Squeamish About..., episode 1: a 15-minute comedy that felt about 10 minutes too long
Are we entering the age of the 15-minute comedy? David Tennant and Michael Sheen did it in Staged, noodling away on Zoom. Diane Morgan is about to do it with Mandy, which starts next week. It’s a win for the viewer because if it’s funny you’re left wanting more, and if it’s not, well, you’ve only wasted a quarter of an hour.
So here is Squeamish About… (BBC Two) squeezed in between Semi-Detached and Newsnight. It’s a spoof documentary series featuring Matt Berry (Toast of London, What We Do in the Shadows) as “rogue historian” Michael Squeamish, a character first featured last year in the one-off mockumentary, The Road to Brexit.
Squeamish doesn’t appear to be based on anyone in particular - this isn’t a send-up of Simon Schama or David Starkey - and for some reason Berry has chosen not to mug away in front of the camera but to supply the narration. For this he deploys a fruity voice very like that of Patrick Allen (close your eyes and you can picture Allen flying over those Barratt Homes in a helicopter) and some silly pronunciation.
The comedy lies in the fact that everything we see or hear is wrong. So in this first episode, devoted to “popular entertainments”, Squeamish references the Beatles but the footage on screen is of Gerry and the Pacemakers. He describes Gracie Fields as “the famous drag act from Rochdale”. Playing a clip of Joy Division, Squeamish says: “I don’t know much about pop music but I reckon that’s a pretty feelgood sound!”
You get the idea. And this really is the show’s only idea. Sometimes Berry takes archive footage of real people, which seems to be from decades-old news programmes, and makes it the butt of the joke. There is footage of the working classes, mostly older people, on holiday or talking about racing pigeons or describing a day’s work as a blacksmith. The mockery isn’t deliberately cruel but it still feels a bit smug, in a laughing-at-the-lower-orders sort of way.
Had Squeamish About… been part of a sketch show, it might have worked. But as a stand-alone comedy series, even 15 minutes felt a bit too long.
