Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes.
Formed in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneered groundbreaking innovation in music making, using anything and everything to create new textures and tones to satisfy eager TV producers looking for otherwordly sounds to lead audiences through their programmes.
For those of us still mourning John Hurt, this lovely HD restoration of the actor’s favourite film is a real joy. Made in 1975 for Thames Television, it’s stood the test of time remarkably well.
“People think babies are sweet. But this one’s bitter.” So squeaks Alice Lowe’s malevolent unborn daughter in the horror comedy Prevenge, prompting her heavily pregnant host Ruth to embark on a killing spree.
Oh dear, writing this review is a bit like being mean to a small cuddly animal. Dough has such very good intentions – characters separated by race, religion and age can find common ground in a bakery – it’s a shame that it doesn’t rise into a tasty loaf but instead remains just a bit wholemeal and stolid.
The excellent Jonathan Pryce plays Nat Dayan, an orthodox Jewish widower whose sole reason to get up every morning at four is to work in his beloved shop. He inherited it from his father and still bakes traditional bagels, pastries and challah bread. But the neighbourhood’s changing, customers are dwindling and his assistant has quit to work in the rival supermarket next door. Nat’s son has gone up in the world and is a lawyer; he isn’t interested in taking over the business and wants his dad to retire. Joanne Silberman (Pauline Collins) plays a frisky widow who owns the freehold, and she’s keen to sell the building to an evil developer (Phil Davis, practically twirling a villain’s moustache). Nat is stubbornly holding on to tradition, but needs help.
Meanwhile in a parallel narrative (it’s literally cross-cut) we meet Ayyash (Jerome Holder, pictured below with Pauline Collins and Jonathan Pryce), a young refugee from Darfur. He’s trying to get a job with the local drug baron (played by Ian Hart, sporting a shaved head); he’ll take Ayyash on as a dealer if he’s got a cover job. Working at the bakery as Nat’s apprentice provides Ayyash with the perfect front. Soon he is selling bags of weed alongside the muffins to those customers in the know and business turns around for all concerned.
Nat doesn’t know about the sideline sales, and becomes fond of the young man, impressed by his baking skills and touched by his piety – Ayyash doesn’t get high on his own supply and is a devout Muslim. In another cross-cut sequence we see both men performing their particular ritual prayers in separate areas of the bakery. It’s all very well-meaning, hands-across-the-divide stuff with plenty of gags about Jewish and Muslim preconceptions about each other, but it pulls its punches. It would have been braver to have had Ayyash come from the Middle East rather than Africa.
Dough aims for the comedy-caper genre, with gags around cultural and generational misunderstandings and shenanigans with the police and local criminals, but it relies on bland stereotypes and despite the best efforts of its actors, they cannot rise above a clichéd and implausible script by first time writers Jonathan Benson and Jez Freedman. After Ayyash accidentally adds a bag of weed to the challah dough, no-one notices the resulting loaves taste and smell different, but all just enjoy the giggles and crave more – no matter how orthodox they are. Soon he’s dumping bags of grass into brownies and other sweet treats and there are queues around the block and smiles all round. Sadly, a cursory browse of the many online recipes for cooking with marijuana would have disabused the writers of the efficacy of this method (there are some delightful how-to videos out there).
It’s not just problems with the script; there’s a flatness to the lighting of the interior scenes which make them look like cheap TV, and an absence of a sense of place with few exterior scenes. Dough is a Hungarian-British co-production and, judging by the credits, a lot of it was shot in a studio in Budapest with a few location scenes in the UK, and it shows. This is veteran TV drama and documentary director John Goldschmidt's first film in many years (his credits include helming Jack Rosenthal’s wonderful Spend Spend Spend in 1977) and it’s waited two years to get a cinema release in the UK after doing reasonable business in the USA. It would be lovely to acclaim it as a lost gem, but unfortunately that’s not the case.
Overleaf: watch the official trailer for Dough
Hanif Kureishi and his interviewer Mark Lawson are both wearing black Nike trainers, and long professional acquaintance makes them as comfortable with each other as an old, expensive pair of shoes.
Nostalgia is dangerous; return to your childhood haunts and what was huge is now tiny, what once was magical at the movies is now mundane.
To appreciate the full engaging silliness of Mindhorn, it helps to have been born no later than 1980. Those of the requisite vintage will have encountered the lame primetime pap it both salutes and satirises. Everyone else coming to this spoof will just have to take it on trust that things, admittedly not all of them British, were indeed this bad back in the day.
The eponymous detective of the adventure crime show wears a brown leather blouson, grey leather slip-ons and an eyepatch that allows him to see the truth. He’s a hot smoothie who hunts down bad guys alone, principally on the Isle of Man, with the help of a fast soft-top and some arthritic moves from the martial arts playbook. But that was the Eighties and now Richard Thorncroft, the actor who played him, is a balding tub of lard in a bedsit reduced to earning a crust endorsing surgical supports for the elderly. His agent has no work for him. He gets summoned to an audition to play a yardie as a result of a clerical error. Kenneth Branagh, one of several A listers recruited to play himself, is underwhelmed.
T
hen a murder is committed on Detective Mindhorn’s old stomping ground and there’s only one person the presumed culprit (Russell Tovey) will communicate with. Thorncroft imagines this is an opportunity that can put him back in the game. Cue a frantic caper which mimics precisely the kind of naff storylines Mindhorn got mixed up in all those decades ago.
The pleasure of this low-budget British comedy is very much centred on the charming, buffoonish performance of Julian Barratt, the funny one from The Mighty Boosh, as a washed-up old ham whose ego has somehow kept his estimation of himself intact. (See also Bill Nighy in Their Finest.) There is almost no delusion which doesn’t have Thorncroft in its grip. Chief among these is that his old lover and co-star Patricia Deville (Essie Davis) still has the hots for him. Humiliatingly she has married Thorncroft’s thinner Dutch stuntman Clive (played by Barrett’s co-scriptwriter Simon Farnaby, pictured above).
Loitering on the fringes are Andrea Riseborough as a policewoman, Nicholas Farrell as a villainous civic leader, Richard McCabe as a hollowed-out cokehead in a caravan, and Steve Coogan (looking freakishly thin and ripped) as Thorncroft’s creepy old supporting player. Mindhorn is directed by Sean Foley, tacking across from stage comedy and bringing in pals like Branagh to lighten up and have a good time.
There are fun setpieces including a crap parade with a real shoot-out, plus some lovely lines too. Harriet Walter, ditching Thorncroft as her client, has a killer putdown which she administers over the phone: “I’ve left your headshots in reception.” It won’t win many awards or break many box office records, but Mindhorn doesn’t outstay its welcome and approaches the important business of spoofery with a practically academic attention to ridiculous detail. A hoot.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Mindhorn
The Scottish play’s traces are faint in this bloody, steamy tale of feminist psychosis.