Small screen

FunlandBBC323 October, 10pm3/5HouseChannel Five27 October, 10pm4/5The new BBC comedy, Funland, is something of a conundrum. In some respects it’s like nothing you’ve seen before, but it is also strangely familiar. Co-written by The League of Gentleman’s Jeremy Dyson and Simon Ashdown, a veteran of Eastenders and Casualty, it strikes a precarious balance between dark surrealism and familiar British drama conventions. Set in a Blackpool scene-scape of greying, sea washed colours juxtaposed with garish bright lights and dilapidated, romantically seedy guest houses inhabited by creepy eccentrics, it’s an ongoing tale of revenge.Oedipal gangsters, sordid strip clubs, slimy provincial politicians, and strange men in threadbare monkey suits abound. Into this bewildering cauldron are cast two sets of outsiders: a sexually anorexic young couple, seeking to revive their stagnating relationship, and a cockney ne’er-do-well bent on avenging the death of his mother. None of this sounds particularly promising material for comedy, but Funland draws its humour from the ridiculous and from palpable unease. Something akin to a northern British version of Twin Peaks, it probes the seamy undercurrents of a genteel town where violence and perversion lie beneath a placid surface.There are characters here, like the Dutch taxidermist with a peccadillo for young men, who remind us of The League of Gentlemen’s more cartoonish aspects and endow the series with an air of the absurd, blurring and mutating generic bounds more than any British series that I can recall. Funland is a show that makes the familiar strange, but it’s also a self-consciously referential piece, full of allusions to modern television and cinema. In some ways its success in doing this is also its greatest weakness.Even after three shows, there’s no sense of emotional attachment to the characters, many of whom seem only partly realised: ciphers to the tricksiness of the writers. Although entertaining and provocative, this show relies heavily on stylisation and just misses out on working fully as either a comedy or a dramatic piece.House, this week’s other notable show, also treads a thin line between comedy and drama, although it operates in an all together more glossy visual universe, somewhere between ER and the West Wing. Starring Hugh Laurie as the eponymous House, this medical drama has already won plaudits in the States for its mixture of serious medical drama and lightly biting entertainment. Laurie’s House is a prime misanthropist: an emotionally withdrawn MD who happens to be an exceptional diagnostician. A verbal wrecking ball of a man, he delights in disabusing his staff of all their touchy-feely preconceptions about medicine and it is his relationship with them which provides House’s primary dramatic momentum.The drama is fixated around the human body in graphic, almost fetishistic, detail, but this is done mainly to showcase House’s exceptional deductive powers. He is intended to be something along the lines of a medical Sherlock Holmes, as the producers happily admit in interviews. The bodies serve as a backdrop of strange conduits and foreign, mysterious connections all to be probed and marvelled at before House unravels their mystery in a stream of comfortingly clinical jargon. In keeping with others, this episode mixes dark comedy, sleek drama and pathos with ease. Sharp, often funny and could yet amass cult viewing status.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005