The Kumars at No 42 BBC2
Dr Terrible's House of Horrible BBC2
Mr Charity BBC2
Home Front BBC2
It's A Girl Thing C4
The Farmer Wants a Wife ITV
Monday night on BBC2 is billed as 'comedy night'. It starts at 9pm, lasts 90 minutes and if you're still laughing by the beginning of Newsnight then I strongly advise you to seek professional medical intervention.
I was initially rather put-off by the high concept of The Kumars at No 42, a hybrid chat-show cum sitcom spin-off from Goodness Gracious Me, starring Sanjeev Bhaskar as the host who gauchely interviews guests in a studio in the 'back garden' of a suburban home and puts up with amusing interventions from his 'parents' (Indira Joshi and Vincent Ebrahim) and 'grandmother' (Meera Syal). Boldly subjecting themselves to the tautly scripted grillings in the first show were Richard E. Grant ('one of Swaziland's most acclaimed actors') and Michael Parkinson ('he's more than inspiration, he's an equal). The result turned out to be pretty much Mrs Merton wearing a Nehru collar.
You won't, of course, learn anything about the guests (who are merely required to laugh at jokes made at their expense), though this is not a new development in chat shows. Still, Meera Syal as the septuagenarian quoting from Withnail and I ('we want the finest wines known to humanity') turned out to be the last laugh on BBC2 before 10.31 pm (that skilled impressionist Jeremy Vine can invariably raise a smile) and though this was rather more of an appreciative grunt than a great big thigh-slapping guffaw, you probably shouldn't expect much more from a Monday.
Perhaps the best should have been saved until last but, unfortunately, The Kumars was followed by Dr Terrible's House of Horrible, Steve Coogan's Hammer spoof, which turned out to be, at best, a semi-detached villa of vileness, at worst a bungalow of badness. Go much beyond sketch length and it becomes increasingly tough to send up a genre in which terrifyingly predictable plotlessness is entirely necessary, while lines like 'I haven't had a drink since that night on the Volga when three bare-chested Cossacks were hungry for my end' come creaking into view along with the ghostly carriages and the heavily-coiffed, bosom-heaving lesbian vampires (mind you, Ronni Ancona did her best).
Easily the funniest thing about 'Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust' was the title, with Honor Blackman's appearance as a PVC-clad hunter of the undead ('I tell you, this man was frightened to death. By fear') a close second. But that's only because the last time I saw Honor on television was during the election campaign, when she was hunting down the Lib Dem undead and giving a blushing Charles Kennedy the kiss of life. Well, more of a peck really.
After Dr Terrible, not even Honor could raise the pulse of Mr Charity, a please-pull-the-plug-and-put-it-out-of-its-misery flatliner of a sitcom in which Stephen Tompkinson (what was he thinking of?) plays the slimy boss of a charity called H.E.L.P.
This is so lame that the writers haven't even bothered to make up an amusing acronym, so perhaps we should help them to H.E.L.P themselves. 'Here Every Line's Predictable' perhaps, or 'Hopelessly Empty Laughter Please'? Suggestions on the back of a stamp. When it wasn't plain boring, Mr Charity even managed to be vaguely offensive: awfully bad timing that the first episode should coincide with the liberation of Kabul, admittedly, but were lines like 'shipping 30 tons of pork to a community of devout Muslims is what gives charity a bad name... Well how was I to know they'd be so fussy?' ever going to be funny? At the end of Mr Charity there was an extraordinary disclaimer: 'the organisations and characters named in this programme are entirely fictional'. You really don't say. Please vote with your off-button and Help to End a Lifeless Programme.
A very spooky sense of déjà vu came over me while watching last week's Home Front. It took a while to put my finger on it but, lo, suddenly I realised this was the most recent episode in the occasional series Dr Llewelyn-Bowen's Horrible House of Makeovers. It's been a while, but nobody who witnessed it could ever forget the terror-inducing hideousness of Laurence's super-camp red and black Changing Rooms revamp, in which he turned a perfectly respectable sitting room into a scout hut set for an am-dram production of 'Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust', reducing its owner to tears in the process. But, last week, miraculously, he did it again.
