The undoubted masters of the toy film tribute genre ... Adam and Joe. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian
The BBC has launched a new user-driven website, inviting us to upload homemade spoof-tributes to classic British films as part of its summer season on the subject. It's an alternately entertaining and depressing experience.
Those of us logging on and hoping for some ingenious mash-ups can forget about it. There's an official guidance film on the site sternly warning against precisely this sort of thing, because it's "copyright material". Pinching other people's films and cutting them together to make each constituent bit look silly, or creating a pointless shouty succession of similar phrases and images, like those ads for FilmFour, is strictly verboten.
So if you're looking for those, you will have go back to YouTube, which is less fastidious about it. Here I have incidentally enjoyed Apocalypt Now, a plausible blend of Mel Gibson and Francis Ford Coppola, and an eerily convincing new version of the "Good Morning" dance sequence from Singin' In The Rain re-cut to I Don't Like The Look Of It, by Da Backwudz.
No, what you're supposed to do is act out favourite scenes using your own cheesy amateur human bodies or dolls, soft toys, action figures etc. Or else create thematic tribute montages. Available on the site already is a selection of short films from amateurs and established comedians with BBC sitcoms and sketch shows under their sleek, professional belts, whose efforts are prefaced by the BBC logo.
One immediate and melancholy conclusion to be drawn isn't simply that the professionals are loads better at it than the amateurs, but that the wrong professionals have got involved.
Phill Jupitus has created a homage to the mind-reading scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and a very elaborate and smart-looking piece of work it is, though maybe they spent a lot more time on the visual pastiche than on the script. Reginald D Hunter has done an instant comedy version of Alan Clarke's Scum (1979).
The only short film I have seen that is actually funny, however, is Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis's recreation of Sidney J Furie's The Ipcress File (1965), which is hilarious, and spoofs cinematographer Otto Heller's crazy camera angles with a sophistication worn lightly. There is some quite brilliant acting from Dennis who does look and sound as if he could be cast in The Ipcress File.
Among the unpaid user-generators' material, there is a very bizarre decapitation of a Barbie doll using a guillotine, inspired by Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), which I have to admit did get a laugh from me at the horrible moment itself. Then there is a toy version of Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), The Wicca Man, by Fiona Maher, which again is good-natured and driven by a sincere love of the original film.
But it was only when I had watched one or two of these that the penny dropped. Hang about! This is what Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish used to do with their Toy TV movies, on the Channel 4 programme The Adam and Joe Show, which sadly went off the air in 2001 to be replaced with things that weren't as good.
Adam and Joe were doing this ten years ago, and very funny it was too. With their cheeky, likeable shamateurism, they had a prototypical Web 2.0 style of comedy, as well as a very sophisticated sense of cinema. Why haven't the BBC got Adam and Joe on board for this site, as well as involved in the season itself? It would increase the comedy-IQ factor a hundredfold.
