Very often on the Great British Bake Off, there is a contestant who recognises, too late, that they’ve got a soggy bottom and a dry crumb, and so they enter a state of panic-layering, slapping on more and more icing and spun sugar until the cake begins to collapse under the effort of making it half-decent. The Luke McQueen Pilots is a not dissimilar experience. This mockumentary, subtitled “Britain’s Hidden Vampire Crisis”, is a send-up of the Stacey Dooley/Reggie Yates school of immersive investigations, but it’s also set up as a failed TV pilot showcasing a presenter on the edge of collapse.
In the real world, McQueen is a comedian whose live shows have involved outrageous stunts, smart conceits or some variant of the two, whether that’s an entire Edinburgh run based on the notion that his former comedy partner Jack Whitehall left him in pursuit of fame and glory, or enduring a series of public humiliations in order to win back a girlfriend who left him when he “accidentally” cheated. These pilots aim to harness a bit of that anarchy, but they are undercooked and the format is muddled. In this one, the first of three, McQueen aims to expose a government cover-up about the existence of vampires, who, he thinks, may have killed his mother. He gives blood outside the Houses of Parliament until he almost faints, and pours milk on himself in the middle of a crowded market. It’s all a little untethered by the flimsy wider story, and feels as if it is straddling many ideas without the confidence to choose one.
In framing it as an unsuccessful pilot, it builds in an excuse for the issues it has, but it’s not a very convincing one. The regular references to Stacey Dooley and Reggie Yates – “The BBC insisted we get an expert to corroborate the facts, like what Reggie Yates or Stacey Dooley would do” – hammer home a point that is obvious from the get-go, and the faux-naive grilling of experts brings to mind Philomena Cunk, which is an unfortunate and unflattering point of comparison. There are the odd, small moments in which it looks as if it’s found its tone: as McQueen scans his Carrie Mathison-style investigation wall, the camera flits over a Post-It that reads, simply, “Buy More Post-Its.” There is a brilliantly awkward and seemingly unscripted moment, too, when McQueen is holding a placard protesting Theresa May’s involvement in the vampire scandal, on the verge of collapse from the “emotion” of the situation and from being drained of blood, when a member of the public comes over and asks for a selfie.
McQueen needed more unpredictable moments to work with. Instead, in big cities, most people seem to look on at odd behaviour for a moment then carry on unperturbed, as is made clear when he loudly demands the age of consent be lowered, and onlookers are less provoked than they are mildly confused.
I wonder if the main problem might have been the most simple to solve, which is the order in which the three episodes are being shown. Using the most obvious conceit for the first episode sets it up as a kind of Cunk-lite romp, though the following two episodes try something different. The next instalment is a potshot at travelogues, in which McQueen goes on a sex tour of Amsterdam with his dad, and in the third he is trying out a Love Island-style reality show. Both promise more than this, which stumbles more than it runs.
