There are some new sitcoms you approach with a dread sense of antici-pointment, already silently convinced they won’t work and you won’t laugh.
But my hopes were high for Asylum (BBC4), starring Ben Miller as Dan Hern, a Julian Assange-style whistleblower, holed up in a fictional London embassy and fighting extradition to the US. It sounded like a fertile breeding ground for laughs: a frustrated idealist with a God complex, trapped in a claustrophobic setting, surrounded by characters with whom he otherwise wouldn’t choose to spend time. That setup, a tight space with a trapped protagonist, worked for Porridge, Steptoe and Son, Red Dwarf (in its early days, anyway) and countless others.
But so much of the important groundwork is missing in this first episode that I found myself too busy mentally asking questions to actually laugh. It’s the casual lack of basic rules that leaves the Asylum universe only partially formed. In this fictionalised version of the Assange story (it’s exactly the same apart from the country attempting extradition), the characters keep mentioning the real Assange. Why bother to create a fictionalised setting if you’re going to directly reference your real-life source material and draw everyone’s attention to the similarities?
Into this already frustrating set-up comes Dustin Demri-Burns (from sketch show Cardinal Burns) as non-specifically European super-hacker Ludo Backslash (in a fluorescent bomber jacket to denote “crazy”), who is on the run from various authorities for illegally file-sharing films.
The embassy officials, lead by co-creator of the show Kayvan Novak, offer Ludo refuge in order to reignite press interest in their tiny country and reinvigorate their international trade figures. As a propeller tacked on to the plot, it phuts and splutters and quickly runs out of gas. I just didn’t believe any of it.
It has been described in various quarters as a satire. And while they do have one specific dig at Guardian journalists and their apparent fascination with celebrity, I’m struggling to see who their target is. The fickle media who tired easily of Assange once it became clear that he wasn’t going anywhere? The corrupt central American dictatorships so lazily depicted here? (They haven’t even bothered to give all the characters from the Democratic Republic of El Rica the same accent.) The self-aggrandising Assange figure? It’s not even clear whether Hern is high status brought low or just a deluded loser from the off. And to surround him with an entirely unpleasant collection of supporting characters – the woman he fancies but who hates him, the embassy official who seeks only to profit from him, the other embassy official who wants to store asbestos in his bedroom – is self-defeating. There is no light and shade at all.
Asylum could be a good sitcom, but they need more than just a high-concept idea for a character in a place – “Wouldn’t it be funny if a self-proclaimed big head got grounded in what is essentially his childhood bedroom with no way of escape?” Because that rather singular situation was already handed to them on a plate. You can’t just add some occasionally funny lines, rooted in neither character nor place, to fill the time between the opening and closing titles and hope for the best. It won’t stand up.
And talking of making things stand up, culinary reformer Heston Blumenthal used the impending Valentine’s festivities as an excuse to explore the link between food and passions of the trouser in Heston’s Recipe for Romance (Channel 4). It followed the usual format of his cooking programmes in that he invited a select group of guests (couples, this time) to sample his show-off edible set-pieces, but he was to scientifically (sort of) measure how much more fruity they were feeling once they’d put their knife and fork together at the end of the feast.
To pad out the hour, there was a genuinely fascinating interview with a food historian who provided some delicious tit-bits about aphrodisiacs of yore.
Apparently, folk once believed that a gentleman’s member was enlarged not by blood but wind, encouraging the eating of beans and pulses in order to achieve full stiffness. It conjured a lovely Heath Robinson image involving valves and copper tubing.
His final menu included heavy use of chocolate, oysters and champagne, but with his added signature variation. Surprise chili seeds hid in some courses and one course included live snakes to engender a “shared pain” response, shown to bond people together. He might as well have thrown bricks at their heads and told them the restaurant was on fire for all the fight or flight confusion that ensued. It may not have been much fun to eat, but it was entertaining to watch.
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