KEY POINTS:
There's a whiff of snuggly telly about Jam & Jerusalem (last night, UK TV.) It's not quite as fluffy slippers and dentures as the appallingly jolly, made for cheering up us old dears at the rest home, as The Vicar of Dribbly, but you do have to wonder
who it is for.
Dawn French is in this too and - perhaps there is a God - we have so far been spared having to watch her stuff her face. She plays Rosie/Margaret.
Rosie would be the village idiot except that she lives in a Devon village where everyone, to varying degrees, is an idiot.
Margaret is ... buggered if I know who Margaret is.
They both live inside the same body (nobody, except me, has yet made the "plenty of room for two" joke) but Rosie is sweet, if inappropriate and annoying, and Margaret, in her brief appearance in last night's first episode, is a bossy old trout who has to be sat on to shut her up.
At the funeral of the local doctor, Rosie gives his widow, Sal (the wonderful Sue Johnston from the wonderful Royle Family), a gift. "There, cheese for remembrance."
What does this mean? If this was The Mighty Boosh (which is all about mad hair) it could develop into some sort of running theme, but this cheese gag seems to be whimsy for the sake of it. And talking of mad hair, J & J seems to have provided the hair and make-up department with opportunities to go wacky which would have been better resisted.
Joanna Lumley is not very cunningly disguised as an ancient posh crone with rags for locks and wrinkles that just make her look like we all knew Patsy would end up looking like.
She does the denture gags. French wears something off the back of a sheep on her head. These two stagger in and out of the plot as though they're in a sketch show. Which is the main problem.
There is a plot. It goes like this: Sal, who has been resisting joining the Women's Guild, finds herself lonely and a bit loony after her GP husband dies. She gives in, joins up and immediately clashes with the guild's leader, a twitchy power freak who, in Rosie speak, gets off on wearing her guild regalia "on her bazookas".
Jennifer Saunders, who wrote it, plays a mumbling yummy mummy who is mates with Madonna and went over to Madge's the other night. "It was a lovely evening. Until Sting played the lute."
That's not a bad line and maybe J & J is not a bad show. Or it's really, really bad. Or good. Either I can't make up my mind or it's made for people like me who have gone ga ga and who don't remember that Jennifer Saunders used to be funny.
