-twistingly awkward. Gervais playing humble is as convincing as David Cameron eating a pasty.

Gross-out sex obsessive Kev is the character who sticks out like a sore thumb in Ricky Gervais's otherwise sensitive comedy drama. But then hitting raw nerves is a Gervais speciality and tonight the odious Kev sets out to persuade Derek to lick a toad. Until a baby bird in need of urgent medical care attracts our ingenuous hero's attention. It all makes for a bizarre mix of the sentimental and the sick-making, with just enough laughter to keep it on track.

What, then of the fictional hero of Derek (Channel 4), who has unspecified learning difficulties? If Ricky Gervais's role in The Office was a masterpiece of the comedy of embarrassment, his title role in Derek is an exercise in sentimental manipulation.

In the third episode last night, Derek, conceived as a perpetually gentle and innocent man, stumbled around the care home where he works, while the rapacious daughter of an old lady who lives there counted the days till her death so she can get hold of her diamond ring. What happened to the ring was the plot line, but Derek kept coming round again for us viewers to feel sorry for him, while a piano soundtrack played sad music.
Gervais stuck to the single note of pathos, wandering about with a moribund fledgling chick in his hand or wailing, "I love working here but I'm always sad," as another old woman died.
Other characters trotted by as one-trick ponies. The care assistant Hannah (Kerry Godliman) is another Dawn from The Office; Kev (David Earl) is addicted to self-deluding sexual boasting. Dougie the handyman (Karl Pilkington with funny hair) is there to give people their comeuppance.

As an exponent of look-at-me humour, Ricky Gervais has come to rival Doris Day or Lucille Ball. His master in sentimentality, though, must be Norman Wisdom, who at least varied his appeal by a bit of energetic slapstick. In Fifties terms Norman was "a bit simple"; Derek, in today's social-work-speak, is "vulnerable" - which actually makes him invulnerable to audience criticism. It would be like kicking the Andrex puppy.

Kerry Godliman interview

Kerry Godliman on Derek co-stars Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington, and why her career has taken a nosedive...