Radio Times review

This week brought perhaps the worst episode of Derek yet. A young rapper called Deon (Doc Brown) came to Broad Hill care home to do community service, provoking the expected reaction from characters written by Ricky Gervais: awkwardness around a black man. Mentally vulnerable helper Derek (Gervais) touched Deon's hair and noted that it was curly, while crass drunk Kev (David Earl) tried to appear cool - "Blacks and whites unite!" - but then spoilt it by slagging off the "Chinkies".

Once Gervais had got that off his chest, Deon became a stooge in another sermon about kindness and respect for the aged. He'd turned up, unnerved and repulsed by having to interact with the elderly, just in time for a talent night at the home. Even naïve Derek would, if watching the show himself, have stood up after ten minutes and said: "Oh Christ, Deon's going to perform a heartfelt rap at the end about how he's changed his mind because the old folk and their carers are so inspiring, isn't he? Clearly he is. Yeech."

Derek would have been right. Deon also chipped in with a speech about how he'd realised that men in the home had fought in the Second World War, and that this trauma was more serious than the things he and his tough mates fight over. Meanwhile Derek confided to the show's unseen documentary-maker, ie directly to us, that he just wanted to make the residents happy, because they didn't have long left and every minute was precious. When Deon had done his rap, Derek said it was brilliant. Deon replied: "Nah. You're brilliant, bruv."

Jealous, snide critics are obsessed with Derek because they find its emotional manipulation so insultingly basic, they wonder how anyone ever concluded that it would work. Has Gervais lost it? Is he lost without Stephen Merchant? They also like to discuss what Derek tells us about Gervais's character: is the whole project an attempt to make us forget when Ricky spent ages unrepentantly using the word "mong" as an insult, because he's realised his apology came too late and his excuses didn't make sense? Tweets and interviews are combed for evidence of a superstar ego gone sour.

On the other hand, Derek's hardcore acolytes - it gets 1m viewers, which isn't great, but isn't as bad as many people hoped - think, in a nutshell, that because compassion is important and care homes should be invested in and celebrated, a show that says this is a good show. Whether the message is unbelievably heavy-handed or not doesn't matter.

Both camps will have looked forward to The Making of Derek (Wednesday C4; 4oD), which went out after this week's episode. It had self-serving scenes that were forgivable in a programme aimed at fans: at one point a series of supporting actors took turns to say how pleasant the show was to work on, and how nice Ricky is.

Gervais himself discussed the character of Derek. "He is kind and sweet and sincere," Gervais said. "So he's got to be scruffy, he's got to walk funny, he's got to have bad hair, he can't be that bright. Because then kindness comes along and trumps it all." Wait a sec. Why does Derek have to be like that? Isn't it a cheap Forrest Gump device to get away with simplistic, greetings-card sentiment, and make a "mong" the hero? No time to unpack that fully, as Gervais moved on to the show itself.

David Brent had a gulf between what he thought he was communicating and what he was really telling us, whereas everyone in Derek says exactly what they think. "That is the difference between this and traditional sitcoms - there's no level of irony, no juxtaposition [sic] between what people say and think and how we perceive them, which makes it sweeter and nicer and different."

Here is the essence of Derek. Gervais thinks he's refining the dramatist's art, not abandoning it, by making his characters bluntly state their agenda (and the show's) at all times. Yes, to most viewers it kills an emotional pay-off stone dead if you head straight there with no twists and turns along the way, but it's done like that intentionally.

It's almost as if Derek the programme is like Derek the character: completely guileless and hopeless at the task in hand, but well intentioned. The trouble is, it's a plea for sensitivity by a man with a long and ongoing record of insensitivity. Much of The Making of Derek was taken up with ribbing Karl Pilkington, who is actually the best thing about Derek by far but was now back to playing his character from An Idiot Abroad, ie an object of Gervais's laughing, vaguely bullying ridicule. The jarring sight of Gervais in fits at Pilkington suffering indignities on set, which meant Gervais was dressed as Derek at the time, summed up why Ricky's work will continue to fascinate us, even if it keeps sliding further and further into mush.

Ricky Gervais has courted controversy with his series about a retirement-home worker with learning difficulties. In tonight's episode Broadhill retirement home wants to host a cabaret show and Derek (Gervais) forms an entertainment committee to discuss plans for the evening. Meanwhile, a would-be rapper is on community service at the home. This is followed at 10.35pm by The Making of Derek, in which Gervais and his cast mates Karl Pilkington, Kerry Godliman and David Earl, explain why they made the series. At one point, Gervais becomes quite metaphysical about the whole thing: "The Office touched on existentialism but it touched on the existentialism of being 30. Derek touches on the existentialism of being 90."

