Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing a starry cast and end with a redeemed protagonist gazing up at some suddenly falling snow. Reviewing Sky’s Bad Tidings this year, I can rather smugly report that there’s no need to revise my theory.
But just in case that isn’t enough television tradition to be going on with, here we also get that other Yuletide stand-by: the characters’ plans for the big day go hideously wrong, yet they still end up having the Best Christmas Ever.
Viewed pleasantly drunk, I concede, Bad Tidings might just hit the spot
The two main stars are Lee Mack and the man with a serious claim to be the breakout celebrity of 2024. As I write, Liverpudlian comedian Chris McCausland has a fair chance of being the first blind winner of Strictly Come Dancing – and even if he doesn’t manage that, his sharp but good-natured gags have already made him one of its most popular contestants ever. Now he ends the year with two more strings to his bow. Not only did he co-write Bad Tidings with Laurence Rickard and Martha Howe-Douglas from Ghosts, but he also turns in a solid acting performance.
Admittedly, his role as Scott – a blind, wise-cracking Scouser – can’t have been much of a stretch. Less comfortable is Mack, whose essential geniality makes an awkward fit for Scott’s weirdly hostile neighbour Neil. Mack does his best to glower, shout and accompany the word ‘unbelievable’ with furious tuts. Nevertheless, Neil comes across less like a bad-tempered old git than a bloke doing an impersonation of one – and for no obvious reason beyond the drama’s need to set up somebody for later snowy redemption.
In short (and in yet another nod to Christmas convention), Scott and Neil aren’t merely neighbours but feuding ones – albeit with Neil doing most of the feuding. Meanwhile, adding to the formulaic feel is a largely wasted Sarah Alexander as Neil’s long-suffering wife, whose only job is to radiate a still-loving exasperation at his behaviour.
So guess what happens when Scott and Neil both stand for the post of the street’s Neighbourhood Watch coordinator? That’s right: the votes are tied and they have to share the job. (‘What are the chances of that?’ asked somebody who’s clearly never seen a television drama before.) Or when Neil rigs up an alpha-male display of lights on his house on Christmas Eve? Yep – he blows the street’s electricity.
And with that, things take a turn for the shameless, almost as if the script has set itself the challenge of seeing how much it can get away with. While the other residents head off to find a Christmas of heat and light, Scott and Neil volunteer to stay and keep an eye on the unguarded houses. Cue the arrival of a family of cartoon baddies and a brazen reenactment of Home Alone.
There is, however, one thing you should bear in mind reading this review. As a Spectator critic, I naturally watched the programme with a pen, a notebook and a steely Leavisite commitment to the text – which, of course, nobody else in their right mind will do, or is intended to. Viewed objectively, Bad Tidings is drama by numbers of the most blatant kind. Viewed pleasantly drunk, I concede, it might just hit the spot.
Alan Bennett 90 Years On raised the usual question about its subject: how successful would Bennett have to be to feel successful – or at least to admit that he does? The programme provided plenty of clips of his greatest hits: Beyond the Fringe, The History Boys, Talking Heads, The Madness of King George and many others. But these were interspersed with perhaps Bennett’s greatest hit of all – his familiar schtick as a man so modest that he’s even modest about his own modesty. (‘It’s not modesty, it’s incompetence.’) After reaching 90, the only life lesson he considers himself qualified to pass on is that in old age, ‘one’s ears get larger, and one’s dick gets smaller’.
Bennett claims to ‘have arrived at 90 feeling every minute of it’ – but, if so, his brain seems miraculously unaffected. He can apparently remember how every actor spoke every one of his lines. And he can certainly do his Alan Bennett with undimmed aplomb, whether analysing Yorkshire speech patterns of the 1940s or speaking fondly of Thora Hird.
The result, needless to say, is a delight – my only complaint being that Bennett’s life and work would surely once have made for a three-part Arena Christmas special, rather than a measly pre-Christmas hour. It would also surely have been accompanied by a proper Alan Bennett season with full-length showings of the many terrific works we caught glimpses of here. Unless, I suppose, BBC2 didn’t want to risk making the poor man feel successful.
Comments