Sunday, July 29, 2012

Hugh Bonneville: GOLD FOR HUGH’S OLYMPICS (EXPRESS CO. UK) By Clare Heal




(I really hope this series comes back somehow!  and I want Ian and Sally to get together!!! - Karen)


What was it like behind the scenes though? For all its glitz, I imagine not dissimilar to Twenty Twelve (BBC2, Tuesday). This fantastic mockumentary came to an end with an episode entitled Loose Ends. We joined Head of Deliverance Ian (Hugh Bonneville) and his team 18 days before the Olympics were kicked off but just 10 days before they were due to hand over to the Live team.

The loose ends they had to tie up included the fears that Danny Boyle’s fireworks might trigger the ground-to-air missiles put in place for security, that the slow-charge eco cars would all have run out of battery by day two and that there were only two volunteers for a specially commissioned peal of bells.

In an impressive cast including Olivia Colman as Ian’s devoted secretary Sally and Morven Christie as the fantastically passive-aggressive Fi, it was Jessica Hynes’s objectionable

Head of Brand Siobhan Sharpe who stole the show. “What I do here is repurpose this whole thing...” she said, turning the bell ringing into a celebrity judged contest called The Big Bong.

There were personal loose ends too but a cut to black and the credits denied us a denouement of Ian and Sally’s will-they-won’t-they saga. I can never make up my mind whether I think this is clever and subtle or a dramatic cop-out but here I hope it might herald another series.

This sort of faux-reality format is hardly original but writer-director John Morton has a deft touch, keeping the blunders just the right side of farce.

In fact, with buses getting lost on their way to the Olympic Park and the wrong Korean flag being hoist, he could have gone a lot further and still remained less ridiculous than real life.

Twenty Twelve has been one of this year’s best sit-coms so there was really no contest when it came to Games-themed drollery. Absolutely Fabulous: Olympics (BBC1, Monday) deserved no medals for comedy.




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