During the recent revival of Friday Night Live, broadcast to celebrate Channel 4’s 40th anniversary, Harry Enfield came back with a couple of his old characters, including Stavros. Enfield played the one-time kebab shop proprietor as the proud owner of a posh coffee shop in Hackney, the kind of place where the London borough’s newer population might prefer to go. His suggestions as to why had me howling. People who were simply expecting the return of a sketch in which a man said “innit” and “peeps” at the end of his sentences would have found there was a bit more bite to it than that.
In The Love Box in Your Living Room, (BBC Two), Enfield and his old partner Paul Whitehouse turn to the BBC’s own birthday celebrations, putting 100 candles on the cake by way of an hour-long documentary spoof. It’s similar to their 2015 series The Story of the Twos, which marked BBC Two’s 50th anniversary, only here it’s Adam Curtis parodied rather than Simon Schama. There’s also a semi-parody of the 1976 Mike Leigh film Nuts in May and several Eurovision song contests, makes the Beatles into a singular prime minister (although, after this year, perhaps that’s not so strange) and invents a Farrow & Ball colour called Munge. It is 60 minutes of rapid-fire silliness, although, just like Stavros, there is more to it than inventing daft words and a Captain Pugwash cartoon recast with Rod Stewart and Ted Heath.
Adam Curtis’s name occasionally appears in the background, as a reminder that this is a spoof. Enfield and director Daniel Kleinman have picked up on the relentlessness and straight-faced sobriety perfectly. Radio waves are illustrated with archive footage of spaghetti and unravelling cotton spools. It is divided into chapters with lofty titles such as The Unforeseen Triumph of Talking Pictures Encased in Fine Walnut or The Public Relations Monkeys Suck at Your Heart. For anyone who hasn’t either loved or endured Curtis’s films, I can’t imagine how this might come across, but it uses its medium spectacularly well, tracing everything back to the workers and the UK’s reliable cycle of being “a bit shit” every few decades or so.
There are plenty of mini-parodies folded up inside its overarching one. Even Martin Parr’s idents are recreated. Many of the BBC’s classics are revisited and revised, from Only Fools and Horses to Strictly, from The Vicar of Dibley to Muffin the Mule, from Top of the Pops to Dad’s Army. The attention to detail on its Peaky Blinders haircuts is very funny, as is Enfield’s take on Cillian Murphy’s moody mystique. There are deeper points made with deft touches, and jokes that are returned to, again and again: Enfield and Whitehouse have claimed the whole show is “complete bollocks”, but inside the gags there are plenty of sharp theories. Its bit on the evolution of political interviews, for example, is a clever analysis of the changing approach taken by interviewers, beginning with “the Wanker Teacher” type, softening into a more pandering friendliness.
Much like Philomena Cunk’s spoof histories, this is about more than its main subject. It gallops through a history of Britain from the end of the first world war to the present day, via the Great Depression, the swinging 60s, the yuppies, the Young British Artists and Blair’s Britain, which it posits as the start of a great BBC blandification. Sadly, it didn’t have time to catch up with the latest drama at Downing Street, but it does end with the death of the BBC, via Nadine the Important and a chapter entitled A Pleasant Stroll in the Memorial Park of Your Mind.
Considering this is a BBC show, made by comedians very much employed by the BBC, and purports to celebrate the history, or at least a history, of the BBC, it has a healthy disdain for lots of parts of the BBC. It has a pop at its labyrinthine bureaucracy, its privately educated overlords and its tricky history with employing women, apart from Joan Bakewell. But it scatters its mockery around with equal measure: New Labour gets as much of a pasting as “Porridge Johnson”, while Pride & Prejudice is used as a jumping off point to lampoon ITV’s Downton Abbey. But as much as it skewers its host (“The BBC didn’t know anyone working class, because it was like a giant public school”), it is also a love letter to it. It might be a barbed one, written after many decades of marriage, weary with the routine familiarity of it all, but there’s no hiding its affection and love. As I said, however, if you have not seen an Adam Curtis series before, then good luck with this odd beast.
