You may have thought BBC sitcoms had sunk to the depths with Ben Elton's The Wright Way, but Quick Cuts is giving it a run for its money. The opening episode of a three-part series started last night and, while I'm not a betting woman, I'll vouchsafe Quick Cuts won't get a full run. Or should it do so, I may have to ask for my licence fee back.
Georgia Pritchett's offering, unlike Elton's monumental failure, at least doesn't have the added burden of a laughter track (at least not in the preview version I saw), so I was able to appreciate just how silent I was watching it. To be fair, I did laugh twice in half an hour, but that was because a decent comedy routine had been shoehorned into a sitcom setting. Quick Cuts is, you see, described by the BBC as “a fast-paced, quick-cutting sitcom crossed with a sketch show, set in a hairdressing salon”. No, me neither. Is it a sitcom? Is it a sketch show? Or is it a misadventure that embarrasses almost everyone involved?
The first laugh in question – let's savour it, why not? - came when a customer was talking to her hairdresser. "She's got that thing where she's afraid to leave the house."
“Agoraphobia?”
“Homophobia.”
Would that there were more of these amusing vignettes. Worse, though, was that the narrative element misfired so badly. The set-up is that Sue (Mackichan) lives with ne'er do well husband, Trevor (Paul Reynolds), whom she is for ever throwing out and then taking back. That was the running “gag” of the show.
Sue owns a hairdressing and beauty salon - which should be a fruitful setting for comedy - with a bunch of employees who fit some yawn-inducing stereotypes. There's Annie (Jessica Gunning) a fat girl - last night she bemoaned getting her hand caught in a Pringles tube - who can't find love, ditzy blonde Becky (Lucinda Dryzek), who's involved with a married man 20 years her senior but can't see it won't work, party boy Gavin (O.T. Fagbenie), who, being non-white, must of course speak entirely in street slang (but at least Pritchett hasn't made him screaming gay, so let's be thankful for small mercies), and Marianne (Jane Dowden, the only one allowed to act with any subtlety), who attracts the interest of a lovesick customer who is convinced she's a male-to-female transsexual. But then, she is saving for a breast augmentation op, so it's an easy mistake to make in this farrago.
None of this would matter if the interplay (some of it improvised) between the characters was believable and/or funny. It isn't, although I must say I loved Becky's response to Gavin when he insulted her (some nonsense about her stealing his credit card and then discovering that he had run up huge a bill by ordering off the internet when wasted). No I didn't see that coming a mile off either. “Cock off, yeah,” she said. “And when you get there, just cock off a little bit further” - which proves that swearing is funny and is clever.
But when a comic actor as wonderfully talented as Mackichan (Smack the Pony, Brass Eye and many more quality shows) is reduced to falling all over the place after her character had ingested drugs bought off the internet, doing some embarrassing auntie-at-wedding-dancing to Enya and jiggling another women's breasts for comedic effect, then you know a show is doomed. And deservedly so.
- Quick Cuts in on BBC Four on Wednesdays
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