Vicious

Vicious stars Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as a pair of gay old queens sharing their lives and a crepuscular flat that looks like a relic from a 1970s sitcom set.

That design may well be a consciously ironic reference but it didn't make the setting any more appealing. There was something dankly theatrical about it. In theory, that befits McKellen's role as an ageing rep actor who, in the show's best line, "once killed a prostitute in Coronation Street".

But there was also something dankly theatrical about the whole concept - the over-pronounced acting, the laboured dialogue, the arch gestures, McKellen's dressing gown - that felt like being trapped in a dramatic workshop on camp with two self-regarding thespians, but not nearly as amusing as that sounds.

Of course, the radical new aspect of the show is that it's a sitcom about gay men on mainstream television. While that's a development worthy of applause, it doesn't, unfortunately, command laughter. Nor did Frances de la Tour, reprising her Rising Damp role 40 years on, but this time more as a female Rigbsy than an older Miss Jones.

She found herself in the unenviable position of having to try to out-camp Jacobi and McKellen, which is rather like having to out-butch Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Everything was at a hysterical pitch, but nothing happened. Instead, the dreadfully static nature of it made you long for the energy and pace of the commercial break.

Vicious: Forget the cast, where are the gags?

Last Monday, ITV launched its evening comedy hour, and even six days later I feel fortunate that I came through the experience.

This first episode deals with the passing of one of the couple's friends who was supposedly infatuated with Freddie. But later it transpires that he was actually in love with Stuart and this sets off a blazing row between the pair. Eventually the duo are reconciled but I get the impression that this is the formula that the series will take every week. The problem with Vicious is that it is incredibly old-fashioned and mainly survives due to the chemistry between its two leads. While McKellen and Jacobi appear to be having a ball, the scripts are very weak and there is only so many times you can hear the pair insult each other.

The supporting roles are woefully underwritten with Frances De La Tour given very little in her role as the waspish Violet. Meanwhile Iwan Rheon, who was so great in Misfits, looks embarrassed most of the time and his character Ash is basically presented as a piece of meat for the older characters to salivate over.

It doesn't surprise me that Vicious lost a million viewers during its half hour slot as I think people would've grown tired of the programme by the end. While some people seemed to enjoy it, I personally felt that this was very old-fashioned and not particularly funny.

Only when I watched it for a second time did I work out the point of Vicious. Of course: it wasn't a sitcom. It was an elaborate exercise in trolling.

On first viewing I couldn't understand why, in the year 2013, two gay men - Gary Janetti and Mark Ravenhill - would create a comedy about gay men who conform to almost every homophobic stereotype: bitchy, vain, melodramatic, lecherous, rude, sulky. The programme's working title was Vicious Old Queens. It was as if Germaine Greer had created a sitcom called Dykes, about two feminists who hate men, wear dungarees and have no sense of humour.

Then it struck me. Vicious was a wind-up, its aim to enrage bilious homophobes by rubbing their faces in their own prejudices. "There! See!" the bilious homophobes would splutter.

"Homosexuals are every bit as seedy and unpleasant as I thought! God, they make me so angry, I could... Arrrgh! My chest! Call 999! I'm having a heart attack!"

I suppose there is an alternative possibility, namely that Vicious is just a load of hackneyed old rubbish. But I'm sure that can't be it.

Vicious stars Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi (quite a coup for an ITV sitcom) as a pair of bickering hams. In some ways it's very traditional. It's filmed on a single set, with a delirious studio audience, and the script contains only two types of dialogue: set-up and punchline. Almost all the punchlines are putdowns. A character will say his dog is 20 years old. Another character will say at least it's younger than these biscuits of yours. That sort of thing.

Slightly less traditional are the jokes about rape. Middle-aged woman: "I'm so frightened I'm going to be raped!" Gay friend, scornfully: "For God's sake, Violet, nobody wants to rape you!" Middle-aged woman: "What an awful thing to say!"

Rape offers such a rich vein of comic potential that I am bewildered as to why the world of sitcom has overlooked the subject for so long. But not to worry, because Vicious remedies the situation within its first ten minutes with not one, not two, but three rape gags in succession, culminating in the following chucklesome exchange:

Man: Nobody wants to rape you.
Woman: Don't be so cruel.

Mercifully, they didn't move on to discuss child rape, or I swear my sides would have just burst. Presumably the writers are saving this for a later episode - not wishing to use all their best material first time out.

Vicious stars Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour, and I can only surmise that all three have close relatives being held hostage by the production company because I cannot think of any other reason why such luminaries of stage and screen should agree to such dross.

The same applies to highly respected playwright Mark Ravenhill and former Will & Grace writer Gary Janetti, who provided the scripts, presumably encouraged by the regular arrival of loved ones' body parts in the post.

Jacobi and McKellen play an elderly gay couple - one is camp, and the other less so. And that is about as far as the characterisation goes. Their relationship is based upon bickering and making acerbic comments, because that's what gay people do. In episode one, the couple are thrown into a complete tizz because a handsome young man has moved into their block of flats.

