Last week saw the release of the latest film in the all-conquering The Hunger Games franchise, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1. The first part of a two-film finale adapted from a single book, they are to be unleashed on screens worldwide over two consecutive Novembers. As short sighted film buffs would tell you, this profit-minded ploy first emerged in 2011, with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, which launched a spate of money-hungry imitators. We’ve seen the Twilight Saga and now The Hunger Games series conclude in such a manner, and seen it announced that Shailene Woodley’s fledging Divergent franchise will be ushered out of multiplexes in the same way.

The positives of this approach for the studios seem obvious — they get to double their money — but are actually less pronounced. The penultimate film, still involving sizeable budgets, invariably make less money than its successor, and often less than its predecessor. Furthermore, the first half of the finales are consistently the worst reviewed entries in their franchises, and so audience’s get turned off. Yet whilst this trend for two-part cash-grab send-offs has therefore been lamented as a new phenomenon, as just more evidence of the decline of filmmaking, it is in fact a trick that’s been pulled for as long as going to the pictures has been a national pastime.

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The movie serial was a popular attraction at the picture houses of the early Twentieth Century. Starting life in the 1910s, these movies, broken down into small quarter hour instalments, were released to cinemas on a regular schedule, telling action-packed stories which always ended on a perilous cliffhanger. Their purpose? To keep audiences of young people coming back week after week to learn the fate of their favourite characters. Sound familiar?

After a dip in production during the great depression, the movie serial thrived in the 1930s and 40s, when a night at the cinema was more like a variety show than the film-centric experience it is now.  Fan appetites for superheroes, westerns and science fiction stories kept the serial afloat even as costs rose, until the advent of episodic television vanquished the serials popularity once and for all. The impact of television on the serial raises an interesting question for our current crop of split finales. To what extent is their structure more akin to that of a miniseries, a drawn out single entity, rather than the filmic, self contained instalments which preceded them? Certainly they have much in common, and yet the miniseries has resurged in popularity partly due to that other modern innovation — the binge watch — whilst these filmic instalments are held for release months, sometimes even years apart. They frustrate the audience rather than engage them.

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The problems with two part finales are vast and many. Primarily their problems arise from their usage for literary adaptions. Suddenly, tightly constructed arcs are split, resolutions not arrived at, and the pacing disrupted in order to adapt a single book into multiple feature length films. The first halves in particular often appear to be treading water. In comparison to serials which were conceptualised to be shown in short chunks, the structure of a single book does not acclimatise well to being split down the middle. For Young Adult literature in particular, so often inspired by the filmic three act structure, we’re left with two movies containing an act and a half each. Two part finales can therefore often feel like less than the sum of their parts.

Unsurprisingly, audiences are catching on. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 took just over $120 million dollars in North America over its opening weekend — a huge number to be sure — but one far short of the $150 million to $160 million range the previous instalments opened in. In Hollywood, where sequels are expected to out-gross each preceding chapter, this was worrying enough to drop the stock market value of Lionsgate, the company behind The Hunger Games, by five percentage points. Worse still, Mockingjay – Part 1 only earned an A- cinema score, lower than Catching Fire’s A, which when combined with the worst reviews of the franchise, is likely to make it drop out of cinema’s faster than previous instalments. Elsewhere, The Hobbit movies, perhaps the worst offenders, splitting, as they do, a single children’s book into three lengthy movies, have seen huge drops in their North American takings, and rubbed some of the shine off of The Lord of the Rings‘ movies’ once flawless reputations.

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But it’s not all negative. Frequently the second half of the finale proves worthwhile, with the concluding instalments of both Harry Potter and Twilight winning the strongest reviews of their respective franchises according to Rotten Tomatoes. Furthermore, many die hard fans will accept any excuse to spend more time with their heroes — just look to the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings movies for evidence of this phenomena. Just as with the serials of the 30s and 40s, the lure of beloved characters and exciting adventures seems to be enough to keep the masses pouring back into cinemas, right on cue.

