Mandy review: Crammed with gags, this is the most inspired comedy on TV right now, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Mandy (BBC2)
Diane Morgan must be television’s ultimate “bad influence,” the kind of person your parents warned you about. First she turns Graham Norton into a hired killer, then she makes Michaela Strachan say the F-word.
Morgan, as her chain-smoking alter ego Mandy (BBC2), climbed a church tower after stealing a ladder from a spire. While she was removing a bird’s nest, a group of ‘great crested eagle’ eggs fell into her beard.
Things like that happen in pretty much every edition of Springwatch, but Michaela (hiding in a nearby tree) was shocked when the first chick hatched.
“I never thought I’d see one like this,” she gasped. “But what’s the £@&% doing in her hair?” Cover your ears, Chris Packham.
Diane Morgan must be television’s ultimate “bad influence,” the kind of person your parents warned you about. First she turns Graham Norton into a hired killer, then she makes Michaela Strachan say the F-word
Morgan, as her chain-smoking alter ego Mandy (BBC2), climbed a church tower after stealing a ladder from a spire. While she was removing a bird’s nest, a group of ‘great crested eagle’ eggs fell into her beard
The entire episode was inspired by the vaguest similarities between Mandy’s peroxide beehive and the platinum hairstyle of 1960s movie goddess Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Director Alfred Hitchcock famously had an obsession with blondes, although half an hour with Mandy would probably have cured him.
This series of surreal 15-minute shorts, packed with running gags and visual allusions, is the most inspired comedy of all time. Written and directed by the star, it’s part sitcom, part sketch show, and revolves around our work-shy heroine’s exhausting attempts to get something for nothing – including benefits, as she makes the effort to show up at the job center.
Plebs’ Tom Basden plays her benefits officer, who constantly tries to bully her but breaks down when she snaps back at him. On her last visit, she caught him cutting his mustache, with only a small blond toothbrush under his nose, like an adolescent Hitler.
Nothing was said about it; this show is peppered with jokes, like the way Mandy leans back to counterbalance her ridiculously high boot heels. Last week she took them off and was suddenly six feet tall, just like Toulouse Lautrec.
“I never thought I’d see one like this,” she gasped. “But what’s the £@&% doing in her hair?” Cover your ears, Chris Packham
Many of the jokes go nowhere. Mandy tried her luck as a ‘living statue’, standing on a milk crate in the shopping area with ivy around her hat. This didn’t add much to the plot, but it did give Morgan the opportunity to strike a ridiculous pose with a frozen face. The fact that it’s funny and stupid is reason enough, like Norton’s performance as a hitman last week.
In a storyline even stranger than the steeples, Mandy and her friend Lola (Michelle Greenidge) have secured free seats to see a psychic by wearing flashy jackets. “Nobody’s questioning you,” she crowed. The medium accidentally summoned the spirit of Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, played by Sean Burke, who looked so much like the snooker star he might be his reincarnation.
Morgan’s genius for visual setups saw her sit in the audience at The Crucible for the snooker final, unnerving Higgins by throwing a light off him.
A chase ensued, with the Pot Black theme. Strangely enough, that music works just as well for slapstick as Benny Hill’s Yakety Sax.