‘Help’: Not just any comedy

The final episode of the first season of Help (not to be confused with the inferior 1986 comedy of almost the same name) screened on UKTV on Friday 4 November at 21:00. It only premiered in the UK about six months ago, so for a change New Zealand TV isn’t far behind the rest of the world, and Kiwis haven’t been left wondering why the jokes and clothes are so last century (as was often the case with Big Train and the progressively lamer Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps).

It would be unfair to describe Help as a Paul Whitehouse vehicle with Chris Langham as the straight man, but you might dismiss it as such on the strength of a cursory viewing. For those who recognise the names but aren’t instantly able to place them, Whitehouse was Harry Enfield’s 1990s sidekick and played pop-picker Mike Smash to Harry’s Dave Nice. But his acting was challenged to a greater degree by The Fast Show, for which he created characters such as the semi-coherent Rowley Birkin QC, who was always “very drunk”.

Chris Langham co-wrote Help with Whitehouse and was perfectly cast in the series as Peter, the psychiatrist. As has been stressed elsewhere, Langham’s pokerface is by no means outshone by Whitehouse’s dazzling characterisation and makeup. Indeed, the variety of Peter’s reactions to his patients’ eccentricities is the focal point of the writing. Langham, we should remember, has experience of playing a mental healthcare professional; he was Douglas, and the real star, of three series of Kiss Me Kate (1998) with Caroline Quentin and Amanda Holden.

Shooting Help must have been a lot of fun and the result makes it look as though it was a painless process; although I’m sure Whitehouse can testify it wasn’t, now that he’s removed all his latex prosthetics. According to one comedy site, he played a total of 25 characters (all patients, except for one) in the six, 30-minute episodes of Help. I wasn’t counting, but it’s difficult trying to recall them all.

One standout was the wily Irishman who, in the final episode, claimed to have seen the ghost of a cow in the consulting room “for a nanosecond”. It’s hard to tell whether this guy is one of the crumbliest crackers in the barrel or is just taking the Mick out of Peter. In any case, round our place, this scene had 11-year-old Joe chuckling uncontrollably, followed promptly and progressively by each of us old codgers, and there were many more characters equally as funny. My favourite was the “west-country crusty” who claimed he was able to “squat in other people’s minds” before ultimately admitting to Peter that over the years he’s done “loads” of drugs (and that’s Whitehouse playing the crusty in the promotional photo at the top of this post).

Another fragmentary memory from the series is of the wife-beating indeterminate immigrant (possibly Italian?) who is linguistically challenged and about as politically incorrect as it’s possible to be. At one point, he refers to a situation he’s created with his neighbour or another wincingly awful ‘domestic’ as “a real Catch-24 situation.”

“Catch-22,” Peter helpfully suggests.

“Wha?”

“It’s a Catch-22.”

“No, he was definitely more than that…”

Just as thoroughbred in pedigree as Early Doors, Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible, The Smoking Room, The League of Gentlemen, Spaced and The Fast Show, Help hammers home the truism that the Brits are simply years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to creating groundbreaking TV comedies. It seems to me that the first season of Help shows the biggest potential for ongoing comedic success since The Royle Family screened in Britain in 1998.

Whitehouse — apparently Johnny Depp’s favourite British character actor — managed the same feat he achieved through the ramblings of Help’s ageing Jewish taxi driver, Monty, as he did with Rowley Birkin in The Fast Show; namely, squeezing grief out of a comedy audience after they’ve only just been chortling, thanks to some slower-paced, bittersweet monologues that start you thinking seriously about the meaning of life (it was Monty’s first scene that saved the first episode from being dismissed as a grab-bag of one-liners).

It’s seamlessly blending the old-fashioned laugh, the poignant pause and the dreadful tragedy that the Brits carry off with such arrogant aplomb. And it was the contrast of longer, more serious characterisations with short, one-joke scenes that helped make Help so compelling. Such as the man who, Peter explains, must “learn to trust” when doctor encourages patient to fall backwards into doctor’s arms at the start of the final episode. Patient trustingly complies, but hits the deck when doctor is distracted by receptionist Rebecca, with whom he’s pathetically besotted. Rather as The League of Gentlemen contained a host of characters who featured in just one scene, Help blends the appearances of regulars with walk-on patients who were clearly designed only to be the butt of a gag or the bearer of a punch-line.

The scriptwriting in Help is more reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads than it is of, say, Little Britain; although Bennett’s TV plays were, of course, one-handers, whereas Help could be described as a collection of two-handers — just as Little Britain is really all about David Walliams and Matt Lucas — augmented by some walk-on parts (in the case of Help, from the likes of Alison King, Mark Williams and Olivia Colman).

Check out this video clip (it requires RealPlayer), in which the doddery Clement — played, I must again emphasise, as are most of the patients, by Whitehouse — tests his impeded speech on a couple of vintage tongue-twisters. As always, Langham’s deadpan delivery is the perfect foil for the gags.

Peter the lovelorn psychiatrist, against his better judgment, is ultimately railroaded into going out on a date with Claudia, an ex-patient, although he’s in unrequited love with Rebecca. This psychiatrist, it almost goes without saying, is in therapy himself and in a nice twist Whitehouse, the multiple personality patient, also plays Peter’s Australian therapist — it’s perhaps his least successful characterisation, as he’s let down by a wooden Aussie accent. That minor shortcoming notwithstanding, Help proves Whitehouse is a man with even more talent than we suspected from years of watching the Harry Enfield Show, Happiness (his previous comedy, although I believe I’m correct in saying it’s yet to be shown here) or The Fast Show, and reminds us that it usually pays to listen to Johnny Depp.

After the darker, dramatic avenues explored in Huff, Help was a refreshingly light journey through mental illness and psychiatric therapy. Judging by the bloggers, web reviewers and newsgroups, the public has responded in an overwhelmingly positive fashion, and I think we can look forward to at least one more season of Help. The first was supposedly scheduled for release on DVD in the UK on 26 September, but the Amazon UK page shows a release date of 13 October 2006. Fortunately, there’s only the ghost of a cow’s chance that a nanosecond will elapse before UKTV rolls the repeats.