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| TV,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F2
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Father Ted was great a blissful union of great scripting and great cast. This happens once in a very blue moon. I’ve seen a lot of sitcoms hatched and screwed because of a lack a chutzpah in one department has sunk the other. Breaking out of the mould of ham-acting and farce plotting seems to be an large millstone for the Brits, the US getting away with it more often than not because a cool American delivery can paper over character dialogue cracks your more enthusiastic middle class actor slips down blindly.
Hippies has Father Ted’s writers and pretty classy cast pedigree (a bloke or two from Big Train, the lass from Smack the Pony etc), and it is funny sporadically. The premise on the surface is a bit thin – hippy humour, and whether you find this funny really depends if you’re the sort of person that would find turning up to a fancy dress party dressed as a hippy a witty thing to do. It just about comes off because the cast are up to the task, but this kind of humour really pales with repetition in the long run - just check out how irritating that Austin Powers became on his second outing.
A lot of it plays directly on the sort of line Citizen Smith rolled on – laughing at the antics of faux radicals in a dour British environment. It’s hit and miss stuff, the ‘sit’ is so inspired that the ‘com’ just doesn’t come. On the plus side it’s the little details that get the laughs, like the guy silencing the bird by holding his fingers over it’s beak, and the ‘super freak’ American hippy asking for seven pounds to burn. These snippets seem effortless compared to the contrived set-ups that make up the main plot. So I’ll watch it for those. Oh yes, and the main character is my brother-in-law’s cousin, so I’ve got to stick to it ‘cause it’s a family thing y’dig.
BBC2 Fri 21.00 GMT
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