The two-part finale therefore is not the modern creation of nefarious studio-executives, but a relic of the golden age of cinema-going, and evidence of our investment in characters rather than stories. It remains to be seen how long their popularity will last, or indeed if it’s already on the wain, but it seems that as long as film-making remains a business, money making split-finales will remain a fixture in the multiplexes. Yet as Shailene Woodley’s tepidly received Divergent series struggles towards its staggered finish, it’s hard not to hope that the two -part finale is consigned to the show-business crypt alongside its sibling – the 1940s movie serial.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

“When you’ve a gun, everybody pays attention.” Who you choose to point the gun at can get you even more attention. If you choose to point it, and not just point it, fire it, at the President of the United States of America then not only will you get attention, you’ll get your own little place in American history. Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Assassins, on at the Keble O’Reilly until November 29th and directed by Silas Elliott, tells the story of the four murderers and five attempted murderers of Presidents throughout history, taking on a revue-show-like format as we learn their stories and their motivations.

It might be expected that portraying characters who resort to such an extreme course of action would be impossibly difficult, but this cast manage to make it look easy. As might be expected, mental illness is pretty much par for the course for the majority of people who would think to attempt something so drastic, but the intelligence of the acting and direction means that even those characters who are somewhat unhinged are all unhinged in their own way. A great example of this is the juxtaposition of Blathnaid McCullagh’s Sara Jane Moore and Heloise Lowenthal’s Lynette Fromme. They’re the only two women, and they both attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford, but McCullagh’s ditzy, prim, accident-prone housewife couldn’t be more different from Lowenthal’s hip but brainwashed Charles Manson devotee.

The appropriately dysfunctional patriarch of the assassins — assembled across time and space to interact with each other in a grimly carnivalesque otherworld — is Sam Breen’s John Wilkes Booth. Breen imbues Booth with the levels of charisma you’d expect from a former stage actor, and from the beginning of the show is representative of the conflict between murdering the President for politics, and murdering the President for attention. Booth gets a ballad in his name, as do two of the other successful assassins, Polish anarchist Leon Czolgosz and hopelessly mad Charles Guiteau, who just wants to promote his book (available for £14.50 on Amazon if you’re interested). We are treated to appropriately strong and affecting performances from Chesney Ovsiowitz (Czolgosz) and Luke Rollason (Guiteau), who hold the audience’s attention and even — perhaps — earn their sympathy.

The collapsing of time in Sondheim’s musical allows for the piece to be bookended by Booth’s murder of Lincoln and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinating JFK, despite the fact that chronologically most of the action shown in the play takes place post-1963. In this production, the roles of the Balladeer and Oswald are combined, but Niall Docherty makes it work, and never having seen the show before, I didn’t realise until afterwards that these were originally separate characters. Docherty has a fantastically sceptical and ironic attitude towards the men he, as Balladeer, tells the stories of, never quite allowing the characters to attain the heroic status they crave.

All the cast are fantastic, both in their singing and acting, and the songs are just as dark and catchy as you’d expect from Sondheim. However, there was a slight problem where at points the words sung couldn’t be heard, either because the music was overpowering the actors’ voices, or because there wasn’t enough enunciation of the words to make them intelligible. This wasn’t a massive problem, but it did let down what is otherwise an excellent performance.

Assassins is a fascinating exploration of the most extreme way to get attention, whether for a political cause, to get the attention of someone you’re obsessed with, or just because your stomach really, really hurts. Whilst the musical doesn’t try to excuse the actions of its subjects, it does prompt you to ask how a just society can allow the poorest and most vulnerable of its population to achieve immortality only by taking a pot-shot at the most powerful man in the world.

Mitchell and Webb, Armstrong and Miller, Fry And Laurie, Jackson and Grumitt — which is the odd one out? It could be Fry. After all, he is a self-absorbed, tousle-haired, national dickhead treasure who seems to have wormed his way into the limelight primarily through his ability to wear colourful blazers, whereas the rest of them all seem like darn good self-effacing chaps. It could be, but it’s not.

The right answer is in fact Jackson and Grumitt. Why? Because, unless I am very, very much mistaken, they are the only duo performing a sketch show at the BT Studio in 8th Week (they’re also the only duo never to have had a BBC sketch show series, never to have received widespread critical acclaim for their comedy, et cetera, et cetera, but give them time).

