Blazed trail becomes a garden path

Press, 8 March 1988, Page 11

Blazed trail becomes a garden path

Nothing dates faster than daring | originality. When “The Young Ones” was first shown a few years ago its stridency, wit and vulgarity made it an instant hit with a band of people aged between about 14 and 24, and with many people working in television at the time, who saw it as a liberating example of what could be done if you , deliberately set out to achieve bad taste.

The show is now being repeated on One at 11.30 on Friday nights, and it is worth staying up for, because it is very funny, but it does not now seem quite the revolutionary force it once appeared to be. Mind you, nor does anything else much in 1988.

The strength of the show lies not in all the vomiting and smashing of things; it lies principally in the polarity between the manic Rick (Rik Mayall) and the deeply depressed Neil (Nigel Planer), preserver into the eighties of the values of the sixties. The other two principal characters,

There is still plenty of energy and random or non-existent plotting, and anyone who enjoyed the show the first time around will enjoy! .it again. But anyone watching the show for the first time, having only heard of it by repute.

may wonder quite whdt all the fuss was about. That is part of the problem with being a trailblazer: your trail, once blazed, becomes a garden path or a yellow brick road rather than a venture into the unknown. !

I should have reviewed the so-called Friday Night Movie, “After Pilkington/’ (in fact a prize-winning 8.8. C. play.) But I saw it in England about a year ago, and couldn’t face the grisly ending again. I remember thinking at the time that it was very entertaining until it got to be grisly. Not having watched the thing again I have no cause to modify that view. Simon Gray,'a distinguished writer for the English stage, certainly- leads the viewer doyvn, or up, a garden path with this work; you sit there thinking you are having a good time for most of the time, and then horror explodes in your face. Very unsettling.

The new thriller on One on Friday nights, “A Killing on the Exchange,” certainly has a distinguished cast, with the

likes of Michael Gough, Joss Ackland and jSian Phillips swanning about. (Plus (the bright-eyed girl who got done in the TV adaptation of P.D. James’s "Cover Her Face.”)

It ■ doesn’t - look as though anyone who has lost a fortune on our local exchange will learn! how to recoup it through a careful study of this; programme. But it should be good viewing for those of us who enjoy dramas showing British police uncovering the nastiness and corruption of people at the top of the | tree. (Perched in the lower branches of the tree, we keep getting covered by their droppings.) I

The police inspector has a sidekick who looks as though he just missed out on being cast in some of the Oxford passages in "Brideshead Revisited.”

It makes a nice change to come across a young detective who is neither a cockney, nor extremely bad-tempered. Ah, the policemen are getting younger and more respectful all the time ...