WHY
THE ANNUAL BARFTA AWARDS 2002
WAS THE MOST OFFENSIVE PROGRAMME I HAVE EVER SEEN.

Victor Lewis-Smith once said that "analysing humour is like dissecting a frog - few people are interested and the frog dies". In this case however, the amphibian arrived stillborn.

At 11.05pm on Thursday 25th April 2002, Channel Four broadcast what was, according to the Radio Times, a "virtual awards ceremony honouring the worst examples of British life over the past twelve months - with prizes for achievements from Worst Celebrity Chef to Hypocrite of the Year". It showed good credentials, being presented by The Larry Sanders Show's Jeffrey Tambor, directed by The League Of Gentlemen's Steve Benedelak, and produced and conceived by Victor Lewis-Smith, the hilarious TV reviewer of the Evening Standard and occasional TV series himself, cutting his teeth on the brilliant TV Offal and Ads Infinitum. In the latter show a spoof awards ceremony had already taken place in the final episodes of each series. They were similar in style to The Barftas, showing clips from real award shows dubbed over with Victor Lewis-Smith's inimitable voice, such as a clip of an applauding Robbie Coltrane dubbed over with Victor saying "There's Robbie Coltrane clapping, or 'working out' as he calls it, the fat bastard". The awards were similar too, including one for The Most Patently Disingenuous TV Trail of the Year. A clip was shown of journalist Tony Parsons saying "Mohammed Ali did more than anybody this century to fight racism", followed by a clip of "another Mohammed Ali" on the Parkinson show (captioned as "Another Mohammed Ali") talking about blacks and whites marrying and having "half-brown, kinky-haired grand-children". Now there's a clip that's not shown on the tribute shows. And that's what so great about Victor Lewis-Smith: giving racist, politically incorrect adverts and programmes the chance to be shown on television today, all in the name of having a good laugh. Surely the way forward is to show adverts featuring blacked-up Ribena berries singing about their drink to the tune of Campton Races and have a good laugh at it's naïvety rather than to ban them from the air completely so as not to corrupt young minds. Along with his amazing technical skills of editing and voiceover, this makes Victor Lewis-Smith one of the most exciting broadcasters working today.

Two years on and Victor's back. His company, the cleverly-named Associated-Rediffusion, is producing a one-off hour-long spoof award ceremony. His last few productions had been serious ones, among them an overly-sentimental Omnibus on Dudley Moore and a humourous account on the life of Benjamin Pell (more on him later), but it seemed that VLS was back in full-on silliness for the sake of it mode, and that this new show would be the only programme worth looking forward to for a long time.

Oh, how wrong could one assumption be? The Annual Barfta Awards 2002 turned out the be the most offensive programme I have ever seen. And why? Let us count the ways...

First off, the show was obviously meant as an hour-long 'spin-off,' as it were, of the last episodes of Ads Infinitum, spoofing the awards ceremony format more thoroughly than it had been before, with a linking device of a real presenter rather than just VLS' disembodied voice. But the extended length and new linking format seemed to be a major problem. Whereas both Ads Infinitum and TV Offal had moved along at a rapid-fire pace, sketches ending briskly with a whip-pan or a tape wind or an "Apropos of nothing...", The Barftas just moved along so ponderously as Jeffrey Tambor wheeled out guest after d-list guest, and introduced nomination after nomination after nomination, coming across more like a real awards ceremony than Lewis-Smith may have realised or wanted.

In an interview with Peter Cook 'fagazine' Publish And Bedazzled, comedy producer Martyn Lewis discussed a spoof awards ceremony he created to publicise the new Amnesty film The Secret Policeman's Other Ball: "We had all these awards nominations that related to the Other Ball film, like 'Best Striptease By John Cleese And Pamela Stephenson Award', which John Cleese collected, saying 'I'm sorry I can't be here tonight but I'd like to thank myself for receiving this award in my place'. With every award nomination, the envelopes would get progressively bigger. And Peter [Cook] would be ad-libbing like crazy". Silliness for the sake of it, these awards seemed to send up the self-important conventions of such pretentious ceremonies rather than sticking to them. Sadly, VLS didn't follow suit: the envelopes, the guests, the fake laughter, the piss-poor jokes ("Chris Evans couldn't get a babysitter - for his wife!"): they all rang true too closely of a real awards ceremony, with only a swear word every so often so as to point out the distinction.

