I remember seeing promo pictures of Mark Gatiss in a curly wig and wondering what it was all about, but I never actually saw Julia Davis' BBC comedy Nighty Night when it was first on - I have my wife to thank for correcting that with her DVD of series 1. Series 2 was always sold to me as a terrible disappointment which didn't make any sense following on from series 1 and was just plain crap. Recently we picked it up cheap, though, so I've finally had a chance to see it.
Is it crap? Not by a long stretch.
Are there inconsistencies? Kind of, but I'm happy to overlook them.
Is it as good as series 1? Possibly.
One thing it has done is make me review my thoughts on series 1.
Series 1 is dark and uncomfortable, and brilliant. The discomfort largely comes from seeing believable characters do things you know are funny but are either socially wrong or inappropriate. It relies on a firm grounding of reality. You can have grotesques and caricatures and still maintain the reality - we've no reason to doubt that Ruth Jones' Linda or Mark Gatiss' Glen Bulb aren't real people, for example.
That's not the case with Jill's husband Terry. You can't blame Kevin Eldon - he's given very little to work with and in some ways in may have been better if he was never seen at all, like Captain Mainwaring's wife in Dad's Army. Terry's not even pathetic, he's just there and clearly all the creative focus was on the other characters. Terry doesn't fit into that world. There's no sense of Terry and Jill having a life together before the series started. That's a shame, I feel.
It's also not very clear why Jill is obsessed with Angus Deayton's character Don. There's no real sense that he could make her happy or massively improve her life, it's almost that she wants him because he's someone else's - which would be fine if that was explicit, but it isn't so the audience is kind of left wondering and making up its own mind. With all due respect to Angus Deayton he's not God's gift to women!
But these quibbles aside, the series as a whole is excellent. Davis is a fantastic performer and Jill succeeds in being both utterly hateful and at the same time utterly alluring. Don's wife (Rebecca Front) Cathy's inability to deal with Jill taking advantage of her MS is painfully and awkwardly hilarious. The series ends with Jill's boutique having closed down, the Vicar and Glen having been poisoned, Terry waking up in a skip and Linda obviously dead lying next to him.
Series 2 starts with Linda back to life and Terry now properly dead. The vicar is in an iron lung, while his nympho wife's permanently erect nipples have grown. Glen Bulb has lost part of his memory and his intestines and is in a secure prison for the mentally unhinged. I don't mind - I can accommodate all this. The best thing they could do with Terry was to kill him off and Linda was one of the best things about series 1. I have a few generalised headline comments about series 2:
1) It starts well, goes flat in the middle, then picks up at the end.
2) It's at its best when Ruth Jones and Mark Gatiss have a lot to do.
3) Cathy is exceptionally annoying throughout - this is NOT good.
4) Ralph Brown gets more insufferable as the series progresses - but not in a good way.
5) Rape of any sort is never funny and if the idea of juvenile rape was going to be dropped so quickly why include it in the first place?
6) The overall scenario and a lot of Jill's actions are simply ridiculous and unbelievable in this series so it loses the discomfort of reality that the first series had.
The reason for point 1 is explained in point 2 - Linda and Glen don't appear so much in the middle couple of episodes. Both Jones and Gatiss shine in this series, given far more screen time and far more to do. Gatiss in particular undergoes a wonderful character journey.
Rebecca Front has more to do in series 2 - it seems Julia Davis decided to explore her character in a bit more depth. Unfortunately her passive aggressiveness and non-commital prudishness just make her annoying in more than small doses. As events escalate and Ralph Brown's character Jacques maintains his New-Age philosophy mantra he gets less and less real and believable. Some later scenes with Cathy and Jacques are almost insufferable.
Point 5 preludes point 6 in general: this series Julia Davis has obviously upped the ante from series 1 and as a consequence the it enters that strange comedy netherworld where stupid and unbelievable things can happen just because that's what the series needs them to do, not because life's like that.
So a lady can be run over, kidnapped, left for possibly weeks in a cupboard in a caravan parked outside someone's house without anyone noticing, then get run over again and eventually turn up for her interview without batting an eyelid. Class.
Jill can convince 'The Trees' New-Age retreat establishment that she's a middle-aged black lady and get her and Linda jobs there without any obvious qualifications. Yes, it's a comment on everyone's fears over political correctness, but it also says people have no common sense.
Cathy, a confirmed Christian, having left the support of a Christian Religious community without obviously losing her faith, is happy to go to a New Age retreat in Cornwall. Likely?
The scene in the hospital with Jill & Linda collecting Don's pre-vasectomy semen. Hilarious, but utterly ridiculous. Scrape that dinner into Jill's front bottom. Up that ante.
Jill convincing the local waitress Don is seeing that she has a stupid big nose and then that Jill can undertake some plastic surgery on her herself, there and then, on the beach. As you do, cos all Cornish teenage girls are gullible dupes of course, and it's all about looks. Hmmm...
Jill tries to convince Cathy and Don that their 12 year old son (a different son revealed for this series, explained predictably by his being off at boarding school during series 1) has raped her on many occasions, which is why she's now pregnant - which she isn't. The rape issue is then dropped, suddenly, while the pregnancy lingers. But if they couldn't deal with it properly, why deal with it at all? It's like there was another dark comedy box that needed to be ticked, then move on.
There's nothing to explicitly state a time difference between episodes 5 & 6 (11 months or so it seems), the viewer is left to figure that out for themselves which distracts us from the action. I think this is lazy, myself. I don't want to be spoon-fed necessarily, but I also don't want to spend half an episode trying to work out why things have changed suddenly.
But, despite all this there are a lot of laughs in series 2 and it trundles along at speed. Because it's ridiculous it's more comfortable to watch more than one episode at a sitting, unlike series 1 for me. The series 2 DVD contains a behind the scenes documentary which goes some way to explain how and why both series happened. Series 2 was obviously a more rushed affair but with a bigger budget, which may explain some of it's shortcomings. Although I appreciate Julia Davis' brilliance as both a writer and a performer I can't say that I subscribe wholly to her comedy philosophy.
