Another week, another comedy gem starring the saviour of US light entertainment, Danny McBride. "Danny McWho?" I hear you ask, in a tetchy and unnecessarily hostile voice. You mean you didn't catch him playing oafish numbskulls in Pineapple Express or Tropic Thunder? Then be sure to catch his mould-breaking performance as an oafish numbskull in The Foot Fist Way, a new mockumentary about a deluded, cuckolded taekwondo teacher, which McWho - sorry, I mean McBride - also co-wrote.
Watching the film recently, my first thought was not "We've seen all this before" or "How many more times will an unoriginal idea get smuggled past quality control just because it's disguised as a mockumentary?" On the contrary, those were, respectively, my second and third thoughts. Instead, I wondered: "Are we witnessing the death throes of the mockumentary?" And, if so, how are low-budget comedy filmmakers supposed to earn a crust now?
The mockumentary, with its fake fly-on-the-wall footage, its mensonges dolled up as verité, arguably represents the only new genre of the last forty years. Think of some of the defining cultural phenomena in television and cinema and you will eventually hit upon a mockumentary, whether it's This Is Spinal Tap, The Blair Witch Project, Borat or TV's The Office. What is it that keeps luring creative types back to this genre like former Big Brother contestants drawn, weekend after weekend, to make PA's at dangerous nightclubs in the Romford area?
It could be that, in the post-Watergate, post-Iraq years when we can no longer trust our leaders, the avowed, up-front fraudulence of the mockumentary is the only trustworthy alternative to the manipulative media. Or it might be that the makers of mockumentaries are capitalising on the decline in the integrity of documentarists like Michael Moore or Nick Broomfield, who have shown themselves to be partial to the sort of propaganda more commonly found in a Hollywood blockbuster.
Undoubtedly the mockumentary has represented the sort of salve we need in an era saturated in media complacency, when the spectre of falsification can strike institutions as venerable as the New York Times and even Richard & Judy's "You Say, We Pay". If we don't keep a close eye on this kind of corruption, we could very well find, after the votes have been counted at the next general election, that we are facing four years of being governed by Ant and Dec. And if you thought Saturday Night Takeaway was bad, you should hear their ideas on corporation tax.
Whatever the reason for the rise in mockumentaries, we can be absolutely certain that it has nothing to do with the meagre production costs involved, or the appeal of serving the public what it knows it likes rather than striking out with a unique new format. Nor is it plausible, surely, that generations of underemployed comics have spent too long sitting around in tracksuit bottoms watching boxed sets of The Office and Da Ali G Show until they are surfing a tidal wave of rancour and envy that peaks inevitably with the announcement, "I could do that!", delivered to an nearby pet, loved one or bailiff.
Some of the most sophisticated movies of the past 40 years have sprung from the mockumentary genre. As well as This Is Spinal Tap and Borat, think of the work of Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run, Zelig, Husbands and Wives), the Spinal Tap star/co-writer Christopher Guest (Best In Show, A Mighty Wind), not to mention The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash or Harry Enfield's rather lovely faux-South Bank Show special, Norbert Smith - A Life, which featured the only recorded example we have of Melvyn Bragg exhibiting a sense of humour about himself. Elsewhere in TV, series like The Larry Sanders Show, Brass Eye, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge, The Thick Of It and the current Summer Heights High all have significant traces of the mockumentary formula in their DNA.
But has the format run its course? An entire genre cannot be killed off by one under-written, over-praised film like The Foot Fist Way using its conventions to score easy laughs at tired stereotypes. But when a creative style is over-exposed or botched, as it is in that movie and others, including Confetti, The Big Tease, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Mike Bassett: England Manager and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, it can easily shade into meaningless cliché. And if you will forgive me for shooting from the hip and calling a spade a spade, I'm sure we can all agree we need meaningless clichés like a hole in the head.