Secondly, the targets chosen to be humiliated needed no help at that. They were the lazy, predicable, easily-attacked public hate figures that everyone has sneered at for the past few years, nominations including Vanessa Feltz, Jamie Oliver and Jeffrey Archer. Even the child prodigy James Harries, who has since had a sex change and become Lauren Harries, was unfairly wheeled out and abused simply because of her gender ambiguity (of which there is none). One is reminded of her appearance on The Priory where she was the butt of a joke as someone Jamie Theakston would have been embarrassed to kiss (unlike the arses of every singer currently in the charts, which he kisses every week). Lauren Harries wasn't deserving of such treatment, and seemed genuinely offended by the (unfair) observation that she "used to be Lord Fauntleroy and now you're Dame Edna". Ironically the only celebrities there who deserved some serious urine-extraction were the ones who turned up to open the envelopes.

Not that those celebrities needed have bothered showing up, so insubstantial their contributions: Nina Wadia did a comedy 'shocked' face on hearing the word "hooker", Richard Bacon did some up-to-the-minute Blue Peter/crack cocaine jokes like he did on The Big Breakfast three years ago, and Christine Hamilton was almost edited out completely. According to an article VLS wrote about the programme that appeared in the Daily Mirror on the day of broadcast , Christine Hamilton "threw a tantrum in the studio after mention was made of 'brown envelopes', whereupon she and Neil retired to the hospitality room and proceeded to down prodigious amounts of free booze and food. So, no change there then", although the truth in this statement may exist solely in VLS's Big Book Of Topical Satire, housed in the library of his imagination. It was only Neil Hamilton who raised the celebrities humour level with his over-the-top reading of the line "No cash, then?!?". Hamilton proved he had a good sense of comedy timing in his When Louis Theroux Met... special where, not only did he quote Ian Richardson's catchphrase from House Of Cards, but also told a hysterical Christine one evening that she should "get something hot inside her", hours after she had been arrested on charge of rape. That makes him an OK guy in my book. Back at the awards, Germaine Greer gave the line "It gives me great pleasure or rather, to be more precise, it's my contractual obligation..." a good reading. However, it was the sheer banality of the envelope-openers that defies description. Surely these are the people Lewis-Smith has been campaigning to get off television, not give more work to. Victor Lewis-Smith shouldn't be working with Narinder from Big Brother, he should be attacking Narinder from Big Brother! Literally if necessary. It was a surprise that Noel Edmonds didn't turn up.

Later on in the show, idiot T4 presenter Dermot O'Leary is introduced with a gaggle of lame jokes on the Oirish, such as "they think a pocket calculator is a device for working out how many pockets they have" and, when asked if he can read the nominations, Jeffrey Tambor remarks "maybe you need to get someone to read them out for you". This is diffused with O'Leary's cries of "I actually happen to find that introduction kind of offensive". One is inevitably reminded of Lewis-Smith's review of Lenny Henry blandcom Chef! where he says: "All attempts of humour were blatantly racist. Did the politically correct Mr Henry really think that such naked xenophobia could be neutralized by the occasional interpolated cry of 'Don't be racist, chef'. I rather fear he did". So do I.

