Overworked humour

Watching the episode of the Simpsons (Sky One, Sunday) written by and starring Ricky Gervais was a bit like going to see a friend in a West End play: so constant is your worry that something might go wrong that you can’t relax enough to enjoy it. But even through all the buttock-clenched well-wishing, you could tell it wasn’t a classic episode.

The problem — as I’ve found myself on those rare occasions when I’ve been paid lots to do an article or it’s a commission from a new editor I’m striving to impress — is that when a writer cares too much about something he almost always messes up. As Gervais well knows, The Simpsons scripts constitute the most clinically brilliant, subtle, wide-ranging, incisive, ingeniously allusive, sophisticated, funny-because-they’re-true writing in TV history, and the moment you start thinking in those terms and try to match it the first thing to go is that slouchy, couldn’t-give-a-toss flippancy which fuels Gervais’s best comedy.

His episode was about a David Brent- style character living in LA who falls in love with Marge during a Wife Swap competition and serenades her with a song whose lyrics go: ‘Lady, when you go away/ I feel I could die/ Not like dye like your hair is dye/ But die like Lady Di.’ The humour is just that teeny bit too overworked, too English-guy-trying-to-please-an-American-audience-with-what-he
-thinks-is-their-idea-of-what’s-funny-about-the-English to hit the spot in the same way that throwaway classics, like, say, ‘I call him Gamblor’ do. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ricky. You’re still a genius.

The thing this week I really wasn’t at all expecting to like was another programme Sky sent me with my Simpsons package — a new drama series called Thief (Sky One, Tuesday). It opened with a gang of thieves in the middle of a high-tech safe-cracking operation (do thieves still actually break into safes, now, except in heist movies?), all of them joshing and bantering in their youthful, zappy, multi-ethnic way and I thought: ‘No.