This festive special isn’t so much about angling against gorgeous Highland backdrops as a harrowing existential meditation on the ubiquity of death. Certainly for those of us with free bus passes, it’s more chilling than any MR James ghost story.
Not that I’m complaining: after a Christmas of unremitting festive faux bonhomie, how refreshing that Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer plumb the depths not for salmon but for matters that usually get airbrushed from our mortality-averse culture.
Bob and Paul keep death close at hand. Over drinks at one point, they show each other pictures of their dead dads on their phones. Paul’s would spend many happy fishing trips with his son; Bob’s dad, glimpsed in a black-and-white shot, never lived long enough to have a pint with his son. “I feel I missed out a little bit,” says Bob.
If the devil said you could live for 30 more years if you did something terrible, would you enter this Faustian pact, asks Paul. He even sweetens the deal by impersonating the devil in the voice of late funnyman Bernie Winters. Bob thinks not.
But then Bob has had a terrible year with his health. Shingles prevented him appearing in Gone Fishing earlier this year (he was replaced by Lee Mack) and now, he tells us, he can’t run any more. Who would want 30 more years of physical decline?
Throughout this TV excursion, time’s winged chariot hovers horribly near. The two men compare ailments and health tips. Their sausage baps aren’t buttered because butter isn’t heart-healthy. I’d have thought fly-fishing waist-deep in the River Dee for hours isn’t either.
True, there are funny moments. I’m a sucker for Ted the dog’s underbite – and the assumption that if Ted could talk he’d sound like Tommy Cooper. At one point they take Ted to a hilariously misconceived dog playground, which seems to have been designed with horses in mind. Ted, being sensible, doesn’t jump over fences arranged for canine show-jumping, but trots around each one. Only fools and horses work. Dogs? Not so much.
The drollest moments involve the pretence that this New Year special is filmed in late December. As they drive to some fishing spot through the majesty of Royal Deeside (Scotland here amounts to mere backdrop for Sassenach highland flings, as at Balmoral) Paul says he’s very impressed Bob has kept his car clean. “New year, new me,” retorts Bob, though one look out the Audi’s window at the foliage discloses that this is – at the very latest – October.
I also like the debate about who would win in a fight between the brawny shotputter on Scott’s oats boxes and the Puritan man on the Quaker Oats box. Conventional wisdom suggests the former, but matters are not so simple. The Quaker’s hat brim might be dangerously sharp, offers Bob. “Like Peaky Blinders,” says Paul sagely.
But twice during their stay in a stately home, as gloaming descends, the two ageing funnymen are visited by portentous figures of doom. It’s like a low-budget Macbeth with a seasonal sprinkle of Dickens in which two weird women present their credentials like the ghosts of Hogmanay present and future.
First to arrive is their old thespian mate Arabella Weir who turns up with a bottle of whisky, a lump of coal (according to the rites of the Hogmanay tradition of first footing) and a terrifying tale. A Northern Irish friend told her, Weir relates, of something called sniper’s alley. It is not, as you might think, something to do with the Troubles, but the scary decade between 60 and 70, when humans are likely to be assailed by fatal ailments. Men are most prone to get hit when they’re 65, women when they’re 63. If you get past these ages, Weir suggests, you’ll probably live long.
I’d like to see supporting data for this thesis but Bob, 64, and Paul, who the internet suggests is “about 65”, exchange concerned looks. All three raise a glass to 2023’s departed – Sinead O’Connor, Paul O’Grady and Michael Parkinson. “Let’s hope we make it through sniper’s alley,” says Weir who, at 66, probably has.
If that isn’t maudlin enough, the following night Clare Grogan pops up. As lead singer for Altered Images in the 1980s, she was a peerless pop poppet. Now, like everybody else on this show apart from Ted, she will never see 60 again. “I thought when I turned 60 I was going to be absolutely fine about it,” says Grogan. “I must admit being fabulous gets to be exhausting.” It so does.
And yet, this being Hogmanay, Grogan rolls back the years, reprising the 1981 hit I Could Be Happy with her group on the terrace of Paul and Bob’s fancy accommodation. As she sings “I could go to Skye on my holiday,” and fireworks burst over this corner of Aberdeenshire, I admit, there are a few tears.
This time next year, says Bob, making a New Year’s promise rather than a resolution, I’ll be running again. Let’s hope.
Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Hogmanay Fishing aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer
