Tag Archives: Sharon Horgan

Dead Boss, taking no prisoners

Posted on by
Reply

Tucked away on BBC3 it would be quite easy to miss brand new prison comedy Dead Boss. But that would be a real shame (dare I say it, criminal?) as it’s actually rather good.

Although very different, it nicely fills the comedy void left by Have I Got New for You on Fridays at 9pm. Written by and starring Pulling‘s Sharon Horgan, Dead Boss is a quirky comedy following likeable main character Helen (Horgan) who has found herself wrongly imprisoned for 12 years for the murder of her boss.

Dead Boss: Sharon Horgan (centre) stars.

Helen (Sharon Horgan) centre

Once inside she devotes all her efforts to finding a way out, with the help of her nice-but-dim arsonist cellmate Christina. But meanwhile she’s up against terrifying fellow prisoner Top Dog (who turns out to be none other than Helen’s ex-supply teacher, intent on revenge for her teenage pranks), as well as Jennifer Saunders’ brilliant prison governor who takes it as a personal slight that Helen wants to leave. On top of that she has to contend with a sister who’s stolen her job, flat and dog and an obsessively stalker-ish work colleague who Helen believes is helping her get out but clearly has very different ideas.

I wasn’t sure about it initially- the opening with a bumbling lawyer was extremely unbelievable and quite silly and some of the characters, especially the tough female prisoners seemed a bit clichéd but by about halfway through I realised I was enjoying it.

Helen is an intelligent, brave and likeable main character and Jennifer Saunders is great. It would very easy to play the governor in an OTT panto fashion but instead she is  very under-stated in her portrayal which makes her far more menacing. There are some genuinely funny and clever lines and in addition a nice little murder mystery is starting to unfold.

The only thing that irritates me about this show is the unbelievable characters, the lawyer being the primary example. Such an inept moron could never be a lawyer and if by some miracle he was, he would never have been employed by a smart woman such as Helen. Since it’s usually the grain of truth that makes things funny, I find all his scenes pretty devoid of humour. Similarly it’s hard to believe that Top Dog was ever allowed anywhere near a school.

But apart from these few little things, the first couple of episodes were impressive and I will definitely carry on watching.

Take a look for yourself on BBC iPlayer

Related Posts

The Borrowers missed the mark

Posted on by
Reply

One of the Christmas offerings from the BBC this year was The Borrowers, a modern adaptation of the Mary Norton classic.

Although it is a well-known story it hasn’t been adapted for the screen many times. It was made into a film in the 1970s and once again in the 1990s, and more recently an anime version from Studio Ghibli. But the television series of the 1990s with Penelope Wilton and Ian Holm is one of my all time favourite shows, let alone adaptation of The Borrowers, so this new version had a lot to live up to.

There is no doubt that scenes were a very small man treats the humble living room as an assault course all to get one Quality Street for pudding is mesmerising. But after that it just felt weird.

The cast, all good actors, just felt wrong. Christopher Eccleston as Pod saved the borrowers once before and retired before reaching 50. Sharon Horgan as Homily had raised a child begging to join the adult world at 40 and now Victoria Wood is a grandmother to quite a grown up child. All this miscasting of ages made it jar slightly.

And Stephen Fry being evil and lusting after Victoria Wood was strange.

My biggest annoyance about the show was the modernisation of it. As a child I loved Arrietty, she owned a miniature book set and wrote in her diary using a small pencil but to her was one of those inconveniently large pencils.

She acted like a teenager does, wanting to be like her parents and at the same time not. But in this version she wanted a man to call her own and that man should not be her father.

So she stumbles out into the world to find Spiller, who has now become a tearaway (made obvious by the fact that he is wearing a leather jacket) and had set his eyes on Arrietty.

This modern update of the story completely missed the important bit that Spiller was actually a nice person just wild and knew more about the world than Arrietty. They developed a friendship which allowed Arrietty to get to know more about the world rather than just she found a pretty man to kiss.

So I found this Christmas treat completely missed the mark as it just took the originally story at face value and missed the important aspects of growing up and why Arrietty is such a good character, rather than a girl annoyingly screeching at her father about nothing.

Related Posts