Godfrey Spry has had a bonk on the head and it has left him with no short-term memory. He now has a fixation with adverts, which he takes as gospel. “Go to Hamburg!” he reads in a piece of junk mail. And so he does, and his wife is killed there by rampaging England football fans. “Test drive the new Calabria 3000 fuel injection hatchback!” says his TV. And he does, along a clifftop at sunset, just like in the ad. The resulting crash and paralysis can’t dampen his spirits, though, and Godfrey makes it his mission to convert others to the warm parallel universe offered by obeying commercials. This may make If You See God, Tell Him – which first aired in 1993 – sound dark (it is), but it’s also full of hilarious pokes at what we allow on to our TV screens.
Devised by One Foot in the Grave writer David Renwick and Andrew Marshall, creator of 2point4 Children, If You See God is a gem from an era when the BBC took its black comedy seriously. Richard Briers plays Godfrey as cheerfully oblivious to the recession that’s lurking behind all those happy adverts. When he’s discharged from hospital after his breeze-block-related head injury, he decides he’s in the wrong consumer category, so sells his house for £10,000 and buys two months in a prison converted into luxury flats. “This floor alone housed 63 cells – all murderers, child molesters and rapists. Now it’s just me and three merchant bankers!”
After a throwaway comment about “buying a steak in Sainsbury’s” causes his city trader neighbour to over-invest and subsequently hang himself, Godfrey moves in with his dentist nephew Gordon, played by Adrian Edmondson, who holds up a “Brainless old tit” sign when meeting Godfrey at the airport.
Together they are blasted with adverts, all of which were professionally shot, and only slightly exaggerated. There are swipes at washing-up liquid (“I wish my dishes were as zippy-clean as Jean’s!”) and digs at luxury chocolates (you buy white truffles and a dress unzips). At one point, Gordon sees a spread promoting the newly privatised sewage industry. It reads “Buy shares in shit”, and features former Tory MP Virginia Bottomley grinning through a toilet seat.
While Gordon and his kindly wife (played by Imelda Staunton) can ignore the ads, Godfrey has become the antithesis of Briers’ character Tom in The Good Life: in love with market forces instead of fleeing from them. This can make for uncomfortable viewing if you’re looking for something light to tune out with – seeing Briers fall prey to all those ads is like watching your grandad clicking on spam. Some sequences are genuinely tear-jerking, such as the moment when Godfrey’s voice cracks as he tries to quote the government’s exciting job relocation initiative (which gets him mugged).
Everyone he encounters is after his money: from the pushy estate agent played by Martin Clunes to the bank with its toe-curling hip-hop campaign, and the baker who ices a suicide note on to a four-tier wedding cake. As black as If You See God gets, however, it still crams in the gags, even joking about cheesy peas a year before The Fast Show. The series’ final message is a stark one, though, something most programmes shy away from: forget your family, your mates, wildlife or transcendental meditation – the only feeling that matters is when somebody puts a receipt in your hand.
