What on earth went wrong? (Big Train)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Big Train
Date:	12/02/02 (1202 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: first series was good

Disadvantages: second series was so bad it almost made me forget that the first series was good

Big Train is a BBC2 sketch show. The first series was broadcast in 1998, and was mostly marvellous. The second series was broadcast on Monday evenings over the last few weeks, and was almost entirely terrible.

The first series was written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, who also wrote 'Father Ted' for Channel 4. 'Brass Eye'/'The Day Today' star Chris Morris was originally involved, but pulled out at an early stage for reasons unknown. The focus of the show was very much on the writing rather than the performers, who were all fairly unknown at the time. The tone of the humour was kind of 'surreal' (which means not really surreal, but a bit stranger than usual). Probably the main feature of the comedy was its completely deadpan nature - the acting was generally very naturalistic and low key, with little of the comic mugging you'd get from Monty Python or whoever. The humour came from the intrusion of the strange into what seemed like perfectly ordinary settings.

The first series was quite patchy. Some of the jokes didn't work at all. It seemed that when the series was trying to be at its most Pythonesque, it fell down. A sketch which imitated BBC nature documentaries, but featuring The Artist Formerly Known As Prince hunting a load of jockeys (in place of a cheetah hunting zebras) didn't work for me at all. On other occasions, sketches that were pretty good were carried on for far too long - there was a great joke about Medieval monks pretending there had been a murder in order to confuse a wannabe-Cadfael. But after the initial joke had been made, we had to watch the monks laughing for about a minute and a half, by which time I was sitting there stony faced wishing they'd just get on with it. Similarly, the idea of Chairman Mao rising from his death bed to sing 'Virginia Plain' is funny, but to have him sing the whole damn song was a bit too much.

But, that said, when it was goo
d it was excellent. The woman trying to use hypnotherapy to give up smoking (especially the Evil Hypnotist), a man dressed as a mouse having a violent drunken fight with a man dressed as a cat, the various 'at home with Ming the Merciless' bits, and many, many others had me falling about. There were also amusing little animated inserts about staring matches, which were great.

The cast in the first series were extremely well-chosen. Four of them, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, Julia Davis and Amelia Bullmore, had previously appeared in Brass Eye, but weren't too well known. The other, Simon Pegg, was someone I'd never seen before. They were all very good at the naturalistic, deadpan style of acting necessary for the show to work, while a few of them (especially Eldon and Heap) could do weird and grotesque pretty well, too, if it was required. I think it won awards, and when it ended I was hoping for a new series soon.

Unfortunately it didn't come until this year. In the meantime, the cast all became better known. All apart from Pegg featured in Chris Morris's unsettling series 'Jam' on Channel 4. Eldon and Davis both starred in other sitcoms. Simon Pegg is responsible for the popular series 'Spaced' (which I'm afraid I just don't get - I'm sure there is humour in it somewhere, but it seems to be hiding from me). All five appeared in the Brass Eye Special.

So there was a second series, recently broadcast. This one was written by Arthur Mathews solo, which could account for some of its failings. Also, both female members of the original cast are no longer present. They've been replaced by three new actresses. Two I don't recognise (Catherine Tate and Tracey-Ann Oberman). The other is Rebecca Front, who was previously very good in 'On the Hour'/'The Day Today' and 'Knowing Me, Knowing You'. Unlike most of the others from those shows (Chris Morris, Armando Ianucci, Ste
ve Coogan, Patrick Marber), she's more or less vanished from our screens until now. She might as well have stayed vanished.

But having gone to the trouble of hiring three new actresses, they hardly used any of them in the series at all - the three men, possibly because they're more famous, seemed to get all the screen time. I couldn't really tell you if the replacements for Julia Davis and Amelia Bullmore are any good, because they weren't onscreen long enough to tell.

The humour just doesn't seem to work. Most of the sketches followed a similar formula to those in the first series, but somehow they just didn't make me laugh, at all (well, OK I laughed a couple of times during the course of the series, but it really was just a couple of times). The gags have somehow been stripped of the humour. It's difficult to say exactly how they've managed it, the series was just missing something, some weird comedy 'X factor' that I can't define. There are a few obvious faults, though.

Firstly, some of the humour has been made a lot more unpleasant, in a way that resembles 'Jam' far more than Big Train. A promising sketch about a man who was paranoid that everyone was talking about him not being married was ruined when he cut his own finger off. Another sketch ended with a middle aged man sobbing in genuine despair, which was kept going for a lot longer than it should have been. The swear-count has increased dramatically, too.

Secondly, a lot of it is incredibly derivative - it's lost any claim to being 'different' that it may have had. Some sketches wouldn't have been out of place in Smith and Jones (a highway man stopping a coach, only to try and wash its windows! Hilarious!). Other gags were just blatantly stolen. A sketch about a schoolgirl becoming a professional boxer is basically a thirty-year-old Monty Python sketch, and dressing it up in 'Raging Bull' trappin
gs isn't going to fool anyone. The tough woman cop who starts acting all girly around her male colleagues was stolen from 'The Fast Show' (who did it better - 'The Fast Show' wasn't perfect, but at least it knew to end a sketch before all the humour had been driven out of it). And, like the first series, this series ended with a too-long performance of a pop song. Even the best joke I saw (Ralph McTell being forced to sing 'Streets of London' over and over again by an angry mob in a pub) reminded me of a much better joke in the first series about George Martin. And there were too many jokes based around people having oversized hands, too many parodies of French art house cinema - there weren't nearly enough ideas.

Thirdly, the way the whole thing is played has changed slightly. There's a lot more comic over-acting now, where before all was understatement. Maybe the stars have decided they want to show off their versatility, maybe Mathews genuinely thought that lots of grimacing would make it funnier. Or maybe, as I suspect, the humour was too thin on the ground, and they decided to try to hide the fundamental weakness of the material by indulging in lots of grotesquery. This theory is also supported by the fact that lots of sketches are too long again this series, for no good reason that I can see.

Fourthly, the staring matches are gone. I liked the staring matches.

So there it is. Big Train has, in my opinion, become rubbish. If they repeat the second series, give it a miss. If they release it on video or DVD, ignore it. You might well wonder why I bothered to watch it after the first episode, given my obvious dissatisfaction. I wonder that too. I suppose I must have been hoping that it was going to get better. It didn't. (Actually, I didn't see the fifth episode. For all I know, it might have been the single greatest piece of television comedy since that episode of Fawlty Towers where the
guy dies. I kind of doubt it, though.)

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