Olly Jackson and Richard Grumitt are almost certainly the latest in a long line of successful double acts to meet at Oxbridge, make a splash with their wacky, off-the-wall comedy, and enjoy a long career of sitting next to the insufferable Alan Davies on BBC panel games. They just haven’t done that last bit yet.

I caught up with them in the very JCR bar of St Hilda’s, before they performed a few sketches from their upcoming show, to ask them why the fuck not? They didn’t seem to have a good answer to this, so I revised my conversational approach slightly. How had they met? Who wrote the material? How did they come up with such a startlingly original idea?

“Rich and I met during a college play,” Jackson tells me. “There was a 15 minute long scene in which we were in the background with nothing to do, so to avoid boredom we tried to make each other laugh by whispering comments.”

“I’d always wanted to do some comedy at Oxford, so after the show finished, I asked Richard whether he would like to do some writing and luckily he said yes. We started doing Audreys [the Revue’s fortnightly comedy evenings] and bar gigs, then we performed at Worcester Ball, which was great.”

Fascinating.

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“Usually, one of us comes up with an idea for a sketch, the other person writes it, and then we edit it together”, Jackson continues. “It’s quite a productive system because the bones of the sketch come from one person and the humorous substance is added by the other.”

Jackson talks like the hundred-mile-an-hour dog runs, in a breathless, hurried manner. In a valiant attempt to involve Grumitt in the interview, I ask him about their comedic style.

“When we started, it tended to be that Olly would play the sillier characters and I would play the straighter ones. That bias is probably still there a bit, but it’s evened out slightly. We try and do universal comedy now, so there’s some surreal stuff, there’s some silly stuff, and there’s some satire in there too.”

Jackson eagerly takes up the conversational reigns again after I enquire as to the duo’s influences.

“I grew up with Mitchell and Webb, so I’m hugely influenced by them and their ilk,” he thunders. “Atkinson [Rowan that is, not Big Ron] is probably my favourite, though. He is just the master of physical comedy but he can do vocal stuff too.”

“I love Monty Python”, counters Grummitt, “but I’m also a big fan of some American comedians like George Carlin [yeah, me neither] and Louis CK.”

Stage-fright, as Renee Fleming (of BrainyQuotes.com fame) once said, ‘can undermine your well-being and peace of mind, and it can also threaten your livelihood.’ So I am interested as to whether or not Jackson and Grummitt shat their proverbial pants when they first performed their own material.

“I think the beauty of performing sketch comedy is that you always have someone else with you. Someone can pick you up, someone can validate that yours isn’t the world’s shittiest comedy.”

I take it that their underwear remained unsoiled, then. Indeed, when I see them take to the cleared corner of their JCR bar, they certainly do seem to exude a confidence in themselves and their writing.

Taller than Grumitt by a good few inches, Jackson is a man seemingly made up of elbows (I imagine he could play a seminal talking cricket in Pinocchio). Despite, or perhaps because of this, he is as versatile as a bipolar Derek Jacobi, transforming from a confused Egyptian builder to a simpering English maiden before my very eyes.

Allowed space to express himself, Grumitt reveals that he is much more than his innocent chorister appearance suggests; his emphatic hand-gestures and resonant voice are genuinely entertaining. He relies on the humour of the writing more than Jackson, but he seems equally comfortable embracing physicality for laughs.

A sketch about the construction of the pyramids goes down particularly well with the gathered crowd of St Hilda’s students who have nothing better to do on a Sunday evening than head down to their college bar, and a satirical pharmaceutical advert for a medicine “distilled from pure bleach and filtered through the ball-sack of a mountain goat” is similarly well-received.

Don’t miss the chance to catch this aspiring comedy duo during their cutting-edge student phase because if you don’t, in a few years time you’ll (probably…) see them on BBC3, forcibly laughing at the soul-destroying banalities of Rob Brydon, and boy, what a fool you’ll feel. It’s also in 8th Week, and you’ll have nack all else to do.