What, then of the fictional hero of Derek (Channel 4), who has unspecified learning difficulties? If Ricky Gervais's role in The Office was a masterpiece of the comedy of embarrassment, his title role in Derek is an exercise in sentimental manipulation.

In the third episode last night, Derek, conceived as a perpetually gentle and innocent man, stumbled around the care home where he works, while the rapacious daughter of an old lady who lives there counted the days till her death so she can get hold of her diamond ring. What happened to the ring was the plot line, but Derek kept coming round again for us viewers to feel sorry for him, while a piano soundtrack played sad music.
Gervais stuck to the single note of pathos, wandering about with a moribund fledgling chick in his hand or wailing, "I love working here but I'm always sad," as another old woman died.
Other characters trotted by as one-trick ponies. The care assistant Hannah (Kerry Godliman) is another Dawn from The Office; Kev (David Earl) is addicted to self-deluding sexual boasting. Dougie the handyman (Karl Pilkington with funny hair) is there to give people their comeuppance.

As an exponent of look-at-me humour, Ricky Gervais has come to rival Doris Day or Lucille Ball. His master in sentimentality, though, must be Norman Wisdom, who at least varied his appeal by a bit of energetic slapstick. In Fifties terms Norman was "a bit simple"; Derek, in today's social-work-speak, is "vulnerable" - which actually makes him invulnerable to audience criticism. It would be like kicking the Andrex puppy.

Episode two of Ricky Gervais's odd little series and some characters feel indispensable.

Kerry Godliman who plays care home manager Hannah, is the beating heart of the piece - whether she's organising Derek's 50th birthday party or taking a teenage girl who's doing community service under her wing.

Other characters - notably Kev (David Earl) the sex addict with revolting personal habits who doesn't even live in the care home anyway - is what the fast forward button on your telly remote was made for.

Ricky Gervais is declining to play safe with his latest bittersweet comedy, if comedy is the right term. Comedy drama? I don't know. Perhaps there is a new genre here. Either way Derek (Wednesday, Channel 4) is about a man with learning difficulties who works in an old people's home. And you don't laugh at Derek, you laugh with him.

He may have a slack jaw and bad haircut but he is sympathetic and kind. In some ways he reminds me of the Peter Sellers character in Being There: the idiot savant who stumbles on profound truths, or at least says things which make you wonder a little (such as "Why aren't pigs called hamsters?").

As with The Office and Extras there are poignant moments. And there is pathos, too. The documentary style used in those earlier shows is also deployed here, with characters giving little one-to-one interviews away from the others. Hannah (Kerry Godliman) as the care worker running the home provides a necessary naturalistic balance to the grotesques around her.

Karl Pilkington plays a stroppy version of himself as the caretaker Dougie (in real life Pilkington has a deep suspicion of old people). And a new character has been introduced since the pilot last year: the sex-obsessed, trainwreck Kev (David Earl). Kev is Derek's friend, and as Hannah said: "If it weren't for Derek, Kev would have ended up dead in a skip."

When an accountant from the council came to inspect the home with a view to cutting its budget there were bound to be awkward moments - this was, after all, a comic device that echoed all the way back to the health inspector episode of Fawlty Towers - but I didn't see the Kev appearance coming. Bustled out of the way when the accountant arrived, he had taken his clothes off and gone for a "quick nap" in one of the beds while the elderly resident was still in the room.

In his stand up shows Gervais sometimes teases his audience about their nervousness at his politically incorrect jokes. It's OK, he implies, it is safe to laugh because I'm being postmodern and ironic. This territory is slightly less safe - laughing at the people laughing at Derek - but it is, nevertheless, still safe to laugh.

Tasteless? No. Pointless? Possibly. It's hard to believe, after last year's misfiring pilot, that Derek would have got a series commission without Ricky Gervais's involvement.

Shattered nuts and well-used sledgehammers litter the scene of this strange comedy-drama mock-doc: telling trumps showing every time, and the converted cover their ears while the preacher drones on about tolerance over a cloying piano soundtrack.

For the uninitiated, Derek tells the story of the eponymous innocent savant (Gervais), a slightly slow but tender-hearted care worker in a retirement home, misunderstood by the outside world but loved by those who take the trouble to get to know him. In this week's opener, said retirement home is slated for closure by the council. Derek and chums Dougie (Karl Pilkington) and Kev (David Earl) join home manager Hannah (the excellent Kerry Godliman) in taking some direct action.

