Since its release in 2006, Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth had had praise and abuse heaped upon it in equal measure. But one thing no one ever called it was a comedy. Perhaps Gore was aware of the chuckles deficiency, and that's why, when training 100 volunteers to deliver his lecture around the world, he selected the bumbling UK comic Mark Watson to take part.
And now, in the week of the Copenhagen conference, Watson brings the lecture-cum-comedy-show to London. The plan isn't, he stresses, to single-handedly save the world. Which is just as well – his compulsive self-deprecation is about as suited to rallying calls as Lee Evans is to playing Superman. Even by his own standards, Watson is in digressive form here, forever drifting off-message mid-sentence, and neurotically apologising for how boring he's being. Gore, he tells us, taught his students to be vigilant of three things: time, complexity and gloom. Too much of either, and you lose your audience. Message to Gore: there's a fourth quality detrimental to an authoritative climate-change lecture – lack of authority.
All his wittering presumably reflects Watson's discomfort at melding comedy with pedagogy. If so, he should get over it. He's built some good jokes into the PowerPoint address, using doping scandals in athletics for instance, to explain why it's naive to think that high incidences of record-breaking could be a natural phenomenon. Elsewhere, light relief comes from fooling with the graphs that depict global warming, and tweaking the experts' quotes. "We've been filling the atmosphere", says Watson, "with what scientists call – crap."
Of course, belly laughs are in short supply here, but Watson's enterprise is fit for purpose. It's a useful primer on climate change for those of us with memories more porous than a depleting ozone layer. And it's neither too long, too complex, nor too gloomy. In fact, it's the opposite; in his compulsion to keep things light, Watson overdoes the optimism. Saving the environment needn't compromise the economy, he attests, and "no one is suggesting that we go back to a society with less electricity and travel." Both sound like convenient untruths.
But if Watson is struggling to find the right balance between comedy and the apocalypse, it's a forgivable flaw. More than a comedian, Watson declares himself here a concerned citizen, putting his faith in people power and our democratic responsibility to make politicians act. It's not hilarious. It's not news. But it's worth repeating nonetheless.