The show is so busy trying to be outrageous that it fails to exercise any quality control on the jokes it lets through. "I went to Oxford!" protests Jacobi, when his intellectual credentials are questioned. "For lunch!" replies McKellen. With conviction, it has to be said, because he is a fine actor. But who knows what agonies he must have suffered delivering such a limp line?

The most annoying thing about Vicious - as opposed to being just plain unpleasant, lazy or depressing - is that somewhere in its stagey, studio-bound set-up, populated by stereotypes, is a decent sitcom struggling to get out. Let me know if it happens.

Why is the UK so far behind US for gay sitcoms?

2013 has finally seen gay characters take centre stage in TV comedies, but it still feels like we've got a long, long way to go before we even come close to catching up with the US.

Vicious review

The sheer nastiness of certain comments had me recoiling into my sofa at times, toes clinging to my leopard print slippers. Like all the best comedies, however, Vicious remembers to inject some bittersweetness into proceedings.

Episode review: Vicious

The bottom line is that you're only going to appreciate Vicious if you take it for what it is - it's not meant to be Shakespeare, it's a sitcom. Did people get uppity about Last of the Summer Wine for portraying 'northern' stereotypes - well no. A 'gay' sitcom is going to trade on stereotypes. And it had some funny lines.

Vicious doesn't feel new at all. We're talking very trad sitcom here. The "sit" part is the sitting room of a grand central London flat, where the two central characters reside. There are various ways in and out of the room - the flat's main door out on to the landing, doors to other rooms. And there's a telephone (landline).

The "com" comes from the exchange of banter and one-line gags between the two principals, and from the arrival and departure of subsidiary characters through the various entrances and exits, and from the odd telephone conversation. The com is marked by uproarious studio laughter (NO! WHY? IN 2013!).

What's (a bit) interesting about Vicious is that the leads - Freddie and Stuart - are played by two grand knights of the theatre (pronounced theatar, obvs). Sirs Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi respectively and respectfully. And they're a couple. So you've got two queeny old luvvies basically playing themselves (to the extent that, although you certainly wouldn't know it from listening to them, they originally come from Wigan and Leytonstone, just as Sirs Ian and Derek do).

More like caricatures of themselves: they're camped up to the max, actual drama queens. And they're Acting with a capital A - thespian jousting. Take that darling, no you take that, ouch, you bitch. Which is rather fabulous. Something like Frasier meets Will and Grace meets Henry V. Oh, and then Frances de la Tour turns up, as their bessie mate Violet, and joins the fun.

It's just a shame that the vehicle in which they find themselves isn't a better one. It's not just old-fashioned, pre-Office TV comedy (as opposed to post-office comedy, which is something else, possibly), it's also, frankly, a bit lame. Ding dong, who can that be at the door, ooh hello, a handsome young man to see the flat above. [Turn handle that produces jokes revolving around Freddie and Stuart flirting with handsome youth, putting each other down, and trying - subtly, they think, but actually very unsubtly - to ascertain whether he's gay or not.]

And: "I've been to Oxford." "Yes, for lunch." That's the sort of thing that might be quite funny if you or I said it, in a conversation. But I want a bit more artfulness, wit and surprise from my television. Especially when it's delivered by Sirs Ian and Derek. A Greggs doughnut of a show - albeit filled with Gentlemen's Relish instead of jam, but still a Greggs doughnut.

I don't know who it is who makes up the studio audiences for sitcoms or what they're injected with before the recording begins, but, as Ben Elton's The Wright Way demonstrated last week, there is virtually nothing that they won't laugh at. Like laboratory animals trained to respond to some arbitrary stimulus, they react to anything that is even vaguely punch-line shaped. This turns out to be quite handy in Vicious, which is full of lines that have the cadence of comedy but often prove to be devoid of wit when examined more closely.

Or to employ a wit so dubious that an appalled silence might be a more reasonable response. An example: "You let a complete stranger use your loo?" says Frances de la Tour's character when she discovers that Freddie and Stuart's lavatory is occupied. "What if he comes out and rapes me?" Gales... no... tornadoes of laughter.

The basic schtick in Vicious is high-camp bitchiness, a form that reached an apogee in the American sitcom Will & Grace (on which Gary Janetti also worked). This is a sadly depleted version, though, and it's delivered by McKellen and Jacobi as if they're playing in Wembley Stadium and only the upper tiers are occupied, with a heavily semaphored effeminacy that seems to belong to an entirely different era.

That is partly the point, of course - they're supposed to be social fossils - but unfortunately nothing else in Vicious provides a believable backdrop for their self-dramatisations, from the inexplicable eagerness of the young straight neighbour to insert himself into their lives, to the jerky clockwork of the plot. Only Marcia Warren comes out of it with her dignity intact, as an absent-minded friend. Seems almost blasphemous to say it but McKellen and Jacobi should watch her and take some notes on comic acting.