Viewers worried that Harry Hill had been trapped in a vortex of You’ve Been Framed reruns on ITV2, rejoice: he’s back, and this time he is not constrained by the need to make drunken nanas falling over at weddings sound funny (the key is not to try: it’s always funny). Harry Hill’s World of TV (BBC Two) is an archive-plundering, TV Burp-style show, with each episode themed around a specific genre. This week it’s soaps; later episodes will go after medical dramas, cop shows and home improvements, which, judging by the viral Changing Rooms clip of disastrous shelving that did the rounds recently, is much missed.
As with much of Hill’s work, this is an absurdist collage of clips taken out of context and smooshed together for comic effect. Soaps are already absurd, even without a new interpretation of their most absurd moments, but still, they provide fertile ground. Hill promises to take us from the earliest days of soap, when a discussion about how a mortice lock works counted as a dramatic scene, to the infamous Corrie crash, still such a jump-the-shark moment for the genre that it is wonder we haven’t replaced the very notion of jumping the shark with a tram falling on top of Rita.
All of the touchstones of soap madness are here: weddings – which inevitably end in scraps and betrayals; Christmas, even more violent than weddings, which makes the Christmas wedding episodes a guaranteed bloodbath; and fires in pubs. “Beware,” says Hill. “They are notoriously flammable.”
There is a brief history element. Starting with 1954’s The Grove Family, the first soap and home of the great mortice lock debacle, it moves through The Newcomers – a pandemic-friendly 60s yarn about a London family relocating to the countryside, presumably encompassing their hunt for the perfect sourdough – through some dearly departed series, such as Family Affairs, Crossroads (“the biggest daytime soap based in a Midlands hotel of its time”) and Brookside. Of course, it reserves most of its attention for the three big survivors: Emmerdale, Coronation Street and EastEnders. If I learned anything from this, it is that Crossroads had the best theme tune by a country mile.
It is a fun excuse to ransack the archives, although perhaps its BBC home makes it a little too EastEnders-heavy, particularly when Stacey Dooley has been giving its classic episodes the Inside the Actors’ Studio treatment on BBC One throughout its absence. It’s a treat to see Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson as Sheila and Bobby in their Brookside prime, even with the addition of sitcom sound effects, and I would watch an entire series dedicated to putting a laugh track over old episodes of that show. I also enjoyed revisiting Phil Mitchell during his addiction phase, burning down, yes, the Vic – “this stinking dump”.
As a fan of TV Burp, I still miss the surreal, anarchic spirit of that show. This is all very mannered and polite, for the most part, and though I know that it isn’t exactly possible in the socially distanced age, I was crying out for a couple of minor soap actors to storm the set in sumo suits and try to knock each other down. Most of the jokes are gentle, but the odd one misses the mark: Pobol Y Cwm gets teased, essentially for being Welsh, and while there is a sly dig about how Welsh people love jokes about their language, it isn’t quite enough to patch up a gag that is essentially “it sounds funny”.
The other problem is that since TV Burp was in its prime, the internet has started to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the same kind of area. Many of these scenes have already been picked apart online and turned into enduring memes. I am never one to pass up the opportunity to see Kat Slater declaring that she “became a total slag”, but it pops up almost daily on Instagram. Although, perhaps, that is an indictment of my Instagram feed.
Still, there are enough vintage Harry Hill moments to elicit a giggle. When the “how to make a soap” segment ends, settle in for two outstanding supercuts: Danny Dyer saying “shut yer mouth”, and people asking for “two teas” in the EastEnders caff, which went on for so long it began to feel like anti-tea propaganda. Shut yer mouth, and ask for a macchiato.
