Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
The latest half-hour to emanate from the television sitcom mass-production factory of Penguin Films is Madam and Eve, a conspicuously futile attempt to transpose the characters of a daily comic strip to the screen. The endeavour was doomed from the start and for all the obvious reasons.
As I was blathering on last week about The Muppets, it is a matter of frame, of format. Madam and Eve works on the newspaper page simply because that is what it was designed to work on. Expanding the strip’s configuration short glimpses of the domestic tribulations of a Johannesburg household and fleshing these out into half-hour sitcoms has the effect of both degrading the original and being rather embarrassing. Even with a superb script the transposition would have been luckless, and a superb script is the exact opposite of what the first four shows of the series have used.
Producer Roberta Durrant or Cookie, to use her affectionate eponym and her team were lucky in being able to find fairly competent actors who physically matched the comic-strip characters. But that’s where their luck ran dry. These unfortunate players labour away in seeming desperation at the leaden material, turning in performances that are way over the top. That they do so, week after week, is sure proof of directorial approval.
In the first show Eve was on a go-slow strike. The gauche idea was to have her walking around in exaggerated slow motion, a primary school-level sight-gag which at best might have worked for a few seconds, certainly not for long minutes on end. In the same episode one joke was used on about five occasions. Because Eve is on strike, Madam answers her own front door and telephone. On each occasion guests and family members go through exactly the same jokey routine.
Once would have been enough. Twice, just bearable. Five times can only mean that hiring some professional wrestlers to rip Cookie away from her “creative” ambitions has not been at all effective. A couple of mechanical shovels are needed for that.
The penalty is of course that Cookie was allowed free access to the set and editing rooms. On the other hand, maybe her level of tacky humour is all e.tv expects. If you will buy your comedy by the job-lot, quality is bound to be stretched thin.
It’s generally accepted that about the only successful way to transfer static comic strip to moving talking screen is by animation Popeye, Peanuts and many others. Until they can manage that, Madam and Eve should stick to the newspapers.
Let’s change the subject to real humour. It will delight many to know that the intelligent, elegantly written and performed BBC series Yes Minister is having a rerun on BBC Prime. Right now they are showing an episode a night, at 9pm. The late Paul Eddington plays Jim Hacker, a blundering minister in the Thatcher Cabinet. His civil-service minder is the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, one Humphrey Appleby, played with silken panache by Nigel Hawthorne. If you like your humour with a visible IQ, this is the one for you.
The single most frightening programme of some time was another from the BBC, last week’s Panorama, in which the story was told of the international tracking down and eventual arrest of 105 of the members of an Internet paedophile ring. Called The Wonderland Club, this numbered some 180 sickies 15 of them in England and believed to have been the largest organised site for the exchange of visual sexual material involving children.
The investigation was kicked off by an American mother whose seven-year-old daughter had been sexually abused by a schoolteacher: in his home study, brutally and “live” on camera for the edification of several dozen of his watching ring members. Trawling the hard drive of his computer put the police on to the ring.
The figures eventually uncovered were horrifying. On the hard drives of these men and women were discovered some 70?000 pictures and video clips, some involving children as young as 10 months. The story of how these sub-humans were tracked and watched over several months so that most of them could be identified before a police swoop warned off other members of the ring was the sort of material that made you despair for the human race.
If ever there was an argument for the death sentence, this is it.