The London bookshop-owner Bernard
Black has one small problem: he hates his customers. At 2.45 in the afternoon,
when he just can't stand the sight of them any longer, he simply whips out a
megaphone and bawls them out. "Right, the shop is closed," he bellows. "Get out,
all you time-wasting bastards. Back on the street."
Bernard Black, the
principal character in C4's new sitcom, Black Books, is the latest in a long
line of comedy curmudgeons. Following in the distinguished tradition of Tony
Hancock, Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty and Victor Meldrew, he is a man constantly at
two with the world.
Bernard is played by Dylan Moran, the Irish stand-up who also co-wrote the series with Graham Linehan, one of the creators of Father Ted. But the switch from stage to screen was not without risks for Moran. There is a long and not always honourable history of stand-ups transferring to sitcoms; Rhona Cameron, Tommy Tiernan and Ardal O'Hanlon's recent efforts, for instance, met with far from universal acclaim. However, there is rather more to Black Books than a hastily cobbled-together dramatisation of fragments from Moran's stand-up act. It is not a fast-buck cash-in on the Perrier Award-winner's substantial live following. For a start, Moran can actually act; as Bernard, he exhibits a magnificent stroppiness.
Also, the series has well
fleshed-out characters, and there's the surprise of a proper structure. Like
Seinfeld, each episode interweaves three different plotlines which come together
at the end. The impression is that Linehan has brought some discipline to
Moran's wilder flights of fancy.
"When I saw the pilot that Dylan had written
on his own, it was very nearly brilliant," Linehan remembers. "But it was
surreal and structureless. When it's too surreal, you don't believe in it and it
breaks the reality. So when I came in, we worked on the way it was constructed
and made it more believable. Rather than relying on Dylan's stand-up, we wanted
the series to stand on its own two feet."
When Moran and Linehan conceived
Bernard, they imagined him as the sort of man who would carry a pair of scissors
with him at all times, in readiness to snip the wires of speakers blasting out
musak in pubs. In the first episode of Black Books, he rails against the sheer
incomprehensibilty of tax returns. "What does that mean?" he fumes at the
document in front of him. "'If you live in a council flat by a river but are not
blind'?"
Bernard becomes so desperate for displacement activities that he
turns his accounts into "a rather smart casual jacket" and even resorts to
inviting in the Jehovah's Witnesses who call on him. "Great, come in," he
enthuses. "I'd love to hear about Jesus. What's he up to now?" The evangelists
are flummoxed because they have never actually been admitted to a house
before.
But just why is misanthropy such a good subject for comedy? Moran
thinks it is simply an accurate reflection of life. "Anybody who's erect is in a
state of disquiet most of the time," he muses. "Maybe there is a whole secret
society of people walking around perfectly untroubled. Maybe there are people
who behave like the ads on the telly and can get their rocks off with a single
cup of coffee. Maybe they do exist, but I've never met them."
Bernard is reacting against the
"white noise" of the modern world that assails us all. "Misanthropy is the
touchstone of this series," continues Moran, a card-carrying member of the
miserablist tendency. "Bernard can't deal with the pell-mell pace of London. He
is someone who can't cope and is not even prepared to try. He has secured
himself in a fortress of denial. His bookshop is a huge sandbag against the
autobahn of modern life."
The more alienated Bernard is, the funnier he
becomes. He reaches such a pitch of frustration with his accounts, for example,
that he realises only serious injury will exempt him from them and tries goading
a trio of Millwall skinheads into hospitalising him.
"The funniest thing in the world is
an angry man," says Moran. "It's something to do with the accelerated
disintegration of the nervous system. Seeing a terribly angry bloke always makes
me laugh because he's pushing away the very thing that could solve his problem.
People like that are fighting for they what want, but they'll never get it
because they are trapped by their own inadequacies and blindness. A properly
funny sitcom character never displays the self-awareness that could get him out
of a hole."
Such characters also provoke a delicious sense of schadenfreude.
When we watch, for example, Basil Fawlty flogging his broken-down car with a
branch, or Victor Meldrew buried up to his neck in his own back garden by a
disgruntled workman, we take illicit pleasure in their pain. The same sensation
applies to Black Books. We just can't help but relish it as the Millwall
skinheads' boots rain down on Bernard's head.
