The Monster Munch bunch goes bad

Published on Tuesday 12 February 2008 18:56

Phoo Action, BBC3 Horizon – How To Make Better Decisions, BBC2

HAVING no particular interest in the work of cartoonist Jamie Tank Girl Hewlett, I have no idea whether the live action adaptation of his Get the Freebies comic, **Phoo Action**, successfully captured the spirit of the original. But judged solely on its own terms, this hour-long pilot for a prospective series proved amiable enough, despite the fact that it was nowhere near as vibrant or amusing as this sort of thing should be.

A red-wigged Jaime Winston, dressed throughout in miniscule hotpants and crop-top (what would father Ray think?), played Whitey Action, a surly and disenfranchised teen whose drab existence was given a jolt by the arrival of Kung Fu cop Terry Phoo (Jimmy Shin). This humble Buddhist knight had been drafted in by Whitey's chief-of-police father (the great Carl Weathers) to combat an insurgent mutant crime wave. Those mutants certainly didn't mess about: within the first few minutes they'd bumped off the queen. Nice. Later, Whitey inherited a pair of magical shorts, Phoo beat up some bouncers in Mexican wrestling masks, and the whole thing climaxed with a pratty Prince William morphing into a mutant just as he was about to be crowned. Rather perplexingly, the BBC are listing this as a drama, when it is quite clear that it's supposed to be a comedy with obvious kiddie appeal.

Rather than attempt to disguise the fact that this BBC Scotland production was obviously made on a tight budget, the mutants were realised in a knowingly cheap and unconvincing manner, their cartoonish outfits lending them the look of the Monster Munch gang gone rogue. This actually gave the show a pleasingly daft visual aesthetic which chimed with the anarchic charms of Hewlett's artwork. Director Euros Lyn, whose work will be familiar to fans of *Doctor Who, did the best he could under the circumstances, although a couple of the action scenes fell a little flat. Despite the essentially freewheeling nature of the concept, the whole thing seemed a little flaccid around the edges, and apart from a fairly amusing pastiche of the BBC's overly reverential royal coverage, none of the gags really caught fire. And yet I still can't dismiss Phoo Action entirely, as it was basically just a good-natured bit of fluff, and with a few necessary tweaks it has the potential to capitalise on the vague promise shown here. Kudos to whoever decided to cast Weathers as the butt-kicking police chief, though: a movie icon of sorts for his career-defining role as Rocky Balboa's nemesis-cum-confidant Apollo "The Count Of Monte Fisto" Creed, Weathers imbued the role with just the right amount of self-mocking intensity. Frankly, I think any programme could be improved by the inclusion of Weathers, but I appreciate that I may be in the minority there.

Since when did Horizon become so breezy and knowing? It used to be an authoritative yet accessible science strand which credited its viewers with intelligence, but today it relies increasingly on a light-hearted and irritating style of presentation. *Horizon – How To Make Better Decisions illustrated the problem in a nutshell: the arch narration and jokey scenes, such as a street magician displaying his powers of misdirection, or a bunch of computer nerds attempting to pick up women via a maths-based decision making process, sat uncomfortably with the more sober and informative moments during which scientists attempted to prove that human beings are capable of precogniton. This jarring approach undermined a potentially intriguing subject. Horizon needs to make a decision over what it wants to be.