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‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. It’s a funny line, imposing the formulaic talk of an American waiter on to a medieval, fantastical, witches and warlocks ersatz epic of the type dreamed up by lonely schoolboys in their bedrooms. I laughed, or chuckled inwardly. But it didn’t quite work. The line is light and assured, whereas Krod (and we’re going to drop those annoying umlauts, only there to create a spray-on impression of mittel-Germanic, Middle Ages vowels) is a shy and diffident hero who would never come up with such a confident, savvy line. Indeed, the joke is that he is far from heroic, being unaware of his own powers, surrounded by useless henchmen (I liked the sorcerer, whose only response to a blaze is to say ‘fire, fire, go away, come again another day’) and dismayed by his girlfriend’s sexual rapacity. She, played by India de Beaufort, is another teenage fantasy, her tight leather garments failing to conceal much flesh.
I was disposed to like this series because the notion of crossing Lord of the Rings with The Office then sprinkling it with irony, which Americans can often do much better than us, was a promising one, if not exactly original. But to get it right you have to respect the original format and its conventions. You can’t just abandon them for the sake of a laugh. Take the killer being hired by Matt Lucas as the evil warlord (I forget the name, but it’s a collection of meaningless syllables reminiscent of pre-Christian France). ‘Krod Maldoon will be dead by morning — or your next two assassinations are free,’ he says. Doesn’t quite come off. Watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail and you see that the jokes work because each scene is played with the utmost seriousness. Most of all, you have to guard the characters’ characters. If comedy is unexpected departure from convention, you need to be ruthless about preserving the convention.
KM is a joint enterprise between the BBC and Comedy Central, the American cable channel, and it did well in the States. It does have some faults from each country, such as British knicker jokes and a stereotyped gay of a type that would have embarrassed the late John Inman. What it doesn’t have is a team of writers. The reason why Frasier and Friends and The Simpsons have worked so well is that the writers are, if necessary, prepared to argue for a day about one line. Our tradition is to have a single writer (Simon Nye, John Sullivan) or just a pair (Perry and Croft, Galton and Simpson), and while that means you rarely get the laugh-out-loud at every word quality of the American shows, you also have a freshness and eccentricity which the US scripts sometimes lack. KM is created and written by a single chap, Peter A. Knight, and I think he needed the toughness and discipline a team, or even a partner, would have provided.
Arena’s 90-minute documentary about T.S. Eliot (BBC2, Saturday) was a hagio-graphy which depicted someone less than a saint. It faced squarely up to the issue of his anti-semitism (though some of his best friends were Jews). There was plenty of the poetry too, though they had some difficulty illustrating it. The line from ‘Prufrock’: ‘Like a patient etherised upon a table’ was — pointlessly — illustrated by a patient etherised upon a table. Thank goodness, there was no young man carbuncular.
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