TELEVISION Sweet and sour


Rev BBC2


his week we welcomed back Tom Hollander and James Wood’s sunny sit- com about an inner-city vicar. Comedy does not come much more likeable: Rev (10 November) is as soft, warm and eager-to- please as a puppy. Hollander plays the Revd Adam Smallbone, a fresh-faced, wide-eyed young churchman who always tries to do his best but sometimes falls short.


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Shot on location and thankfully free of a laugh-track, the series tacks a little closer to reality than the farcical Vicar of Dibley. In this first episode, two plot lines were interwoven. In the first, Adam bumped into a mugger in the street and was hailed as a hero, a mis- understanding which he did little to dispel; soon he was in the newspapers as “Kung Fu kicker vicar”. In the sec- ond, he decided to take a party of local children from his local church school on a trip to see the white cliffs of Dover. The kids were reluctant (“I hate out- doors,” said one, “unless it’s indoors, like Bluewater”) and the bureaucracy – health and safety, child protection policies, criminal-records checks, parental consent forms – proved utterly daunting. It was exaggerated for comic effect, but not, I suspect, by very much.


Adam is a good man, and devout in his


way. At points in James Wood’s wry script, he stopped to pray, although his sincere devo- tions were invariably interrupted by mundane thoughts. But the enjoyable side effects of becoming an accidental hero proved a temp- tation, especially when he discovered he was shortlisted for a “Pride of Britain” award to be presented on national TV, where his more worthy rivals included “a girl with meningitis


CINEMA Leading lady


Tabloid DIRECTOR: ERROL MORRIS


n 1977, for a few fevered weeks, British newspapers sold millions of copies on one titillating story, comprising equal parts of road movie, sex comedy, crime caper, religious satire and theatre of the absurd. Its central protagonist was a blonde, 28- year-old former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, who earlier that year had allegedly abducted Kirk Anderson, a young Mormon missionary with whom she had a relationship,


I 28 | THE TABLET | 12 November 2011


who confronted a burglar despite having no arms”. “I can’t do this,” he tells God. “This is wrong.


Why have you engineered this, O Lord? I didn’t do anything. You and I know it, and … well, just you and I know it.” Despite the rumblings of his conscience, he resolved to attend the ceremony, not least because his long- suffering wife longs to dress up in a posh frock and enjoy an evening out. What satire there is in this series is directed upwards – Simon McBurney plays a won- derfully camp and worldly archdeacon, busily totting up the value of Adam’s TV appearance (“430 grand”) – but it stopped when Adam received an unexpected visit from the Bishop of London. Played absolutely straight by


of a dwarf actor and owner of “Dwarves For Hire”, a specialist theatrical agency. It starred Warwick Davis, playing a character called Warwick Davis, who was vain, self-deluding, insecure and rather sad. In the course of this opener, we saw him thrown out of his marital home, grovelling to Gervais and Merchant, and discussing a £250,000 tax bill with his useless accountant. Watching Gervais and Merchant’s work is


often uncomfortable. Embarrassment and offence are their tools. They like to say and show outrageous things, wrapped in a thin veneer of self-protective irony. Gervais, as his Twitter followers have discovered, likes the horrible insult “mong”, claiming it has changed its meaning since the days when it meant “mongol”. In Extras, they had Kate Winslet talk about playing “a mental” as a sure-fire way of winning an Oscar. Here, jokes that would be condemned coming from less fash- ionable (and, it must be said, accomplished) comedians were given full rein: at one point, for instance, Davis attempted to use a door entry- phone placed just out of reach. It was a sight-gag that would never have been allowed in a prime-time BBC1 sitcom.


But this is not one of those shows.


Not all sitcoms can bring in Liam Neeson to play, like Davis, Gervais and Merchant, a comically grotesque version of himself. The premise was that the lugubrious Northern


Comedy with a moral: Rev


Ralph Fiennes, the bishop proved both kind and wise, letting Adam work out what he already knew: the right thing to do. “You’re going to have to tell the truth,” he said. “And that’s when your courage will really be shown.” Comedy with a moral: how un-British. Life’s Too Short, which followed, was an


altogether riskier venture. Written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who also appeared in it, this new series employed their usual mock-documen- tary format to give us an account of the life


from outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Ewell, Surrey. From there they drove to Devon where the pair remained in a rented farmhouse for several days. Maybe he was willing, maybe he was imprisoned. According to the tabloid head- lines, what ensued was that the “Manacled Mormon” was forced to have “Sex in Chains”. Tabloid, Errol Morris’ documentary about the case, does not settle the truth. McKinney has always denied the charges for which she was sentenced to a year in prison in her absence (having skipped bail). She had already spent three months in Holloway; she had also attended openings and parties as a celebrity. The documentary is built around a lengthy interview with McKinney, the most engaging


Irishman had decided to turn his hand to live comedy, and had turned to the writer/directors for advice. They decided they should improvise a couple of scenes together, with a haunted-looking Neeson playing first a hypochondriac (“I’ve contracted Aids. I got it from an African prostitute. I’m riddled with it”) and then a greengrocer. His terrible humourlessness, and Gervais’ consequent discomfort, were brilliantly done. I laughed out loud (which didn’t happen while I was watching Rev, for all its gentle charm). And that’s how Gervais and Merchant get away with it. John Morrish


and exasperating of subjects. Instantly recog- nisable despite the intervening decades, she fizzes and flirts with the truth, emotes and reasons winningly, persisting in her devotion to Anderson who, long since returned to the Church, unsurprisingly chose not to con- tribute.


Screen-time instead goes to an articu late young Mormon refusenik, Troy Williams, who was himself once a missionary to Britain, before coming out as gay and hosting a Salt Lake City radio show. His role is to identify with some wit and dash the conflicting forces that must have battered Anderson at the time. Then there are representatives of the two British tabloids, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, that fought for circulation over McKinney. The Express bought her story


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