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“You can’t really learn that stuff. You’ve either got it in you or you haven’t” says Jack Dee’s Rick Spleen on writing his first, as yet barely started, novel, in the series 4 premiere of Lead Balloon. One can’t help but feel that the same is true for writing a successful sitcom. What’s so frustrating about this mediocre opener is that Dee undoubtedly does have it in him, if only he wouldn’t stand in his own way with feeble attempts at slapstick and teenage comedy. For a thirty minute episode, the series opener stretches the audience’s patience as much as it stretches its ability to believe Spleen’s Sixth Form daughter is much younger than 30 (the Mother/Daughter age gap is, in real life, just 13 years).
One musical montage too many, and far too much screen time for the pig (a rather contrived plot device) would leave the remote control looking more and more desirable, if it wasn’t for Lead Balloon’s moments, fleeting as they may be, of comedy gold. Dee is at his best squirming under pressure or, even better, in one of his shameless attempts to gain respect alongside his effortlessly preferable and wonderfully underplayed partner Mel (Raquel Cassidy). Rick Spleen’s assertion that a pig is “the kind of thing a couple like us would have” is met with Mel’s usual wry observation- “It’s not. Because if it was, we’d have one”. It’s moments like these, not clips of Spleen wedged under a table practically mooning a journalist whilst trying to coax out a defecating pig, that have kept it popular for three series.
If only Dee would take a leaf out of his on-screen counterpart’s book, incomplete though it may be, and have a little more self-belief, he might not feel the need to pad out glimpses of promise with pig defecation and painfully cliché lines from the ‘teenagers’. In fact, perhaps he should think about firing whoever approved the line: “A novel. Is that, like, a book?”. They may as well have said “Wassup dog”.
Whilst I would have much enjoyed to show wit and wordplay by saying that “this sitcom went down like a lead balloon”, the premiere deserves more credit than this. The premise is there, the talent is most certainly there, it just doesn’t seem fresh any more. As comparisons to The Office are inevitable, perhaps Dee should follow Gervais’s lead and end the sitcom on a relative high, before “Lead Balloon” refers to more than just the character’s career.
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