Tom Baker (II)

Douglas Adams 'Doctor Who' script turned into novel

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author wrote City of Death starring Tom Baker in 1979. Now it will be extended by writer James Goss...

TV commissioners take note. Impressions aren't funny. The actual act of sounding like someone else is an impressive skill, especially if you can do more than one, but by themselves, impressions are not in the remotest bit amusing. Jon Culshaw may do a canny Tom Baker, but the mere act of sounding like Tom Baker is about as humorous as getting stuck in a lift. With Jon Culshaw.

So it was refreshing to see Terry Mynott bringing something very different to the TV impressions table in his rather bleak new sitcom The Mimic.

Dour, slow and not the cheeriest of concepts, The Mimic doesn't scream hit. The tale of maintenance man Martin Hurdle, who muddles through life with only his uncanny ability as a mimic to perk himself up, isn't a gag-fest. It ekes out jokes and woos you in with pathos and the likeable Mynott.

It wasn't the most sure-footed debut, but purely for bravery and trying something different, I'm willing to come back next week. Mynott could knock out 27 minutes of Terry Wogan and Ronnie Corbett impressions, but he's tested new waters here and his exploration of the mundane, outsiders and the ordinary showed brief glimmers of potential.

And the fact that he didn't just wheel out a Tom Baker impression means that I'm willing to give those glimmers a chance.

When a show causes your hands to involuntarily clamp your face in a Munch-like scream of a Sunday evening, it seems careless not mention it. And so, while there was some good, honest programme-making in the schedules last week I must purge myself of Kookyville before returning to the sphere of the critically temperate.

"Welcome to a sketch show with a difference ..." purred Fenella Fielding, deployed in the Tom Baker/Little Britain role of ironic posho narrator. "These people are not actors or comedians and there's no script ... they're just real funny people."

And if you thought that some combo of comedians, acting, scripts or forethought was almost fundamental to the sketch-show format, then you obviously lack the basic contempt for human beings of the Kookyville commissioners. This, you see, was nothing less than the first example of "constructed reality comedy", in no way the kind of idea that would be farted out by an Apprentice contestant should they ever be asked to tackle TV production.

As with your basic constructed reality show, the idea was that a bunch of purportedly non-fictional people go about their purportedly non-fictional lives while excreting stilted dialogue in obviously staged set-ups. Only here, in a presumed attempt to justify that comedy billing, the dialogue came with the added stench of sub-Frankie Boyle obnoxiousness.

Not every scene was unwatchable. The one involving two Essex girls' protracted intellectual struggle at a farm was merely a failed audition piece for The Only Way is Essex, while Bradford entrepreneur Afzal safely plumped for being re-christened Ricky Meh-vais with his unofficial tribute to David Brent. More attention-grabbing, sadly, was swearword-happy pensioner Ronnie who, likely concerned about the mellow view of her generation being peddled by BBC1's Last Tango in Halifax, mimed a diarrhoea episode in her local Chinese. Before volunteering to chew Simon Cowell's balls.

So vanilla, you say? Well, then, I give you the mother-daughter pair Suzanne and Annierose, seen gawping and gasping at a dwarf before contemplating the horror of one trying to suckle Annierose's breasts. And - my favourite - the hotelier couple who joked about trying to throw a Thalidomide victim through a window, which also allowed for that old impressionist's standard routine, wholly ignored by Rory Bremner et al, the "ickle-wickle Thalidomide victim voice".

The programme was fair in one respect; the joke, such as it was, was on everyone: the short and disabled; the "real" comics, representing all those funny, uncouth sorts outside metropolitan media circles; the godforsaken viewer; and, of course, the beleaguered Channel 4, increasingly prone to trolling audiences for attention. In that respect, Kookyville succeeded, whipping up a social media gale and instant reviews along the lines of "Put this atrocity out of its misery". But the obvious point, inside the Twittersphere and out, is that exercising your right to provoke mindlessly will eventually result only in mass unfollows.

Chris Addison Interview

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