Harry Enfield in Celeb: The Bloke hits wrong chord

By FIONA RAE

The question is, why make a parody of ageing rock stars when there are plenty of the real thing, especially Ozzy, doing the job nicely?

Harry Enfield may be known as the creator of numerous memorable comedy characters, but with Celeb (TV One 10.10pm) he may have done his dash.

Fittingly, Gary Bloke is an ageing rocker fading into obscurity at his country pile. Critics in Britain saw similar comparisons to Enfield.

"It's meant to be a joke on vain and vacuous celebrity," wrote Andrew Anthony in the Observer. "But the only vain and vacuous celebrity on display is Enfield."

Enfield had made a high-risk move to Sky in 2000, having been offered a pile of money to make Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show, which screened here late on TV3.

At the time, he thought it was a good way to start again after his co-conspirators Paul Whitehouse and Kathy Burke wanted to pursue their own interests.

Despite having created 25 new characters for the series, and attracting almost a million viewers on its first night, the series failed, with audiences dropping by half in just three weeks of its start.

Sky had hoped the new characters would become part of the national culture just as Kevin the Teenager, DJs Smashy and Nicey or Loadsamoney, the cowboy builder, had. It was also promoted as more "adult-edged" by Sky.

He then made a well-publicised jump back to BBC One to make Celeb, which is based on the cartoon strip of the same name which appears in satirical magazine Private Eye.

He also took inspiration from the likes of Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart and Pete Townsend, while his wife, played by Amanda Holden, is a loose composite of Meg Matthews (ex-wife of Oasis' Noel Gallagher) and Jerry Hall.

"It's about these people who live in a rarefied world and don't know what's real - people like Mick Jagger, who discuss the merits of getting the tube as opposed to a helicopter," he told the Guardian.

But the question is, why make a parody of ageing rock stars when there are plenty of the real thing, especially Ozzy, doing the job nicely? And if you want to see a definitive cucumber/socks-down-the-trousers scene, surely it's the airport sequence in Spinal Tap rather than tonight's first episode of Celeb.

Despite Enfield's popularity with the British mainstream, next to post-modern comedies such as The Office or The League of Gentlemen and the surrealism of Black Books, he's looking alarmingly like his sad Celeb dinosaur Gary Bloke.

He also seems stretched thin without the talents of Whitehouse, who has a more subtle line of characters in his own The Fast Show, and the outrageous Burke, who can actually act (Nil By Mouth, Elizabeth and Anita and Me).

Comedy has always defied analysis but while it might be tricky to define why we laugh, it's not hard to figure out why we don't. And, frankly, that Bloke is not funny.