TV review: Beautiful update is really pretty vacant

Published on Thursday 9 October 2008 20:03

Beautiful People, BBC2 Ninety Naps A Day, Channel 4 JONATHAN Harvey's execrable sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme should've been enough to ban him from staining the genre forever more. Unfortunately, some genius at the BBC has seen fit to allow him another go with Beautiful People, an extremely loose adaptation of Simon Doonan's memoirs.

Now creative director at Barneys department store in New York, Doonan grew up in suburban Reading in the 1960s. In this version the era has been updated to the late 1990s, presumably because it's cheaper to realise, but also because it'll be easier to sell to that all-important twentysomething market. In the narrow minds of TV executives, young people are dribbling ignoramuses who couldn't possibly accept something set 20 years before they were born. The lack of respect for this demographic is astonishing.

The compromised setting is the least of Harvey's problems. Groaning under the weight of his predilection for tired innuendo and sub-Victoria Wood-esque whimsy (where the mere mention of a macram convention in Slough is supposed to be funny), this strained, awkward comedy never takes flight.

The latest episode centred on the adolescent Doonan's failed attempt to land the lead role in a school production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This was an excuse for a musical fantasy sequence set in a suburban street, which was obviously intended as a wacky highlight, but wasn't half as funny or endearing as everyone involved clearly thought (it's not often that you see a spoof of Barbra Streisand's Yentl these days, I'll give it that).

The best thing – the only good thing – about Beautiful People by far is the excellent Olivia Colman as Doonan's feisty, tipsy, kind-hearted mother. She excels in the sort of role that probably would've gone to Alison Steadman in years gone by, delivering a sweetly unabashed comic performance and showing that there's much more to her than Peep Show's mousy Sophie. She's better than this limp series deserves.

The Narcolepsy Network Annual Conference in New York was the setting for Ninety Naps a Day, a Cutting Edge documentary in which three narcoleptic Brits met fellow sufferers for the first time. The initial result was a tug of war between British reserve and American openness. All that hugging, gushing and yakking just isn't how we resolve things over here. The event was forged from a well-meaning yet undeniably ridiculous template of herbal remedies, holistic healing and therapeutic quilt-making.

I wasn't surprised when narcoleptic Ken and wife Christine walked out of a "laughing workshop" led by a man in a pink boilersuit. Student Samantha was even more opposed to this happy-clappy regime, spending the entire weekend either asleep or slumped in a grumpy, sceptical heap. Only 14-year-old Tony threw himself into proceedings, probably because he wasn't old enough to be cynical about such things.

Gradually, however, the very act of meeting other narcoleptics and talking about their condition began to work. Ken and Christine addressed their situation properly for the first time in 40 years, seemingly drawing closer in the process, and even Samantha grudgingly admitted that she'd earned a greater acceptance of her condition than before.

This worthwhile film highlighted the shocking fact that, despite the presence of around 30,000 narcoleptics in Britain, there exists no official support network. It's a nightmarish, incurable, deeply debilitating condition deserving of far more understanding and provision.