Fantastical joke

Wednesday, 10th June 2009

‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon.

‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. It’s a funny line, imposing the formulaic talk of an American waiter on to a medieval, fantastical, witches and warlocks ersatz epic of the type dreamed up by lonely schoolboys in their bedrooms. I laughed, or chuckled inwardly. But it didn’t quite work. The line is light and assured, whereas Krod (and we’re going to drop those annoying umlauts, only there to create a spray-on impression of mittel-Germanic, Middle Ages vowels) is a shy and diffident hero who would never come up with such a confident, savvy line. Indeed, the joke is that he is far from heroic, being unaware of his own powers, surrounded by useless henchmen (I liked the sorcerer, whose only response to a blaze is to say ‘fire, fire, go away, come again another day’) and dismayed by his girlfriend’s sexual rapacity. She, played by India de Beaufort, is another teenage fantasy, her tight leather garments failing to conceal much flesh.

I was disposed to like this series because the notion of crossing Lord of the Rings with The Office then sprinkling it with irony, which Americans can often do much better than us, was a promising one, if not exactly original. But to get it right you have to respect the original format and its conventions. You can’t just abandon them for the sake of a laugh. Take the killer being hired by Matt Lucas as the evil warlord (I forget the name, but it’s a collection of meaningless syllables reminiscent of pre-Christian France). ‘Krod Maldoon will be dead by morning — or your next two assassinations are free,’ he says. Doesn’t quite come off. Watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail and you see that the jokes work because each scene is played with the utmost seriousness. Most of all, you have to guard the characters’ characters. If comedy is unexpected departure from convention, you need to be ruthless about preserving the convention.

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