Mourning Gervais (or: How the second series of Extras and that which followed it broke my heart)
Mourning Gervais (or: How the second series of Extras and that which followed it broke my heart)
8:40am September 27th, 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ia__1d_rM&feature=PlayList&p=C5B2897AE7DD46F6&index=0&playnext=1
I was going to make today’s post about how much peter hellier sucks (and oh christ oh lordy does he suck...) but I found, to my delight/slight annoyance that the clip I was going to use to illistrate my point (Helliers craptacular appearance on ‘thank god you’re here’*) isn’t available on youtube, and , fuck, I’m not going to scour the internet just so i can point out that a fat, mildly retarded man isn’t always as funny he should be.
So instead, a much graver sore point for me - the slow, painful erosion of my goodwill towards and love for Ricky Gervais( and to a lesser extent Stephen Merchant).
I love the office like a nutcase - it was hysterical, painfully well observed, wise and insightful. I realised recently that it enaged me emotionally more than any tv show I can think of. I misted up when Brent begs to keep his job at the end of series two, I got a great thrill out of him telling finchy to fuck off and the tension and release of Tim and Dawn getting together in the christmas special was completely genuine and estatic. No matter how often I see the brent dance, or gareth acting like a dick, or tim and dawn flirting I never ever get sick of it. Oh my god do I love that show. And I thought the first series of Extras was superb - the celebs where well intergrated into the storylines and Mercant was fucking brilliant as Andy Millman’s manager.
Gervais became ubiquitous a year or two ago (he did a few amusingly obnoxious cameos for Comic relief, my favourite of which is attached) and that’s where it all went wrong for me - his patchy-at-best stand up, his appearance on several high profile american movies/ shows ( a night at the museum, for your consideration, the simpsons), all extended riffs on Brent, really started to wear thin. Could there have been anything more disapointing than his simpsons starring/writing cameo, something which promised to be, like, the most mindbendingly great thing ever,and turned out to be an utter non event?
So then Extras series two comes along and I’m ready to be won back over. But I’m not. I’m not at all. Extras 2 is rubbish.
Firstly, in series one, the celeb cameo’s were written into the storyline in a way that was interesting and relevant, as was the way they played around with their public persona - the Ross Kemp/Kate Winslet/Les Dennis episodes wouldn’t have worked without them, they were intergral to what happened in the plot of the episode. Now the Celebrity cameo’s have gotten bigger, the roles they play have gotten smaller - now Chris Martin turns up for two minutes of screentime and leaves. It still makes you smile to see him acting like a jerk, but it’s not great writing.
But their greatest crime was turning Maggie into such a nothing character- in series one, sure she had idiotic tendencies, but she was also warm, caring and capable of insight and wit. She was a real person. Now she’s just flat out retarded, says nothing of any interest, and has the tact of 2 year old. Maggie’s only role is to fuck things up for Andy, no matter how blindingly unrealistic her faux pas are - it’s as though they write an episode thinking ‘right, andy has to get in trouble with his Ex. Let’s just have maggie explicitly tell her private stuff in an enitrely unmotivated fashion.” She has gone from being a character that had plots written to service and develop her further, to a character that exists soley to service the plot, something which would be unforgivable from bad writers, let alone writers as great as Merchant and Gervais.
Last night I saw a preview scene from “Stardust” the latest big budget feature that Gervais has appeared in and I felt the Nadir had been reached. Sharing the screen with Robert De Niro, using all the facial and vocal tics associated with brent, he rolls his eyes and say ‘you’re avin a larf!’ and briefly chuckles. Suddenly Gervais looked an uncomfortable amount like the kind of lazy, one note comedian that he has always loudly claimed to despise.
*Basically,hellier has one joke through the entire sketch, and that joke is ‘ “Boy, improv is hard. They really should’ve hired someone funny“