Taking The Flak

Now here's a moment of true excitement: there's a funny comedy on the BBC. Like me, I'm sure it's something of a relief to you when you are fortunate enough to witness such a rare event but I was more than impressed with Taking The Flak

Taking the Flak is a satire on TV foreign correspondents. More precisely, it is a satire on John Simpson, the BBC's foreign editor. David Bradburn, played by Martin Jarvis, is about the same age, weight and hirsuteness as Simpson and is the BBC's "chief foreign editor". It must have been good fun for BBC people to guy Simpson - who has, to be sure, a measure of the pomposity all famous broadcasters acquire. But to make him into a womanising, fraudulent vampire, sucking the facts out of local stringers and fixers in order to feed his self-dramatising "pieces to camera", is a terrible thing to do to this boldest and most illuminating of reporters. Still, satire is unfair by nature. Broadcasters dish out much worse to politicians and other public figures who don't have their comfort and salaries, and it would be fine if it were funny. But it's very bad.

TV review: Taking the Flak

John Preston reviews the first episode of Taking the Flak, BBC Two's new comedy drama series set among war reporters in an African country.

Taking the Flak (BBC2), which competes for the same airtime, begins promisingly enough. Harry, the local stringer in Karibu, is doing a piece to camera: "This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." (Any plague-spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.) Over his shoulder, the cheerful life of Karibu pursued the even tenor of its way.

At this point the BBC's visiting firemen arrived, to cover the crisis, led by Martin Jarvis (playing, lets face it, John Simpson), and it all went to hell in a handcart. (Perhaps Susie Dent can explain the handcart.) The plot was chaotic. The locals were not always intelligible. And I am very sorry for the woman from the World Service who had to mime incessant diarrhoea. You wonder if the trip to Kenya was worth the shilling, as some of the funniest scenes were back at the BBC where Nigel (Mackenzie Crook) was holding the fort with minimal fortitude ("The editor of the six is literally foaming at the mouth. He bit a picture researcher").

Andy Hamilton was asked recently why he stopped writing Drop the Dead Donkey, the granddaddy of this genre, and he said you couldn't keep up. Damien Day - GlobeLink's shameless star reporter - putting a teddy bear on a bombed building would be considered quite mild now.

TV Review: John Simpson on Taking the Flak

War reporter John Simpson reviews Taking the Flak, BBC Two's new comedy drama about a team of news reporters in war-torn Africa, whose lead character is not entirely unlike Simpson himself.

Taking the Flak had satirical aims based around the absurdities and egos of 24-hour news, and it pointedly mocked the BBC's very own BBC News channel. It followed a big story breaking in an African country, with a vain chief reporter, a harried producer, a right-on, shrewish World Service presenter with diarrhoea (a joke that ran and ran) and a junior correspondent whose patch was being invaded.

It was sporadically funny - particularly the character of a moon-eyed, Sloaney children's charity worker and only the occasional glimpse of any actual war or unrest going on - but it told us nothing we hadn't seen before on Drop the Dead Donkey and other similar shows. The characters didn't feel original (as ever, the journalists were all shysters and unprofessional). The jokes and satire went one way and after an hour of in-jokery, you did find yourself wondering: if the BBC is so keen to mock its own news operation, using recognisable presenters and graphics, why should we trust the real thing?

Taking the Flak is dependent on collegiate war stories too, rather more literally in this case since BBC2's new comedy is about foreign correspondents covering a small African war that has just got big. For Harry Chambers, the local stringer, this is a good news/bad news deal. On the one hand, his long service in this grim station may finally be rewarded with a few seconds' airtime on the main bulletins. On the other, he is almost certain to be "bigfooted" - edged out by the arrival of a more famous colleague, whose in-depth research consists in pumping the hotel waiter for basic facts 40 seconds before a live two-way with Sophie Raworth (who appears as herself). The fact that BBC News felt comfortable about allowing its anchors and studio to add verisimilitude to the comedy tells you something about its lack of real bite. And although this comedy, too, is built on the black humour of a closed cadre of professionals ("Would you like your rooms on the shooting side or the mortar side?" a hotel receptionist asked the arriving hacks), there's never a sense that you're just eavesdropping. Everything's effortfully designed to get an audience reaction, most effortfully with a running gag about a World Service reporter's irritable bowel problem. And whereas the crap in Getting On smells like the real thing, the crap in Taking the Flak is more like a plastic joke-shop turd.

It is a great subject for a comedy and it does have its moments, whether it's the interplay between a producer struggling in the field and a desk producer who has enough time on his hands to make Daleks out of coffee cups, or the skewed cultural grasp of the local fixer ("Goodfellas... my favourite comedy movie! That Joe Pesci!"). But while Getting On cares about being true first and hardly seems to care whether you laugh or not, Taking the Flak cares so much that you feel almost embarrassed when you don't laugh as often as you'd like to.

Pompous, self-absorbed foreign correspondents were set up as the fall guys in Taking The Flak and heaven knows the John Simpson school of tank-riding self-aggrandisement is a sitting duck. But though it energetically flailed around in a fictional African nation teetering on the brink of civil war, the intended satire ended up as flabby as its intended target. Why it was stretched out to an hour when the late, great Drop The Dead Donkey would have filed a similar story in a pithy 25 minutes was a mystery.

Way too much time was spent on the state of a female World Service correspondent's bowels, an enervating side issue which repeatedly sucked the momentum out of a supposed comedy thriller involving boy soldiers and a hostage situation. And there you had the problem. BBC Four comedy drama Getting On showed it is possible to find laughs in the darkest corners of the human soul. But Taking The Flak flipped the coin and showed how tasteless it is when you get it wrong.

Taking the Flak - The Red Button

If you missed it last night, here's the packages that went out on the red button after episode 1 of Taking the Flak. You will see lots of BBC New Journalists telling their favourite stories about David Bradburn.

"This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." So begins BBC correspondent Harry Chambers' piece to camera from a central African republic at the start of this spoof on foreign news reporting. "It wouldn't take much to make a difference here," he adds, "A visit by Angelina Jolie or Fearne Cotton... perhaps even a simple, one-off drama by Richard Curtis." It's one of the better jokes in what turns out to be a rambling farce set under African skies - imagine Drop the Dead Donkey crossed with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Martin Jarvis is enjoyable as a John Simpson-style foreign editor who flies in to take over any story when it gets big enough, treading on the toes of local stringers like Harry. But Jarvis and the rest of the cast have to fight with a script that wobbles alarmingly. A running joke about a plump female reporter's troubled bowels is about as unfunny as comedy gets. There's a great satire to be made deconstructing the foibles of the news machine. Sadly, this isn't it.