Who needs the Priory? Wrestle your demons on screen

By Jay Richardson
Published on Tuesday 17 January 2012 16:48

When heavyweight silent comedy star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle was implicated in the death of actress Virginia Rappe at a party in 1921, his court acquittal couldn’t save his career. His films were banned and he became a Hollywood pariah.

Nowadays though, such notoriety needn’t be an obstacle.

Last week it emerged that Tina Fey’s marvellously arch sitcom 30 Rock had turned the scandal surrounding homophobic remarks made by the show’s star Tracy Morgan into a storyline. In their sketch show-within-a-show, Fey’s head writer Liz Lemon writes an apology for Morgan’s character Tracy Jordan, maintaining that he’s not a homophobe, he’s an idiot. Idiots, led by actress Denise Richards, join the gay community in picketing the studio.

Morgan’s reputation is tarnished, but he has survived and will doubtless continue to prosper. So synonymous is he with the unhinged, gaffe-prone Jordan that his blinkered remarks seemed, for want of a better expression, in character. Moreover, a precedent of sorts has been established in Curb Your Enthusiasm, with Seinfeld‘s Michael Richards sending up his notorious “n*gger” outburst. Grasping to find the right word to express his anger at black co-star J.B. Smoove, he flees in horror when he realises a crowd has begun recording them on cameraphones.

In both of these rehabilitation programmes, loyal sitcom creators support their co-stars and redistribute some of the blame to a rubbernecking public keen to be offended. Sadly, as Kramer, Richards was the most zanily loveable of the selfish, often despicable Seinfeld characters. And here, the friction between on-screen and off-screen personas is more uncomfortable than uncomfortably funny, with Larry David requesting the viewer to suspend belief rather than disbelief.

Widespread disbelief certainly greeted Mel Gibson’s violently misogynist, homophobic and anti-Semitic outpourings, yet he attracted reasonable reviews for comedy film The Beaver, foregrounding his real-life breakdown with his character’s reliance on a glove puppet. Still, the public stayed away and the $21 million production recouped just $1million at the box office.

Having cheerfully appeared alongside convicted rapist Mike Tyson in The Hangover, the breakout comedy’s stars objected to Gibson appearing in their sequel. And the Australian’s next movie, in which he’s incarcerated in a tough Mexican prison, is reportedly undergoing a name change from How I Spent My Summer Vacation to the more disparaging Get The Gringo. Which should fulfil his need for race relations debate and public self-flagellation.

Of course, America is the land of second chances. In the UK, Chris Langham served his time for child pornography offences but been unable to find any acting work beyond last year’s low-budget film Black Pond. Langham’s character in the film loses his job because of a horrible crime splashed all over the newspapers; in the fictional version it’s a murder committed by his family, but the dark comedy taps directly into the actor’s infamy.

What other roles might the former star of The Thick of It attract though? Another inept but essentially harmless politician? It seems unlikely, despite Black Pond’s BAFTA nomination this week.

It’s worth recalling that Angus Deayton was once dubbed television’s Mr Sex. Yet ever since tabloid revelations about his drug-fuelled romps with a prostitute while his partner was pregnant, his parts have taken an altogether seedier turn – as a suburban adulterer in the bleak sitcom Nighty Night and as a wife-swapper in last year’s mediocre sex film Swinging with the Finkels.

Spare a thought too for Steve Coogan. Appearing as ‘himself’ alongside Rob Brydon in A Cock and Bull Story and more recently in restaurant reviewing comedy, The Trip, the actor has deliciously lampooned his tabloid reputation for drugs, difficulty and womanising. Unfortunately, he’s also confirmed that his best character since Alan Partridge is Steve Coogan. His appearance on Newsnight confronting former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan couldn’t have been more compelling with Brydon playing the shabby hack.

King of rehabilitation programmes, though, remains Charlie Sheen, who is about to star in the sitcom adaptation of the film Anger Management and as the lead in Roman Coppola’s feature A Glimpse Inside The Mind of Charles Swan III, In the latter, he plays a ladies’ man tortured by feverish dreams of past relationships, struggling to turn his life around. Who needs The Priory when you can be paid to wrestle your demons on screen?

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