“‘Youth” channel BBC3 is hurtling towards its online-only fate in January 2016. It’s already lost its big acquisition, Family Guy, to ITV2 and there’s been talk of one of the true jewels in its crown, Don’t Tell the Bride, setting up home on one of its bigger siblings. This means the days of flicking and accidentally chancing upon something like Being Human, or In the Flesh, or a surprisingly incisive documentary about young people and mental health, for example, will be gone. To watch BBC3, you will have to make a concerted effort, and it is unlikely that great swaths of viewers will do that. Its new comedy Murder in Successville, a truly bizarre concoction of genres and ideas, reinforces the sense that this is a real shame.
Murder in Successville is ridiculous. Each week it takes a real-life celebrity, and places them in the middle of a fictional murder mystery, which they must help to solve. Successville, where these crimes take place, is populated by celebrities doing ordinary jobs, only these “celebrities” are impressionists doing their versions of those celebrities doing ordinary jobs. It’s part sketch show, part structured reality show and part quiz show. Its jokes are largely crude and scatological. Everyone is on the verge of laughter throughout.
In the opening episode, the celebrity stooge is Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea. I’ve never seen Made in Chelsea, so he well could have been the impressionist’s version of Jamie Laing, though a passing colleague saw him on my screen, confirmed it was the real Jamie Laing and declared him to be “the worst”. Laing plays a rookie cop tasked with cracking the murder of Strictly Come Dancing judge Bruno Tonioli, who, in Successville, is a chef married to chief suspect Darcy Bussell. Neither are played by themselves. Local gangsters Alan Carr and Harry Styles are not themselves, either. Nor, disappointingly, is ballistics expert Taylor Swift actually played by Taylor Swift.
This is a very, very silly show. For the first half I was torn between feeling extremely pleased something so anarchic and daft had been commissioned by the BBC in the first place, and willing it to be just that little bit funnier, and less reliant on jokes about bumming. But eventually, it got me. Laing gamely plays along as he is directed towards increasingly absurd situations, such as interrogating Alan Carr’s underworld “sister” Jimmy Carr, who communicates only in that seal-bark laugh.
If Laing really is a villain in Made in Chelsea, then Murder in Successville is a remarkable act of rehabilitation for him. He just can’t stop giggling, and it’s helplessly contagious. This is the same silly joy that comes from sitcom blooper reels, or performers corpsing during live comedy, or trying not to laugh when you’re getting told off. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but it is surprisingly charming, and perhaps some of those remaining BBC3-on-TV viewers might have stumbled across it and been charmed by it, too.
There are more surprises, though less charm, in another new comedy, Channel 4’s Bugsplat!, from Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered writer Guy Jenkin. Bugsplat! is set on an English RAF base, where drone pilots coordinate attacks on far-away targets. The press of one big red button in a converted shipping container in a field annihilates enemies and any number of innocent “collaterals”. This brutal premise forms the basis of George Brant’s fierce monologue Grounded, which is currently running off-Broadway with Anne Hathaway as its drone pilot. But the treatment here is more daft than harrowing, reaching for dark humour in the fundamental absurdity of the situation. That is not, in itself, offensive, though the jokes never quite land, hovering uncomfortably between trying to be both cautious and outrageous.
In its opening scene, a target vehicle is tracked by a drone as it moves from wilderness to town to marketplace to an orphanage for blind children, the collateral damage of any attack becoming increasingly unacceptable. “It’d kill 50 children!” one observer objects. “Health and safety gone mad,” grumbles splat-hungry pilot Lexi (a caustic Lauren O’Neil), as she hovers over the button. Eventually, she gets to press it. She celebrates with a drink – they’ve taken out the bad guy. Only they haven’t, and the real bad guy tricked them, and WikiLeaks is all over it and what appeared to be an operational triumph quickly turns into a PR disaster, particularly since someone filmed them dithering over the approach.
Vincent Franklin, last seen in Russell T Davies’s Cucumber, plays exasperated Wing Commander Barry, who tries his best to manage this messy cross between a bureaucratic nightmare and “Xbox shit”. But for a modern sitcom dealing with such current subjects, it feels strangely old-fashioned. Were it not for the subject matter, it is easy to imagine it airing on ITV’s 9pm Friday-night spot. There are touches of wit – I enjoyed the use of “to decease” as a verb – but the obvious problem is that the real situation is so tragic and absurd that it requires razor-sharp satire to slice it open. The Thick of It, which is a clear point of comparison, worked because its writing was ruthless. This doesn’t go far enough. When Fiona Button’s PR manager Gina attempts to take control of the disaster – “What’s a cock-up but a triumph that hasn’t been spun right?” – you’re left wishing Malcolm Tucker would come and show them how it’s all done.
