Taking The Flak
BBC 2
Jo Brand’s Getting On
BBC 4
Just how much realism can television viewers take in the name of comedy – even in the darkest of jet-black satires? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself about a couple of new comedy drama series at the start of their runs on the BBC. Taking The Flak is set in the world of television (specifically BBC) foreign correspondents. It owes an obvious debt to the writers of The Day Today and Drop The Dead Donkey, but it has found some taboos of its own to bust – jokes about land mines, child soldiers and terrorist hostages, anyone? Well-wrapped as these are in more familiar comedy fare (travellers’ tummy, frustrated spinsters, gun-toting natives), they still make quite a departure from the sitcom norm.
Set in a fictional African state where an unexpected aid package from Russia provokes the Americans to try to top it, the action revolves around the misadventures of the foreign TV crews who pour into the country to cover this “new front in the Cold War”. Resident BBC stringer Harry finds himself elbowed aside by incoming BBC “big beasts” such as star reporter David Bradburn (nice to see Martin Jarvis getting some decent TV work), whose persona floats on a cloud of randiness and egomania. Doon Mackichan plays his desperate producer, while Joanna Brookes draws the short straw with dumpy and unshaggable radio reporter Margaret.
On the debit side, the characters are painted with a brush so broad that the paint drips off the edge of the canvas. Local black fixer Joyful is a “crazy African” from central casting, while Jarvis’ celebrity slimeball seems to have just stepped off the stage of some Restoration comedy. All the characters suffer from that disease of modern TV sitcoms – the tendency to cram their every remark with smart alec wisecracks and feeble jokes, regardless of whether or not this fits their personality. Is there a BBC script directive somewhere which stipulates this? I could easily believe it.
On the other hand… Well, every television newsreader or foreign reporter I’ve brushed against in what I laughingly call my career has conformed to the crudest of stereotypes. In fact, their breathtaking arrogance seems underplayed here. And you get a real feeling that the writers have quite a bit of personal experience of this world to draw upon. The TV hack’s bag of tricks – fake “experts” to quiz, pre-scripted “spontaneous” interviews, instant political “briefings” from the hotel waiter – is turned upside down and shaken out with a satisfying crash. Not quite as sophisticated as it could be, this series is still braver than most, holding out the potential of dark laughs to come. Perhaps that is why the BBC, nervous as ever, has released it without any fanfare – slipping it into the schedules like a turd in a swimming pool.
Talking of turds, there are plenty of them in evidence in new series Jo Brand’s Getting On, hidden safely away on BBC 4. This low-key, documentary-style sitcom is set in a geriatric ward in one of today’s go-ahead health service hospitals.
An old lady expires while the ward sister by her bedside plays computer games on her mobile phone. A faecal mishap on a chair provokes a huge fuss, the hospital admin woman insisting it be cordoned off with accident tape and a “critical incident” report compiled. Downtrodden nurse Jo Brand is told she cannot simply flush it down the toilet. Meanwhile, an elderly Asian lady babbles desperately without an interpreter and her next-door neighbour looks forward to her discharge and a “nice holiday in Zurich” with her grownup son.
In fact, Swiss euthanasia seems the only sane response to a stay in this hospital, but you do wish the old folk would take the nursing and administrative staff with them into the great beyond. Anyone who (like me) has an elderly parent to care for will be simultaneously attracted and repelled by the satire on offer here, but also able to attest to its depressing realism.
My only criticism is that real nursing staff would never spend so much time on their geriatric patients. In my experience, most of them are either terminally furious or totally absent. Roll on old age.
Helen Chappell
