The day seems unlikely to be saved… Graham Hitchins (Karl Theobald) and Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville).
And they’re off! Another series of the BBC’s relentlessly gentle satire on the absurdities of the Olympic year. They’ve kept the same title sequence, the one that features footage of the Mayor of London waving a giant Olympic flag and a voiceover of the commentator celebrating Lord Coe’s gold medal race. Take that, establishment. I considered stopping berating this show for not being satirical enough, and accepting that it was just a sitcom about a group of people who just happen to work in the Olympic Deliverance Team. But firstly it’d be a little weird to write a sitcom including recognisable public figures about events that are currently taking place, and secondly it actually is a satire. At least in the sense that it mocks jargon, bureaucracy and those in power. It’s not very good at it, but this show definitely maps onto the territory marked “satire”, and I don’t think we can let it off the hook by suggesting it’s a closed comedy setup which has no connection to the real world, except for some accidental making fun of current events.
It’s all kicking off this week because the Algerian delegation have insisted that the arrangements for the multi-faith worship centre are not satisfactory, since the centre does not face Mecca. If they don’t get what they want, they’re threatening to boycott the games. It’s another excellent demonstration of this show’s baffling ambivalence. Tackling the funny side of situations which arise from the sensitivities of certain world religions is an obvious target for a satirical show, and fair play that they chose the one which gets most attention in the British press. To do otherwise would probably have courted criticism for being “too PC” or “tiptoeing tolerantly around intolerance”, though it might have been funny to see how a Buddhist boycott threat would have looked. So they decided to square up to controversy and make it about Islam. But not to make anything in particular out of it.
READ MORE: http://calitreview.com/28248
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