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 As a talk show parody, Jennifer Saunders finally has another winner, writes David Knox.
Did you say Oprah?” gasps Vivienne Vyle.
“How dare you talk about Oprah? We’d all like to be Oprah! We’d all like to sit and clutch hands with Susan Sarandon and weep openly when she says she’s a great ‘MARM’.
“We’d all like to sit smugly in the condom of cashmere and deal out Ralph Lauren vouchers to the poor and hungry, but we can’t. Do you know why she can? Because she owns the fucking channel! She doesn’t need children!”
As TV talk show host ‘Vivienne Vyle’, Jennifer Saunders is back, unleashing her characteristic stinging barbs in a sharp new comedy from the BBC. As a fusion of Jerry Springer, Larry Sanders and assorted British hosts, this is the most ideal vehicle for Saunders since Ab Fab concluded. Mirrorball and Jam and Jerusalem were hardly her biting best.
Here Saunders lets rip on trash TV. We go behind the scenes, literally, of her shows entitled ‘My Son Calls the Wrong Man Daddy’ and ‘I Love My Mum But She Dresses Like a Whore’. Backstage a production assistant revs up a jealous father, directly before he is introduced. “She’s trying to take your son away from you,” he says. “Tell her mate, do something about it!”
Vyle confronts her angry, working class guests, moralising from on high like a televangelist. Before long she is socked in the nose and lying in a hospital bed. This leads to the show’s producer Helena De Wend, played mercilessly by Miranda Richardson, to impose a psychotherapist on the show. Dr Phil anyone? But the conceited Vyle is having none of Dr Jonathan Fowler (Jason Watkins), who insists most of the guests are too unstable to appear.
Set against the onscreen theatrics and moral shortcomings of television are deeper, personal issues within Vyle. She has married her gay friend Jared (Conleth Hill) but is desperate to become the mother to her dead husband’s frozen sperm.
Richardson’s smoking, swearing, ballsy producer looks like Geri Haliwell on a bender. Her daughter, spending more time with her nanny, only speaks Spanish. Christopher Ryan (The Young Ones) will also appear as Miriam, Vyle’s transgender PR advisor.
As you might have guessed, everything is in place for a rip-roaring attack on television, pop psychology and celebrity. I loved it.
The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle premieres 9pm Monday July 28 on UKTV.
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