I've never been a fan of Pete Doherty's music. Whereas some saw a modern-day Baudelaire, I could never shift the image of an 80s Nick Cotton reading A Beginner's Guide To William Blake and busking Clash B-sides. But this Sunday's MTV documentary, Pete Doherty In 24 Hours, suggests that he may have finally found his true calling – as a sketch show character.
The film sees a skeleton crew descending on Doherty's squalid country house to shadow him on the day before his catwalk appearance at London fashion week. Presumably, the intention was to capture a fly-on-the-wall view of hedonistic excess, but what emerges is a portrait of a man bored out of his mind. Never one to reject a rock'n'roll cliche, Doherty has retreated to the sticks, decorated his bucolic bolthole with tat and then rattled around it with nothing to do (see also Led Zeppelin at Bron-Yr-Aur and Mick Jagger at Stargroves). The sight of him trying to jolly up the proceedings with contrived zaniness (owning a hammock, having paw prints on the wall, randomly doing cartwheels) recalls Rik from the Young Ones trying to get the student party going.
By the time the film crew have captured their subject speaking in a hilarious "gay voice", execute a mincing walk and pretend that his house is haunted you begin to suspect that the only way a pillock of this magnitude could have come to dominate British pop was if he had carefully contrived the joke from the start. The real giveaway comes when he knocks off a cringeworthy joke song about his forthcoming catwalk appearance that bears no discernible difference to his "real" output.
The final sequence, which features Doherty faking a seizure in the back of a car, is a perfect parody of an attention-seeking rocker that Neil Innes or Bad News would have been proud of. At the end, when Carl Barat waddles on stage for an "emotional" Dickensian skiffle reunion, the comparison to an earlier famous duo is overwhelming – not Mick and Joe, or Mick and Keith, but Laurel and Hardy.
