Brian Weaver is an ordinary loser – an office temp facing the sack. Actually, that makes him a rather extraordinary loser – I used to be a temp, and it was near impossible to get sacked. Brian (Inbetweener James Buckley) doesn’t even know what’s coming, because he is too busy arguing with a help desk about an undelivered phone charger – he received a bracelet by mistake. When he tries the bracelet on, his wrist starts to smoke and he disappears. When he reappears, he is in a parallel universe policed by fairies and populated by wizards and chicken-headed humanoids.
That, in a nutshell, is the premise of Zapped (Dave). Brian has rocked up in a pretty low-rent, part-fantasy world, just outside a pub called The Jug and the Other Jug, whose regulars are the magical equivalent of losers: a useless soothsayer, a drunken wizard and a half-giant, half-dwarf. The good news is, they have his phone charger. The bad news is, they don’t have anywhere to plug it in, and he is trapped.
You may have surmised that Zapped is a comedy, although you would be hard-pressed to find evidence of it. The jokes are pretty thin, and some (the one about the chicken-headed man supplying eggs, for example) were pressed into service more than once. A quality cast do brave battle with the material: Sharon Rooney is the soothsayer, who thinks she may have predicted Brian, and Paul Kaye brings a certain demented verve to the wizard Howell. Sally Phillips does a nice turn as evil psychopath Slasher Morgan, although the joke is mostly that Slasher Morgan is played by Sally Phillips.
Zapped isn’t dire, exactly. It is gentle, amiable and silly. There are a few good laughs and faint rumblings of a plot beneath all the nonsense. But the magical realm of Munty – for so it is called – is sketchily imagined. It looks as if the whole thing was filmed in a dusty corner of a decommissioned Harry Potter set. Characters speak in a jumbled mix of sword-and-sorcery tropes and modern-day phrases (eg, “my dating history”), and very little of consequence occurs. The Mighty Boosh could make a virtue of this kind of surreal slapdashery, but here it just seems unconsidered.
Even Brian, blasted from our world into this one by a bracelet, seemed to lack interest in his new surroundings. He just wanted to go back home, and I quite wanted to go with him.
Twenty-four years ago, mysterious black-and-white footage emerged of what was supposed to be an alien autopsy secretly performed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. History’s Greatest Hoaxes (Yesterday) explored this film’s unlikely provenance. “Where did the footage come from, and was it real?” asked the narrator, perhaps forgetting the name of the programme.
The film itself doesn’t hold up very well – it looks like two men in paper suits trying to defuse a piñata – but in 1995, it was enough to prompt a Fox Network special and much speculation. What remains impressive all these years later is the audacity behind the stunt.
The aliens were made by special-effects expert John Humphreys, and the operating theatre was mocked up in a flat in north London. The alien’s innards came from Smithfield market. Spyros Melaris, who filmed proceedings on a 16mm camera, spent weeks sourcing period medical instruments and 1940s American bakelite sockets for his set. Sceptics said the curly flex on the wall phone in the background was an anachronism, but they were wrong. When the filming was complete, the hoaxers had to chop up the bodies like murderers and dispose of the parts in various bins around Camden.
The fake backstory surrounding the film is just as elaborate. Ray Santilli, a record promoter, said he got the footage from a military cameraman. “The whole idea, really, was to put it out there and let people make up their own minds,” he says now. When pressed, he claimed the footage he released was actually a reconstruction – he likened it to art restoration – of the original film, which had degraded, and that only a few authentic frames ended up in the final version. Weirdly, he still stands by that story. “I still have the original footage,” he said, “and that footage at some later stage, when we decide it’s right, will be made available to the public to see.”
To take part as a talking head in this programme risked a certain culpability, or at least gullibility. Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos suggested public credulousness was based on the fear that “there is something out there, in the same way that cavemen feared big bad dinosaurs”. Marcus Brigstocke said he was persuaded when the film first emerged. It is easy to think we are all smarter now, until you remember that Donald Trump is running for president.
