Tough at the top

The first thing you should know is that I love, adore and worship Sacha Baron Cohen and have this fantasy whereby we get married and set up home in Notting Hill as a power couple and when the phone rings and it’s Richard Branson I will say, ‘I’m so sorry, Dick, but we can’t come to Necker Island next week as we’ve promised to go away with Charles and Nigella. We know, boring, but we can’t cancel them again.’

Baron Cohen is, I believe, the greatest comic film-maker working today, and although The Dictator is not up there with Borat, or even his Ali G television persona, as it’s so much broader and more familiar, I would not allow this to come between us. ‘Sacha,’ I would say to him at the breakfast table, ‘pass the toast.’ As my mother always told me, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,’ and although I have based a career on doing the exact opposite, I would make an exception in this instance.

Unlike Borat and Brüno, The Dictator does not, sadly, depend on Baron Cohen ambushing real people, as it is, instead, a narrative fiction; it has a story and sticks to it. Therefore, the stakes feel a lot lower, probably because they are, and the tension between prankster and pranked is absent. This is a shame as it’s this tension which produces such wondrously embarrassing yet telling results. OK, Brüno wasn’t as well-received as Borat, but that scene where Paula Abdul sits on a Mexican gardener while talking about her charity work? Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know about Hollywood’s relationship with giving? Will you ever be able to erase that from your memory? Whereas this film? I think I can feel it disappearing from my mind even as I am trying to remember it.