A Downing Street party gets out of hand - or does it? A scene from Blaired Vision.
With Blaired Vision premiering tonight and Wills and Harry Go To Vegas entering Sky One's schedule on Thursday you could be forgiven for thinking that the trend of these Double Take-type programmes constitutes a new type of television. I certainly hope not. For Double Take is one of the worse things the BBC have ever broadcast. I have rarely seen such a shameless misuse of licence payers' money. It was horrifically scripted with an obnoxious cynical attitude of "never mind the quality - just watch those lookalikes" and a laser-guided eye for the easy target.
While Alison Jackson is adamant that her work explores the gap between public perception and reality, the truth is that it these shows never raise their creative sights over the concept of Sven Goran Eriksson in Union Jack underpants. (You can see a bit of Blaired Vision here.) To pretend otherwise is to treat the viewing public with such contempt you may as well slap them right in the face while lighting cigars with their licence-fee dollars.
This seems to be an increasingly common misconception in television - that physical resemblance equals comedy or even worse in the case of Rory Bremner that it equals social comment. Take away your initial reaction of "yes, that actor bears a resemblance to Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister" and you are left with some of the most feeble jokes ever to make it to broadcast. In its 2003 run, Double Take produced a sketch with Michael Jackson pulling off part of his nose, referencing his alleged plastic surgery. You would think that jokes about Michael Jackson's nose went out some time in the mid-Eighties with deeley boppers and Horace Goes Skiing but the series was filled with references and jokes that needed carbon-dating before inclusion.
Uniquely appalling as the Double Take programmes are, the mistake is not limited to them. Impressionist shows like Dead Ringers and the McGowan-Ancona axis of feeble suffer from similar weak scripting. Many jokes broadcast on Dead Ringers wouldn't even get into a script meeting of any half-decent regular comedy show, never mind out of it, but because a man who resembles George Bush is delivering them they are deemed to be somehow intrinsically funnier. Seven years he's been in power and I have yet to hear a funny joke about him. Jokes about Bush being gay with Tony Blair, generally being stupid or unable to speak the Queen's English are comedy antimatter anyway so the prospect of a lookalike delivering a Les Dawson joke with "mother-in-law" replaced by "Tony Blair" is not helping the matter.
As with the later series of Spitting Image where good puppets and voices carried weak scripts, the trend of lookalike comedy is cheap, infantile and creatively barren. The very concept of lookalikes adding something more to a script breeds complacency. TV needs to snap out of this current infatuation and return to the basics of good scripting. And it needs to acknowledge once and for all the fact that just because George Bush is a walking punchline doesn't mean it's a funny one.
