Wedding Belles: fizzles out an hour before the last commercial break. Photograph: Channel 4
It was the necrophilia scene that did it for me. Not that I was shocked. On the contrary, it would have been nice to feel something as potent as shock while watching Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh's Wedding Belles last night on Channel 4. Rather, no, when the auld fella, having swallowed a bottle of Viagra (better safe than sorry), is found in an old people's home humping the corpse of the woman with whom he hoped to have consensual sex, it was confirmation of the truest thing I wrote in my notebook, namely: "This scene is going on and on and on. And nobody's thought to make it stop."
It wasn't so much that I could see the joke coming a mile off. If only. I could see the joke buy a one-way ticket to Edinburgh at Victoria Coach Station, spend the journey scratching its bum and eating chips, get off at St Andrews several hours later, take a leisurely down to Leith, have a few pints and only then think of turning up for service in this dire comedy drama.
Welsh and Cavanagh's script was premised on the notion that lewdness is in itself funny and that drug-taking, swearing, and the full panoply of low-rent gross-outs are less venerable on telly than crinoline, well-filled britches and Regency boobs. Welsh hasn't moved on much creatively since his debut 1993 novel Trainspotting. He still holds fast to the idea that a brawl in a Leith boozer is the epitome of gritty urban truth and hilarity: it's now neither. Ever since Danny Boyle directed Trainspotting 12 years ago and Robert Carlyle's character made the Glasgow kiss his own psychotic calling card, it has been a cliche.
And did the auld fella have his plonker pulled by an obliging care home assistant after she'd yanked him off the corpse? He did. And did a priest arrive on the scene wearing his best Frankie Howerd gob at the climactic moment? He did. But did anyone at C4, when reading the script, think to say: "Irvine. Dean. Mates. This is woeful. Do us another draft, yeah?" They did not.
A shame, because I've always admired Michelle Gomez and Shirley Henderson, and wished they had better material than this - a tale of four Leith women wronged by a quartet of louses in the week before one of them is supposed to get married. Cue a lot of chardonnay drinking in wedding frocks around the kitchen table and the relating of fanciful surgical procedures, such as the labiaplasty - the results of which Gomez described as a "wee pink butterfly" when she proudly showed it off in the hairdresser's salon.
Sounds marvellous, you might say. How often do we see a contemporary drama about female bonding? But if this was female bonding, it would have been more edifying to buy the women some Solvite, let them glue their faces to each other and then struggle to get free. I'd rather have watched that for two hours. Think of the money they'd have saved on wedding frocks.
Gomez, at least, has had to get used to TV shows that are too long, having been in Green Wing. At least, though, Green Wing never bothered overmuch with a storyline to link the gags. Better to do that than write a story like Wedding Belles that fizzles out an hour before the last commercial break.
But surely, you retort, how refreshing it is to see a wedding-based comedy without posh twazzers like Hugh Grant and Simon Callow in key roles. It could have been, but it wasn't. It was unremittingly jaded. They even dared to write the gag in which a junkie espies a tin on the mantelpiece emblazoned with the words Charlie. Can you see what the joke is yet? It's just bought a coach ticket in London. That's right: she snorts the contents, only to find that the moniker isn't druggie slang for cocaine, but the name of the householder's deceased dog.
When I interviewed Welsh last year around the publication of The Bedroom Secrets of the Masterchefs, he was smarting from a review in The Times that said: "Welsh's sixth novel is so awful that ... it invents its own category of awfulness." Blow me down if he hasn't done it again.