The other celebrities involved in the show didn't know they were involved, namely the people in the audiences of other, real awards shows. In Ads Infinitum the stock footage of people they cut to were usually the subject of a joke, such as the 'Robbie Coltrane' cutaway described above, and a similar joke where Victor cut to a laughing Victoria Wood before saying that where he comes from "Victoria Wood was where we took the chicks for a bit of forcible penetration". In The Barftas however, the cutaways were shots of laughing Michael Caines or Gwyneth Paltrows (along with the two mentioned above) chuckling at a piece of Lewis-Smith-penned whimsy. Whereas before the celebs were the subjects of jokes, they are now the recipients of jokes, to be found howling at many of which they wouldn't normally find funny (I'm sure Pierce Brosnan wouldn't have found a close-up of a computer-generated defecating arsehole terribly amusing). The more this grating laughter occurred, the more it came across as an insecure laughtrack of the type used by awful children's sitcoms. The height of this was the self-congratulating laughter the "Cheeses Of Nazareth" pun received as though it was the wittiest and most original joke ever written (which had been used for at least twenty years previously, as far as I'm aware). And as for the laughter that greeted the "Mental Floss" pun, the only possible reason that this was included could have been that Lewis-Smith has been asleep since 1985. Presumably VLS thought the laughtrack was sending up this style of insincere, sycophantic laughter that occurs at such shows, but instead came across as an example of a comedian virtually laughing at his own material, or to quote numerous VLS reviews, "corpsing at his own jokes as they fall lifeless to the studio floor".

The laughtrack had come across as annoying on the previous Ads Infinitum awards ceremony where it was played over a clip of a fucking hilarious Dali-esque Kellogg's cornflakes ad (which featured, in Victor's own words, "a toothless, senile clown and his fat feckless wife, presumably intended to frighten children out of ever having breakfast again"), where the laughter seemed to intrude on rather than enhance the effect of the show, almost as if it was pointing out where the funny bits are, something that's been criticised in his column enough times and something the constantly amusing VLS never should never have to do.

Some of the lines are not without mirth, however. Many of them are from Lewis-Smith's previous TV, radio and printed work (Victor Lewis-Smith reusing material? Now there's a surprise) and lines such as "The farmer we just saw cannot be with us tonight, because he just discovered another nasty infection in his bullocks" and "Jilly Goolden trying an impertinent little sixty-nine with Oz Clarke before daintily spitting it out afterwards" would have got one giggling if they were delivered by the man himself. Instead they are delivered by Jeffrey Tambor and voice-over man Phil Cornwall, who Lewis-Smith seems to think are funnier than him. He is very wrong.

Only one contributor came out of the show with any dignity: Benjamin Pell. The only one on the show with nothing to lose, namely because he was nothing to begin with. Himself the subject of one of Associated-Rediffusion's documentaries, Scandal In The Bins, Pell became famous through rummaging through politicians' bins and finding scandalous documents. Ever so slightly not all there, his documentary made entertaining viewing. VLS seemed to like him so much he turned him into a roving (or, to quote Jeffrey Tamor's introduction to him, "raving") reporter, designed to go out and interview the winners. Sadly, VLS gives him too much free reign and the uninspired results frequently fall flat. Chris Morris had previously proved on his radio show that if you put a monkey in a suit and give him a microphone, the results can be hilarious. Morris' monkey was Paul Garner and was told through a earpiece every word he should speak, thus acting purely as a mouth piece for Morris' surrealist ramblings. Benji Pell's surrealistic ramblings came off as real, and somehow that made them less funny, and even slightly worrying. Had Lewis-Smith tightened up Pell's repartee with the interviewees (either in the scripts or in the editing), these segments could have been comedy gold. There were some previously written lines but these came out curiously devoid of humour, such as asking Lauren (nee James) Harries if she had always "wanted her own slot? On TV, I mean!". Irritatingly, Lauren's seemingly superfluous reaction was cut, which is more Ali G than anything. Could it be that in Victor's attempt to crowbar the likeable Benjamin Pell into his new show somewhere he failed to think through to what the comic conclusion would be?

There was an interesting piece in The Mirror about how Lewis-Smith' original idea was to do a section of the show called "Challenge Hanukah", where Benji would hang-glide over Michael Barrymore's house and drop a Barfta award in his pool. This sounds like a fucking brilliant idea! But Channel Four's lawyers got nervous (allegedly) and called the thing off. Shame, as the things Benji Pell is sent out to do are dull dull dull. He goes to the prison Jeffrey Archer's held in and takes a Jeffrey Archer look-a-like there. He phones someone at Gary Rhodes' restaurant and asks if Gary's in. He does NOTHING AMUSING WHATSOEVER! Still, he's a genuinely mentally disturbed individual and has a lovely Jewish mother already and, if given the right script and format, could be the funniest thing to happen to television in a long time. Go on, Vic, get thinking. How about a series of The Pells at No. 42?

