ITV's Headcases
©ITV Pictures
I'll say something nice about Headcases: I don't think it's as bad as James Donaghy did in the Guardian. But it doesn't get a lot better than that. I agree with him that it shows the danger of admiring the look of the screen to the detriment of the gags, which are what any show like this should be focused on. I thought the material was more mixed than he did, though that wasn't the main problem I had.
On the basis of tonight's first show, the Tories will be hurt much more than Labour by the political satire in this show. Yes, there was a Dickensian sketch sending up Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, but nothing about it rang true at all: both men were portrayed as full of anxiety and nervous energy, which seems to me way off the mark. I think a more biting portrayal of Brown would be as a slow, gloomy, sinister figure. Another mark missed was Nick Clegg: it didn't look like him or sound like him, and there seemed no point to the short sketch starring him. The Tory sketches were much better: yes, it's easy and unoriginal to, make them public schoolboys, fagging and all, but at least there's something both truthful and hurtful in that. There was, though, arguably more of the grotesque than fun or politics in the portrayal, and I think they made an error by having Osborne (who sounded a lot like Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image - is Steve Nallon working on Headcases) as Cameron's fag: it'd have been more subversive the other way round. Where the show hit a bullseye was with William Hague, though - the character looks and sounds convincingly like the man, and has real potential.
The showbiz send-ups were equally mixed - Heather Mills was great, while Posh 'n' Becks are surely old hat by now - and this brings me to the main problem with Headcases. The length and type of sketch and the mix of politics and showbiz is so similar to what Spitting Image used to do that you wonder, really, why they didn't just get the rubber heads out of storage and revive the old thing. I'd have preferred something really new.
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