The second series of Sean Lock's 15 Storeys High (BBC3) is proving to be minor comic masterpiece. Having tackled monorchism in the first episode and ping pong-obsessed twins in the second, last night's edition saw creativity itself under the microscope as anti-hero Vince (Lock) spent a crazed 30 minutes trying to turn a holiday catastrophe into an amusing anecdote. As with Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm,Vince's disasters are invariably self-inflicted: in this instance, tearing up his plane ticket in a fit of pique at a Finnish ground stewardess resulting in his last minute cheap holiday being cancelled. Determined to make the best of a bad lot, he insisted he didn't mind, because the only reason anyone ever goes on holiday is to bring back a good story. But as his flatmate Errol (Benedict Wong) was only the first of many to point out, Vince's story wasn't actually any good. So what would make it so? There followed a series of increasingly complex, exponentially surreal attempts to construct a more compelling tale from the same basic raw material (such as the one where he was pushed over the edge because every woman in the airport was groping his bottom). Yet everyone he approached still had a better story than his. (I particularly liked the nurse who'd just treated a man with with a false leg buta real foot.) In a week that saw some wonderfully original new comedy on BBC3, this was undoubtedly topped the lot.
Gerard O'Donovan
The Daily Telegraph
|
