Life's Too Short

When we started this blog we were only going to write about drama, but the latest Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant project can't pass without comment....


The show, starring Warwick Davis, has bombed, had a critical mauling, and lost millions of viewers.  Gervais, Merchant and Davis himself have appeared in the media to defend it from accusations that it exploits Davis, and is offensive to dwarves.  Our main complaint though is that it's very, very lazy.


Good sitcoms surely tell a funny, well-plotted story, where the characters end up pretty much in the same position as they started in?  With this it feels far more like they sat down and brainstormed some situations, then added some pretty straight dialogue to get them from one situation to another.  For example, in episode five, Warwick went to a psychic, who told him to "get back out there", so the next scene was him trying to pull in a bar, then you had him at a dating agency, and so on, with a couple of trips to different churches to quiz the preachers thrown in, each as a short sketch.


Good sitcoms have genuinely surprising twists, but here they're all very predictable.  The boy who wrote abuse on Warwick's website, and whom he goes to confront?  He's in a wheelchair.  The woman with whom he gets set up with by the dating agency?  She's also a dwarf.  Never saw either of those coming.  (In fact I did wonder whether the date was going to be in a wheelchair, or even a dwarf in a wheelchair.)


Good sitcoms have good characters.  Here Warwick Davis plays a dwarf version of David Brent as he was in the Christmas specials of 'The Office' - a bit arrogant, a bit of a loser, a minor celeb whom no one recognises.  All of his lines sound like they could have been said by Brent, and all they've done (it seems) is revive Brent, with someone else playing him, but give themselves more to work with by making him a little person, so we get jokes about him being locked in the toilet because he can't reach the door handle.


There are a lot of sitcoms that have been written very quickly; once you have the characters and the situations it can come together very fast.  When Graham Chapman was writing 'Doctor in the House' (or a subsequent 'Doctor' series) he and his co-writers used to write an episode a day, according to the stories in the excellent A Liar's Autobiography.  However, Graham Chapman knew he was bashing the scripts out, and didn't have much respect for his audience.  Do Gervais and Merchant have any respect for theirs, or are they just too busy to do better?


Ultimately 'Life's Too Short' could be the perfect example of a show that people were too scared to turn down, or at least insist on changes.  Gervais and Merchant are such big stars now, with projects on Sky and films to juggle, and it seems that the BBC weren't able to get them to put more effort into making it better.  Sadly, this happens far too often elsewhere, with second novels double the size of the first and with half the impact, and dramatists like Poliakoff writing self-indulgent, much-heralded dramas that, were they submitted by an unknown, wouldn't get the green light.