Sinister ... Jennifer Saunders as Vivienne Vyle. Photograph: BBC
Last week, Jennifer Saunders' new vehicle, The Life and Times Of Vivienne Vyle, found its ratings dipping below the million mark. Meanwhile, a week or so before, posters on this blog tore it to pieces for not being as funny as The Jeremy Kyle Show, which it bases itself on.
This feels kind of inevitable. As Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, another behind-the-scenes drama about the dark inner workings of network telly, found to its peril, the behind-the-scenes antics of people who work in television tend to be mainly of interest to people who work in television. Studio 60 aimed high and got chopped off at the knees, mid-season.
If the same happened to Vivienne Vyle, a black barely-comedy as brutal as Nathan Barley, it'd be a shame. The point about skitting the unskittable might have been its undoing if it was attempting to be a skit at all. But it's not - barring the odd surrealist twinge, precious little is exaggerated from the source material.
Vivienne Vyle is a character piece, and in the cold light of day, its accuracy is sinister. With Absolutely Fabulous, Saunders could affectionately poke fun at a celebrity culture and its cosy immorality. It all seems rather quaint now. Vivienne Vyle's world is completely amoral, depicting a hellish cesspit where nobody's even pretending to enjoy themselves and what was once ambition has simply becomea new way for people to be horrible to each other. Egomania has become the norm and nobody's immune: last week, even the show's apparent conscience, Dr Jonathan Fowler succumbed to the me disease, coveting a show of his own.
Jeremy Kyle would probably cry wild parody at Vivienne's megalomania, but I'd say the portrayal of a bully drunk on power, sneering at people, pushing them to the point where their only defence is violence and then aggressively clawing back the moral high ground is accurate.
Meanwhile, Miranda Richardson's Helena DeWent doesn't look such a caricature once you've actually met people who work in television.
The gags might jar against the serious face at times, but Vivienne Vyle is just as clever as Studio 60 thinks it is, and the sight of Jennifer Saunders' fingers getting frozen on to her dead husband's sperm vial made me laugh just as hard as any number of Aaron Sorkin wisecracks. The viewers and critics are wrong.
