So it’s true. Or it’s not true, depending on how you look at it. The 1969 Nasa Apollo 11 moon landing never happened. A fake, all filmed at Pinewood Studios by Stanley Kubrick, just as he would later fess up to – or at least hint at – in The Shining.
How do we know? Because a young Steven Toast – Toast of London (Channel 4) – was also at Pinewood that day; to film some sex comedy probably, it’s hard to remember, he was smoking a lot of children in need (weed, I’m assuming) at the time. Anyway, he wandered on to the wrong set, Studio D instead of Studio B; right on to the surface of the moon in fact, where Stanley K was directing Neil A and Buzz A’s first steps, with space race “winner” Richard Tricky Dicky Nixon keeping an eye on proceedings from the wings.
Now, nearly half a century later, Toast, half boozed up, has let slip, to Lorraine Kelly as it happens, live on breakfast TV. Uh-oh, trouble ahead. And, if that wasn’t enough to worry about, he’s just found out – from Lorraine – that the open-air Macbe … sorry, Scottish Play … he’s about to do is going to be broadcast live on television. Straight after Emmerdale Farm, part of ITV’s Culture Night (ha!). Cue pillar-clasping stage-fright.
It’s typically bonkers Toast. Joyful in the madness of the ideas, Matt Berry’s performance, his facial acrobatics, vocal pelvic thrusts and unconventional syllable stress. But in with the lunacy there’s more than a glimmer of truth. I don’t just mean the fake moon landing (have you not seen The Shining? It’s all there, plain as the white streak in Steven Toast’s rug). But also in the absurdity and uncertainty of the thespian world it depicts. Toast, between parts, is still doing his voiceovers (as Berry does in real life; he is The Voice of so much) at Scramble, with Danny Bear and Clem Fandango, coke-snorting c-words, issuing instructions from behind the glass. I’m sure every Soho voiceover studio has its bandana-wearing hipster idiot-child intern like Clem Fandango, whom every actor, twice Clem’s age and trying to make ends meet, has had to endure.
To make things worse, at Scramble they’ve discovered a tiny chap, a kind of human lyrebird called Colin, who can perfectly mimic Toast’s voice. Is that work going to dry up too? Who’d be an actor, eh? I doubt Toast is the only one to have self-doubt, superstition and paranoia lurking just beneath the misguided braggadocio.
If you’re coming to Toast new you’re probably finding it absurd and glorious and hilarious. Which it is. But what about those of us who’ve been there from the beginning (like those annoying people who said they were at the Haçienda or wherever before anyone else)? Well I’m still laughing, but maybe not quite as loud as I was. Because it’s the same thing, and the same thing gets less funny? Well, there might be some of that going on; when something is mainly about one character, and one world, it’s hard – even for funny and imaginative people, which Berry and co-writer Arthur Mathews are – to keep it up. (Could Charlie Brooker’s and Chris Morris’s Nathan Barley have gone on? Discuss.) But also it seems that – even with bonkers conspiracy theories and pickled-onion sex – the surreality and the bawdiness have been reined in, and no one wants to see that. Perhaps success might be partly to blame; Matt Berry’s own star has been heading in the opposite direction to his creation’s. Now look at these famous people wanting a piece of Toast. Lorraine here, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm later, Peter Davison, Brian Blessed … I wonder if this brighter spotlight and more attention has meant some cleaning up going on. See, success, celebrity, they don’t make anything better.
I’m worried it sounds like I’m too down on Toast of London. It’s still one of my favourite things on TV. It’s still hilarious and brilliant. It’s just maybe not quite as hilarious and brilliant.
It’s certainly more hilarious and brilliant than Josh (BBC3). Which doesn’t mean Josh Widdicombe’s eponymous sitcom – about a slightly younger version of himself sharing a flat with a couple of mates (played by Beattie Edmondson and Elis James) – is bad. There is a nice chemistry between the three of them, and between Edmondson and her mum (played by actual mum Jennifer Saunders). It’s all nice, in fact. Funny too, sometimes, in a nice, cosy, safe, familial, familiar kind of way. Exactly as you’d expect a flatshare sitcom to be.
