KEY POINTS:
I sympathised with Vicki Pollard when she found herself in an American boot camp for delinquents in Little Britain USA (TV2, Fridays, 9.45pm). "Yeah but no but yeah," she gibbered to an uncomprehending female guard, who shouted that she didn't understand a word.
Why would she? Vicki
is a British phenomenon, a scion of English juvenalia whose arrival in America is as bewildering to her as it is
to the viewer.
The blunt-instrument humour of LB's Matt Lucas and David Walliams doesn't translate easily in its transfer across the Atlantic. Some of the characters - Fat Fighters' Marjorie, Carol the rude receptionist, Lou and Andy - should have stayed home. Mind you, in the first episode, Marjorie dished out a few good hits on guest Rosie O'Donnell, "a big lesbian lady". Rosie, a comedian not renowned for her sense of humour, got pissed off with Marjorie's fixation on her girlfriendliness instead of her girth. As O'Donnell seems angry whenever she's on screen, it was hard to tell if she was genuinely annoyed or "acting".
In the second episode, it was astonishing to see the actor who played Janice's lumbering husband in The Sopranos as a member of
the Fat Fighters group. Taunted by Marjorie, his previous character would have shot her, or gone off to passive-aggressively play
with his train set.
And who knew America had so many gay female celebrities until the names
were trotted out in the scene where a married couple was breaking up because the wife had gone gay. "I had no idea," whined Walliams, the
husband, as he handed over her possessions - including the Jodie Foster
Comfortable Shoes.
Harvey still wants his bittie, which remains appalling, and Bubbles De
Vere, fleeing her British creditors on a luxury cruise to Rio, is as revolting as ever - and looking pretty tired. I don't like many of
this American-version's characters, particularly the two body builders, but I did snigger at the slit-eyed spaniel which orders its lady owner to perform revenge-of-the-pooch tasks like poo in public.
Overall though, Walliams and Lucas should have been content to cut
Little Britain off when it was still fresh. Some people don't know when to stop.
You could say the same for Rough Diamond, which started on TV One last Saturday. Following on from a 2005 pilot, this is purely a vehicle for David Jason, who plays "loveable rogue" jewellery thief Des Parker, supposedly retired and living in the south of France where he's getting a swish villa built.
Through an incredible series of cons and coincidences, Des and his
son flew back to London to mount a police-operated heist in Buckingham
Palace, to steal a huge diamond about to be returned to the Indian
Government. It was a fake (or was it?) and the fuzz didn't want the Indians to get upset if they found out.
The cast was full of familiar faces - Jenny Agutter as a journalist-love-interest-cop, ancient-as-time George Cole as a slipper-wearing getaway driver. But what was it? Comedy? Drama? Farce? By the time we got to the boss of Buck House security being hypnotised and Jason blacking up as an Indian academic it was more like pantomime.
Rough Diamond was originally called Diamond Geezer in Britain, which sounds like a Guy Ritchie title. The camera work was
pure Ritchie: stops and starts, freeze frames and whirly bits. All very cliched and irritating - and it can't disguise the fact that this is
an old geezer of an idea in which the main man, Jason, looked as if he was "acting", as opposed to when he exemplified subtlety in Frost.