Phil Cornwall's voice is a curious one. With lines like "There's Richard Brian Arthur Michael Kevin Madeley. Richard's mother thought, as a mark of respect, she should mention everyone who took part in the gangbang" and "I'm sorry Mister Wigon, but sticking a bow-tie onto a child does not a genius make", he appears to be trying to do a Lewis-Smith impression but it doesn't quite come off, sounding enough like him to get the timing of the lines right but not enough like him to fool you, most noticeably in the Trevor McDonald impression, "WHO empHAsisES ALL the WRONG syllABles when HE'S readING the NEWs". A similar thing happened in the Lewis-Smith produced Z For Fake, a ten minute oddity on BBC2 late last year. Presented (in voice only) by voiceover man and When Louis Met The Hamiltons director Will Yapp, he seemed to be doing what Victor Lewis-Smith would have done if he was in that situation, again not quite good enough to fool the ear. Interestingly (or perhaps not), Z For Fake was written by comedy book co-writers Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine, who co-wrote a lot of The Barftas.

Victor Lewis-Smith does make two cameo appearances in The Annual Barfta Awards, in voice only: once as the voice of Daniella Westbrook's septum in a disgusting (but funny) puppetry sequence ("Daniella is a bitch. She just blew me out"), and again as Jeffrey Archer and his rapist in prison. He also supplies a 'pop' noise with his mouth to imply penetration (perfectly in sync with the launching of the soap), showing shades of his "Good Thumbs-Up From The Controller" sketch from Loose Ends.

The problem with the show was not so much the material which, as I've already said, is filled with quite good old Loose Ends material and jokes from his reviews ("It must be a face, it's got ears"). The main problem is with the attitude behind the show. As with Christopher Morris' Brass Eye Special, the programme is not so much created so as to entertain the public and themselves but as to make an offensive and as controversial programme as they can possibly get away with broadcasting. In that respect it's no different to Carry On Emmannuelle. One can't imagine VLS chuckling over the observation of a fake flame lamp being a not particularly practical item in the same way he would have wet himself over the editing of his Jim'll Fix It song from Loose Ends, and the audible delight behind such couplets as "Because you're too tight-fisted to part with your dough, you arrange a ride for a cripple on the Fix It show".

Victor Lewis-Smith is a wonderful comedian. Witty, original, satirical, his reviews in the Standard (and his book, 'Inside The Magic Rectangle') are a must-read and his page in The Mirror is the only thing ever printed in The Mirror worth reading. His programmes are consistently hilarious and his radio work was truly inspired. The Barftas, on the other hand, was shite of the highest order. In the olden days VLS would have turned this funny idea into a ten minute episode of Ads Infinitum, doing all the voices, music and editing himself. Padded out to an hour, complete with poor filler material and real ads, this was just as bad and poorly written as the shows he is trying to satirise. Such potential pissed away on clumsy writing and the lazy targeting of celebrities didn't even make it worth VLS renting the editing suite. Because of this disaster Lewis-Smith probably isn't going to get another comedy series in the style of TV Offal or Ads Infinitum commissioned and so he'll resort to either making really dull documentaries on nothing or sitting at his word processor bitterly typing about Chris Morris' latest offering. The Barftas could have been, and I'm not joking here, the funniest show ever on the strength of Victor Lewis-Smith' talent alone but it simply turned out to be a complete waste of everyone's time. Victor Lewis-Smith is insulting everybody by creating and producing such a low standard of comedy when everybody knows he can produce something of true comic greatness. And that is why The Annual Barfta Awards was the most offensive programme I have ever seen.

And sadly, there's only one TV critic with the wit, passion and brutality to give this programme the savaging it deserves. And he's its executive producer.

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WHO'S TO BLAME:
The fuckers behind The Annual Barfta Awards 2002:
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An Associated-Rediffusion Production for Channel Four Television, MMII.

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