Petering Out

The world seems to be full of Peter Cook at the moment: his biography stares out from the shelves, his face stares out from the screen in retrospectives of his life and reminiscences about Secret Policemen's Balls and, last night, his black and white doppelganger, in the form of Rhys Ifans, stared out from beneath a cloth cap in Ray Bennett's "Not Only ... But Always". This last was supposedly a teleplay about the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore partnership but turned out to be simply another piece focusing on the life of Cook.

Cook, for many, is the great genius of British comedy, the man who - with a single wave of an elegant hand - shook up the establishment (and set up The Establishment) with his excoriating satire and opened the way for the 60's to occur. All around him, we are constantly reminded, were mere pygmies: Alan Bennett a campily wistful Northerner; David Frost an irritating little git on the make; Jonathan Miller a pompously overintellectual ass; Dudley Moore a Dagenham oik who could play the piano a bit and liked shagging, and so forth.

Yet there is surely a worm in the bud of this rosy view of Cook; not his treatment of Moore, nor his treatment of women, nor even the booze and porn. The clue to the problem lies in the constant asseverations by those who bend the knee before the Cook altar that "he certainly didn't waste his talent". They protest too much. For those of us who didn't grow up in the sixties, Cook was a pale and puffy figure who stalked such heights as "Supergirl: The Movie", "Joan Rivers: Can We Talk?" and reruns of dross such as "Bedazzled". By all accounts he would regularly drop in on the offices of Private Eye to sprinkle a little magic dust over the contents, but the difficulty with using this to defend his genius is that the Eye has never been half as brilliant as those behind it think it is. Let's face it, apart from a moment of brilliance at the Secret Policeman's Ball with his parody of the Jeremy Thorpe summing up, an amusing turn on a Clive Anderson talkshow(1) and a few rambling calls as "Sven from Swiss Cottage" to a late-night phone-in, Peter Cook spent his last few years in an alcoholic haze, shuffling from his house to the Europa late-night store on Hampstead's Heath Street to grab more booze.

None of this is to deny Cook's early brilliance: he's still the man who created some of the finest sketches and monologues of all the early 60's Oxbridge set. It is to ask why we in Britain are so keen to tell and retell his story. Particularly when the British seem so keen to praise Cook while ignoring the story of Moore. Surely in any other country it's the diminutive Dud's story that would be being told and retold. Where else would they ignore the tale of a short, working class boy with a club foot who manages to overcome all these difficulties, going on to become an organ scholar at Oxbridge, an accomplished jazz pianist, half of one of the greatest British double acts and then manages, while his partner trudges the weary path into alcoholism, to turn himself into a Hollywood sex symbol? Where else would they prefer the story of a well-heeled public schoolboy who began his life on the public stage in triumph and ended it in something less interesting than failure?

(1) generally hailed by his supporters as the second coming of the comic Messiah.

The Incredulous

So, while the Christmas season has put me in the mood to rant, let me turn my baleful gaze on"The Incredibles", the latest product of the usually excellent (not counting "Finding Nemo") Pixar Studios. I went to see the film yesterday and, as you might expect given the tone of recent entries, hated it. Amazingly, given the competition, "The Simpsons" alumnus Brad Bird has succeeded in creating one of the dullest films of the year; so much so, in fact, that I felt I could have spent my time more profitably by scanning my popcorn for kernels resembling Mother Theresa.

So how did Mr Bird manage his astonishing feat? It's certainly not the premise of the film, which is cheerfully stolen from Alan Moore's excellent "Watchmen" comic (the premise being that the government has banned superheroes from plying their trade, forcing them to live out their lives in their everyday Joe/Joanne personae). Nor can the blame be put on Pixar's animation which, while perhaps a little plainer than in some of its films, is otherwise pretty much up to the studio's usual high standards. The music (a loving 'tribute' to Connery-era Bondage) is also up to snuff, and the voice-acting is fine, if lacking in the pizzazz found in something like "Monsters Inc", "Toy Story 1 & 2" or Dreamworks' "Shrek" movies.

So what are the problems? (By the way, I should probably point out that there are a whole load of plot spoilers ahead but, as the plot's ropey, I can't be bothered) Well, number one is the decision to worship the gods of genre more unswervingly than a Texan worships his semi-automatic, particularly when the genre god being worshipped is the wrong one: Bird starts the film by setting up all these superheroes, but then uses all the genre conventions of the spy movie (baddie intent on using technology to take over the world, volcano lair, the torturing of the hero, the villain's female sidekick who suddenly balks at their mentor's utter lack of morality &c &c). Not a single convention is ever subverted in the slightest - when you see our hero dismiss the ugly kid who wants to be his sidekick, you know that kid is going to come back as the evil mastermind and - waddaya know - you're yawn right, when evil mastermind turns out to have a yawn sexy female sidekick you know she's going to come round to the goodies' side and - waddaya know - you're right again. Next there's the decision to shove in the family-relationship issues (hmm, spies with kids, now where have I seen that before ... hmmm .... perhaps ... "Spy Kids"?), with the inevitable blossoming of self-confidence in the shy yawn goth yawn teenage yawn girl ("You're more powerful than you realise ... You'll know what to do when the time comes" ... but strangely not, "By the way, have I mentioned anything to you about periods?") while the brash yawn and annoying younger yawn yawn brother learns to ... oops fell asleep there for a moment ... learns to be less annoying and brash. Then there's the lack of peril - at no point does anyone seem genuinely threatened: James Bond may be threatened by a missile lurching towards his plane, but that's because he's (just about) human, there's no way an elastic woman, a superfast boy and an invisible goth who can throw forcefields around are going to be imperilled, not even when yawn yawn yawn gothgirl is too lacking in self-yawn-confidence to use her yawn powers. And talking about a lack of peril, how can anybody think it's frightening to use as your final baddie basically the same one Mr Incredible defeated unaided somewhere in the interminable first half of the movie??!!! Please, if anyone out there can explain this to me I'd be really, really grateful. And then, of course, there's the completely idiotic stuff, like having the baddie defeated not by the Incredibles but (a) by his own robot (which seems to have taken against him for some reason best known to itself and certainly never explained in the plot), (b) by the Incredibles' baby, who yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn snore fart twitter turns out to have superpowers after all! and (c) his own cape (in the lamest excuse for keeping down the very expensive business of animating capes yet seen).

