My prize for the best thing on TV this year goes to the comedy Rev (BBC2, Thursdays). I know Simon Hoggart disagrees with me on this — he finds it all a bit predictable. But in the spirit of Christmas I should like to point out that Simon is a wine-soaked pinko Guardianista who hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, whereas I am world-famous for being right about everything, so there.
Why is Rev so good? Let us count the ways. Its alpha and omega — as with all the best sitcoms — is character. Apart from Perry and Croft’s various masterpieces and The Simpsons, I’m hard pushed to think of any other TV comedy with quite so extensive a cast of well-drawn, plausible, compelling major and minor characters.
Simon McBurney’s Mephistophelian Archdeacon Robert, for example. You wish he could have a spin-off series of his own, like Frasier did after Cheers. Mind you, you could say that about virtually the entire cast: Colin (Steve Evets), the chain-smoking, boozing, druggy tramp who calls the vicar ‘Vicarage’; Jimmy Akingbola’s frighteningly plausible, mad, black sponger-vagrant Mick; Adoha Onyeka (Ellen Thomas), the mumsy, effusive heart-and-soul of the congregation; Nigel McCall (Miles Jupp), the lightly camp, perpetually affronted lay reader who thinks he’d do a better job of running the church than the hero, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander, who also co-writes the scripts with James Wood).
Archdeacon Robert is special, though, because he gets the best running gags: his persistent, gloriously unapologetic rejection of every cup of coffee Mrs Smallbone makes for him; his habit of briefing/debriefing the Rev in taxis, keeping him trapped or dropping him off in the middle of nowhere according to his sadistic whim; and, above all, his fantastical name-dropping. The implausibly well-connected Archdeacon is always on the way to some ludicrously chic event, be it the latest Roux brothers pop-up opening or — my favourite — ‘I’ve got tickets to hear David Hare read some of his emails at the National.’
This is another thing I like about Rev: what the Archdeacon would probably call the multilayered sophistication of its comedy. On one level, the Hare reference works as yet another amusing signifier of the Archdeacon’s rarefied artsiness; on another, it’s a free gift for those of us cynical right-wing bastards in the audience, who want to go: ‘Yes! That’s just the kind of unutterable wank Hare would put on and which pseudy London bien-pensants would flock to see.’ (I’d love to know what Tom Hollander’s politics are. But if they are what I suspect I suppose he’d better not say lest it kill his thespian career stone-dead.)
Like all the greatest works of comedy genius, from Life of Brian to Team America: World Police, Rev is outrageously profligate with its one-liners, sight-gags, throwaways. In the episode where the Rev and Nigel head off to do battle with a ghost haunting an elderly parishioner (Sylvia Syms), for example, they do a brilliant Never-Mind-the-Buzzcocks-style humming duet of a motif from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. This, for those who know it, is also the theme to The Exorcist. And for those viewers who don’t know it, the script is not about to explain.
Sometimes, I’m not sure that Rev is even aware of just how good it’s being. In my favourite episode so far — the one where the Rev finds himself tripping on MDMA having swigged what he thought was just Colin’s whisky — there’s a scene where the thoroughly E-ed up vicar is kneeling before the altar, communing with God, while a figure potters behind him, out of focus. Throughout, you’re half-concentrating on the vicar’s silly but moving ramblings, and half-wondering who else on earth is in the church and what on earth he makes of all this. Then, as the scene ends, you discover: it’s Colin, also completely off his tits on E.
All Ricky Gervais’s sitcoms, as we now know, depend heavily on the comedy of extreme embarrassment. With Rev there’s an element of this, too: when, for example, in the E episode, the tripping vicar joins in with the children’s play to give his excruciating impersonation of a leper being healed by Jesus, the hideous awfulness of it all is so great it’s almost impossible to watch. But what Rev can also do — and this is much more difficult — is be sensitive, thoughtful and touching without straying into sentimentality.
A lot of this is in the quality of the acting. Handled by lesser talents than Hollander and the superlative Olivia Colman, the Smallwoods’ marital relationship could be toe-curlingly icky, what with it all being basically so nice and loving and grounded. Instead — just like real-life good marriages — it’s the programme’s anchor.
Most impressive of all, though, is the fearlessness with which it broaches the numinous. Unlike, say, The Vicar of Dibley — which was just Dawn French in a dog collar — Rev addresses each week with intelligence and sympathy the struggle to make sense of religious faith in an increasingly secular world. In fact, it does a better job of this than the Church of England does. Not that that’s terribly difficult.
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