David Walliams and Matt Lucas take the fly-on-the-wall airport documentary and give it two good running jokes, a dozen thin ones and several characters in make-up that should not have left the chair. There is a sharp half-hour here spread across three hours.
David Walliams and Matt Lucas, who made Little Britain, follow it with a six-part spoof of the fly-on-the-wall airport programme, the kind that ran on British television for years with a soothing narrator and a great many people being patient at check-in. The form suits them. It supplies a reason for the catchphrases, it lets them play two dozen people without having to connect any of them, and it gives the camera somewhere to stand. The first episode went out on 25 December 2010, which tells you how confident the BBC was. The confidence was about a third justified.
The best material is the smallest. Peter and Judith are a couple whose holidays seem to exist so that they can be complained about afterwards, and they deliver their grievances straight to the lens with the stillness of people who are certain they are being reasonable. The complaints get odder each week and neither of them notices, which is the joke, and it is a good one. The pilot and first officer are a proper double act, two men who loathe each other and have to sit a foot apart for eight hours, and the programme has the sense to keep their scenes short. We laughed at both, more than once, and we laughed the way we were meant to, which is not nothing for a sketch show.
Then there is Omar Baba. Walliams and Lucas play several Black and Asian characters in heavy make-up, and we were uncomfortable the first time it happened and did not become less so. It is not only that the make-up is ugly, though it is. It is that the characters underneath it have one joke each, and the joke is nearly always that they are foreign. Omar runs his airline on the principle of never paying for anything, and that is the whole of him; six episodes later he has not acquired a second idea. The costume is doing the work the writing should have done, and the costume should not have been doing anything at all.
The mockumentary itself is handled competently. The camera is handheld and a little late to everything, the narrator speaks over shots of aircraft taxiing at dawn in the voice of someone reading a bedtime story, and the cutaways to a departures board or a baggage carousel arrive exactly where the real programmes would put them. Adam Tandy produces, and the thing looks like what it is copying, which is the point. The trouble is that the real programmes had the advantage of not knowing what would happen next, and this one always does.
The guests are a measure of how the show thinks. Geri Halliwell, David Schwimmer, Rupert Grint, Barbara Windsor, Anna Friel and Germaine Greer turn up as themselves and are asked, mostly, to be recognised. Sally Rogers, Di Botcher, Alice Lowe and Aisling Bea get the small parts, the passengers and relatives who have to react to whichever creation is in front of them, and they do it well enough that we wished the camera had stayed with them. A sketch programme that gives its best straight faces so little to be straight about has misjudged where the funny is.
Little Britain worked the same method, a character, a setting, a catchphrase, repeated until the repetition was the joke. By 2010 the repetition is just repetition. Each of the six episodes plays a variation on the same dozen situations, and by the fourth we knew what every character would do before the narrator had finished introducing them. The runtime is 30 minutes and most episodes feel longer.
The few reviews that exist are split between mixed and unimpressed, and we are nearer the second. Watch Peter and Judith and the cockpit if someone has clipped them for you. Sit through all six for the rest and you will spend most of three hours waiting at the gate.