And that's not all folks, oh no. Then there's the politics of the thing, now this may just be me but I couldn't help but think that Mr Bird had been on Maggie Thatcher's "How To Be Me" course, the film's messages being (a) that there's no such thing as society there is only the family, (b) when everyone is super no-one is (c) you should only ever lose to people you know you could beat with your hands tied behind your back if you wanted to and (d) goth girls should learn to wear Alice bands and smile more. I half-expected a lengthy discussion on why the British were right to torpedo the General Belgrano when it was sailing away from the Falklands.

And finally there's the matter of tone. The Incredibles is not a family movie. For one thing it spends too much time making overlong jokes for the adults (see Mr Incredible working at his insurance job ... see him sharpen pencils ... see how dull his life is .. see how the, initially packed, audience is rapidly thinning out) to grip the children, for another it spends too much time pandering to the children (no blood, no sex) to grip the adults. And where was the stuff that's supposed to appeal to both groups: the funny jokes, the clever sight gags (even Mrs Incredible getting stretched in a whole series of sliding doors was too drawn out (no pun intended) to work as a joke but too jokey to let us think she might be in danger), the bits that make you - even for a second - care about and feel for the characters? If it was there I missed it, as did all those members of the audience who got bored and left halfway through, led out by their screaming kids.

No S#!t Sherlock

I watched the BBC's latest leaden Sherlock Holmes last night, a "new and original" tale: "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking". To call it woeful would be to flatter it.

The problem isn't to be found in the petty details, though there are plenty of problems there: Holmes enjoying a pipe of opium (a vice he specifically rejects in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"), his taking of heroin/cocaine during a case (a vice we are repeatedly told he only indugles in when bored), his saying "Elementary, my dear Watson" (when, as every good pub quiz member knows, he never once uses the line in the original stories), having Watson rather than Holmes make the vital imaginative leap (something clunkily set up to show Watson's understanding of human nature and Holmes's lack of it) &c.

The problem isn't the characterisation (though the characters are uni-dimensional even for a Holmes adventure, and the relationship between Holmes and Watson is reduced to that of a squabbling married couple).

The problem isn't the casting (though Rupert Everett is truly awful as Holmes: all lassitude and no energy, his voice a constant public schoolboy's monotone, which - though it is sprinkled lightly with mid-Atlantic vowel sounds - repeatedly gave me the impression he was actually investigating the theft of Tompkins Major's postal order from the prep room).

The problem isn't the decision to set the stories in the early 1900's, after Holmes and Watson have gone their separate ways (though it seems to be there not to give freedom to the writer but to allow him to show telephones! and use fingerprints! and involve King Edward VIIth! coo-er gosh!).

The problem isn't the liberal scattering of cliches: the evil identical twins, the trail of blood (unaccountably ignored by all and sundry for 15 minutes), having our detective arrange matters so that victim and criminal will confront each other in the police station ( a favourite of "CSI: Miami" which at least has the excuse of having to produce twenty-plus shows a year and not just a one-off special), or the detective seeking to distract the criminal by revealing their dark side ("I understand too, it's an addiction" - oh piss off while I yawn myself to death) et al.

The problem isn't even the fact that, due presumably to total failure of dramatic faculties, the writer can't even be bothered to be consistent: at the beginning of the "drama" Holmes can spot Watson despite the fact that he's walking 50 yards behind him through a smog-ridden and filthy alleyway near the Limehouse docks filled with as many extras as the budget will allow, at the end he's unable to tell when a murderous slightly-less-evil twin is galumphing around a foot to his rear.

No, this alleged drama has one overriding problem: the plot is a substandard police procedural of the type normally knocked out for minor TV channels as pale imitations of "Prime Suspect" with a dash of "Cracker"-style cod psychology and sexual dysfunction (clumsily introduced via Watson's "feisty" American fiancee (all American fiancees are feisty, it's the law). The programme has nothing to do with Holmes - like James Bond a cartoon superhero without the cartoons - at all, and everything to do with a writer needing to use a name to get his flimsy idea commissioned or, perhaps, the usual crew of anencephalic BBC commissioners leaping at the 'imagine Sherlock Holmes meets Jane Tennyson" pitch.

The whole team behind this have robbed me of a couple of hours of my life. If they'd wanted to show an averagely-entertaining detective drama they could have put on an old episode of Bergerac. If they'd wanted to annoy Holmes fanatics they could just have dropped their trousers outside 221B Baker Street and crapped on the pavement. If they wanted to annoy anyone who could give a toss about decent telly... well, if that's what they had in mind they've found a pretty good method.

The programme was expensively shot, expensively made and cheaply thought out. British TV doesn't get much more depressing.