No one can doubt Derek's good intentions, but it owes its existence to a man desperate to prove he's not who we think he is. And as for the comedy? Well, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, the final scene is so hilariously sappy that you'd need a heart of stone not to laugh.

On Channel 4's opening night in 1982, Ian McKellen starred in Walter, a drama about a man with learning difficulties who tries to make his way in a cruel world filled with suspicion and derision. In Derek (Channel 4, Wed, 10pm), Ricky Gervais stars as a man with learning difficulties who tries to make his way in a cruel world filled with suspicion and derision. And has Karl Pilkington a best friend.

The contrast couldn't be more stark. Whereas the future knight and Lord of the Rings star simply was Walter, Derek is The Office boy with a greasy haircut, bad knitwear and facial tics. The cynical might view Derek as Gervais making a grovelling apology for 'Mong-gate' when he threw a word around on Twitter in late 2011 which attracted the ire of the Daily Mail (obviously), Susan Boyle and MENCAP. Except the writing of Derek was well under way by then ahead of its pilot episode last spring.

Like the overwhelming majority of modern comics, Gervais' heart is solidly in the right place but the brain has a tendency to force a foot deep into his mouth from time to time. Taking risks and making an inevitable mistake or ten is part of the comedian's job description. Here, though, Gervais has gone almost entirely in the opposite direction. Soundtracked by Einaudi, Derek is overstuffed with manipulative schmaltz, and so sickly-sweet that it requires you to undergo an emergency filling just by switching it on.

Shunning the pratfalls of the pilot, Derek is now a conscience-driven series in which besuited health executives visit the care home where the eponymous 49-year-old works, callously poking around to see where cuts should be made or whose jobs can be exterminated. Oddjob man Dougie (Pilkington) is one obvious candidate for the chop, while the delicate situation is not helped by the inexplicable presence of a sleazy waster Kev (David Earl). He brings a certain David Brentness to proceedings, replacing tugging on his tie with slugging on an endless stream of Special Brew while attempting to force himself onto any female (whether old, obese or other) unfortunate enough to cross his awful path.

Gervais' triumphs here are to show that the previously irritating Pilkington is actually half-a-decent actor and to write a beautiful lead role for Kerry Godliman as the stoic care home leader. Where it falls spectacularly down is through some rather lazy button-pushing (especially with the endless photo-montages of aged residents in their youthful pomp) and in Gervais' massively distracting central performance which hinders rather than helps the series. And will he ever give the mockumentary genre a break?

Part of the 4Funnies season, this latest pilot appears to have a few things that could well make it into a series. For starters it's rather heart-warming, it's amusing, but the main reason Channel 4 will probably turn it a full series is because Ricky Gervais is executive producer (that's pretty much how PhoneShop got commissioned).

Created by stand-up David Earl, the title character, Brian Gittins, is a taxi driver working in a small, slightly oddball town. It's not every place that regularly has someone wearing only their underpants walking around hold a large bunch of balloons. The story follows his working life, in his taxi which keeps having constant faults, whether it is the horn activating whenever he turns the steering wheel, or the alarm going off when he walks about ten feet away from the vehicle.

The main plot concerns Brian's attempts, with help from his student daughter Lucy (Camille Ucan), to try and ask out his controller Cheryl (Ashley McGuire) out on a date. However, the funniest moments are when Brian is making his journeys with his passengers. For example there's the sequence when Brian has to deliver a woman in labour to a hospital, but because of the taxi's faults it keeps turning on the radio, leading to a chorus of "Rabbit" by Chas and Dave.

This pilot seems to have a little bit of everything. A bit of slapstick, a bit of romance, a bit of realism thrown in. Gittins has all the makings of a decent sitcom.

Character comedian David Earl has popped up in Extras, Derek and Cemetery Junction, so it's no surprise that Ricky Gervais acts as executive producer on his 4Funnies pilot. Earl plays Brian Gittins - an oddball, gravel-voiced minicab driver - who means well but is a little creepy. This Gittins is a toned-down version of a character who's been a regular fixture on the live circuit (albeit as a café owner rather than cabbie) for Earl. We follow Gittins's car journeys: awkward flirting with colleague Cheryl over the taxi's radio, dating advice from his daughter and conversations with eccentric passengers. Earl's performance is subtle and generous to his supporting cast. The set-ups can be a little clumsy - 'Right Dad, I'm on Google,' his daughter says to establish one scene, before slowly reading out exactly what she's typing - and the half-hour's more likely to induce giggles rather than belly laughs. But it has its moments, with Seb Cardinal's cameo as an Irish passenger obsessed with the volume of dog mess abroad being a highlight: 'My whole memory of Holland was a country jam-packed with dogshit.'

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