This was all the more shocking because, out in the back garden of Vina Patel's solid tudorbethan Surrey home, Diarmuid Gavin had already created something that had made its new owner cry - albeit with joy. But then poor Vina, a self-confessed control-freak who had bravely trusted Laurence to realise an 'elegant, classical, sophisticated, feminine' vision for her living-room, somehow ended up with a white riot of mock regency MDF and plaster, horrendous purple soft furnishings and a spectacularly hideous (specially commissioned) photographic portrait of her self, windswept and wearing a sari, which may not have been printed on velvet but nonetheless looked like the work of one of those makeover photo studios that advertise in the back of naff glossy magazines.
'The curtains look like an ill-fitting wedding dress and the furniture is out of Gulliver's Travels. My house is filled with MDF. I hate this scheme... and I don't want to say this,' admitted a tearful Vina as she hid behind her hands and then, shortly afterwards, cowered behind her new wonky purple chaise longue affair, designed by LLB and straight out of Barbie's boudoir.
Though shocked, Laurence remained unrepentant. Eventually, after what one can only assume involved several hours of cajoling and some judicious work in the edit suite, Vina admitted 'I think it will grow on me'. But then so can warts. Luckily, Ms Patel has a divine garden room to which she can retreat while she locates a skilled interior undesigner. This Home Front was ab-fabulous and grossly entertaining telly but, given that Laurence has proved himself a dangerous liability with a budget of only 500 quid, how can he still be allowed to spend thousands on a room that ends up resembling Liberace's lavatory?
Still, Laurence's interior wasn't the weirdest concept of the week by far - for that you had to catch It's A Girl Thing, another new TV hybrid (an unfathomable combination of sitcom-and-factual entertainment), brought to a presumably baffled nation by Channel 4. I watched in disbelief as four young women called Jemma, Natasha, Christine and Vanessa played four young women called Jemma, Natasha, Christine and Vanessa, who moved into a flat accompanied by binbags full of clothes. They then spent the next 20 minutes trying them all on and being photographed against a white studio background before eventually ending up in the pub. Finally, lots of credits flashed up to identify the source of the garments: Gucci, Iceberg, Miss Selfridge!... winked the graphics excitedly... Uth, Maharishi, Versace, Joop, Zara, Gina, Shanghai Tang! And I definitely spotted some stuff by Blimey, Gawd and Omigod!
I really don't get It's a Girl Thing. It goes out at 8pm, which is a vaguely grown-up hour, and yet seems to be aimed at fashion-mad pubescent girls (though the number of serious designer labels far outweighed the high street pieces so they couldn't afford them anyway). And nothing explains the desperate script and ghastly archness of the cod-sitcom format. It's A Girl Thing reaches new lows of fluffy feminine pointlessness but, even worse than that, it almost gives girls a bad name. This week (I hope), Jemma, Natasha, Christine and Vanessa get to try on some new Gucci burqas ('Does my bum look big in this?' 'No more than the rest of you!') and decide that living as an oppressed and invisible minority is far preferable to the tragic emptiness of their facile, lives.
In the highly addictive The Farmer Wants A Wife, several horny-handed types have been paired off with blind dates after having advertised their rustic charms (big bales, brand new combine harvesters, good with sheep - that sort of thing) in Country Living magazine. Last week, at the urban barn dance, things seemed to be going quite well for several of the fledgling couples, though I do fear for the matrimonial future of Robert, whose date, Lorraine, eventually bolted to the baaahhh after having suffered terribly throughout dinner ('I've only ever had plain jumpers before, but these are all patterned ones' sweet-talked Robert), and was last seen getting jiggy with another farmer while Robert danced alone, one man and his hangdog expression. Both touching and wickedly funny, The Farmer Wants a Wife has also helped me to rule out the possibility of moving to the country in this or, indeed, any other lifetime.
