Idris Elba! Kim Kardashian! Ariana Grande! Greta Thunberg! Rihanna! Adele! The cast list of ITV’s new comedy is impeccable. It would be right up there with Glengarry Glen Ross or Pulp Fiction if it weren’t for one snag: those famous faces appear only via deep fake technology, which super-imposes their beloved features onto the profiles of actors (who are doing middling vocal impressions of them). This is the world of Deep Fake Neighbour Wars, a show that mixes comedy and technology with as much success as Dave Chapelle welcoming Elon Musk as his warm-up act.
It’s essentially a mockumentary version of naff reality TV, like Nasty Neighbours and Fear Thy Neighbor. Petty domestic disputes that escalate into (in this case, slapstick) violence. The twist here is that the participants have the faces (and names) of well-known celebrities. They don’t, however, have the careers of those celebrities, and they only possess a smattering of their character traits. For every Kim Kardashian (Francine Lewis) who’s obsessed with sunbathing in Lewisham, or Greta Thunberg (Katia Kvinge) who’s monomaniacal about electricity wastage, there’s a pernickety Idris Elba (Aurie Styla) trying to grow coriander or a cackling Conor McGregor (Al Foran) who wants to celebrate Christmas all year round.
