Send in the Clowns
Psychoville Preview
If you don’t count the Halloween special, then it’s been nearly two years since the first series of Psychoville ended with an explosive cliffhanger and so you’d be forgiven for finding it hard to remember the intricacies of the plot if, like me, you have trouble recalling what happened last week. But although the story is quite convoluted, it’s not really confusing like, say, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or a Steven Moffat episode of Doctor Who. And to be honest there are so many great lines, consistently funny performances and shocking twists in this first episode, that you’ll be too busy enjoying yourself to care about exactly where it’s all going.
I genuinely don’t want to spoil the fun, so while I can say that some characters survived the explosion at the end of the last series, some most definitely didn’t, and much of the action in this initial episode is concerned with bidding farewell to the old and welcoming the new. A particularly promising new arrival is Jeremy Good, a worryingly punctilious librarian haunted by Lynchian visions; his first scene is one of the funniest of the episode, and Reece Shearsmith plays him perfectly. Steve Pemberton also has a new character Hattie; a Northern fag-hag on the fringes of the acting profession. She’s not as striking a newcomer as Jeremy Good, but as ever, it’ll be interesting to see how both of these characters fit into the main plot. Even more intriguing is Grace Andrews (Imelda Staunton), an MI5-type Judi Dench wannabe who was first seen in the Halloween Special, and is clearly going to play an important role as the story unfolds.
One of the real strengths of Psychoville is the assuredness with which Pemberton and Shearsmith create a world where violent shifts in tone seem perfectly natural. This episode starts brilliantly with the funeral of a character from the first series; there are so many details packed into this set-piece opener that it rewards replaying, and the wake afterwards includes corking lines (“Who are you smiling at?”) and a nice reference to the ‘Cairoli Foundation’. Scenes that feature dialogue straight out of Alan Bennett, (“I was once hospitalised by a Bakewell tart”), are rapidly followed by moments of genuine unpleasantness, and in fact, if one key scene in this episode is anything to go by, then the horror element will be even stronger in this series. It seems very likely that there’ll be a greater sense of jeopardy for the characters as the run progresses, and I wonder if the writers may be working towards a definite ending this time around rather than relying again on the vagueries of another commission.
It’s hard for me to be impartial about Psychoville. Shearsmith and Pemberton are about my age and seem to share almost exactly the same frame of cultural reference, so throwaway Marc Almond jokes, an unfortunate shared memory of Down’s Syndrome references in the playground, and nods to circus clowns from the 1970s are right up my alley. Some people probably find this kind of humour puerile, adolescent, television-obsessed and very specifically male-orientated, but I’m at least three of those things so how can I be expected to resist? Ultimately if you don’t like this, then there’s plenty of other comedy shows on television, although I can guarantee that only one of them will feature an homage to Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, and it won’t be Life of Riley.
Psychoville is back at last – enjoy it while you can.
[dcs_darkspliter]
Psychoville returns on 5th May 2011 at 10pm on BBC2
