In this week’s blog post, I’m going to be focusing on something newer than my last post – namely one single series sitcom created in the 2010s. The show in question is a sitcom that heavily spoofs health and safety guidelines through the lens of a man named Gerald Wright, a show imaginatively titled “The Wright Way”. The show in question was very poorly regarded, but is it as bad as people say? Let’s find out.
Origins
The show was first announced in 2011, initially under the name “Slings and Arrows”. Interestingly, it wasn’t the only show set in a health and safety office considered at the time – Channel 4 had piloted one such show called “The Fun Police”, although they had chosen not to go through with it in the end.
The creator of the show is Ben Elton, who is a bit of a mixed bag – on the one hand, he helped write some of the best sitcoms of the 20th century, such as Blackadder and The Young Ones, and whilst not as popular as these two, his solo work, The Thin Blue Line, does have its fans. However, in recent years, his work was being to show signs of deteriorating hard – Blessed, Ben Elton’s Live From Planet Earth, and Get a Grip were all canceled after one series, and whilst We Will Rock You was successful enough, it was panned by critics for having a plot whose sole purpose was to tie together a bunch of Queens songs. As such, Elton was coming under increased scrutiny from those who pondered how much creative talent he truly had. This leads us to this sitcom, which first aired in April 2013 on BBC One.
Premise
It is a fairly simple set-up – in the old tried and true approach of making the show title a play on the name of the main character, our main character is a health and safety inspector called Gerald Wright (David Haig). Gerald is a man who takes his career too seriously – he refers to his department in “The Rogue Speed Bump” as being “the department that introduced the static seesaw, the horizontal slide… babies must wear helmets when breastfeeding near the swings because of us”. However, this is something that he struggles with in his personal life – his wife left him six months ago for a fitness trainer named Kyle (Michael Falzon) after he snapped at her for leaving a bit of butter in the marmite, and he personally disapproves of the relationship between his daughter Susan (Joanne Matthews) and her girlfriend Victoria (Beattie Edmondson), who only really stick around because they don’t have enough money.
Susan tends to be the straight person trying to get Wright to see his flaws, whilst Victoria is basically a Dumb Blonde who speaks in what a man in his 60s today expects a teenager to sound like (her catchphrase – “OMG, that is SO a YouTube moment!” – says it all really).
Meanwhile, Wright has a very unremarkable supporting cast. Malika Maha (Mina Anwar) is a man-eating woman who may or may not have killed her husband, whilst the other two, Clive Beeches (Luke Gell) and Bernard Stanning (Toby Longworth) respectively, don’t really have any character traits beyond being Wright’s underlings.
Characters introduced in later episodes are Mayor Len Wrinkler (Robert Daws), who has a tendency to phasing sentences backward and who is antagonistic towards Wright, and Valerie, Wright’s wife, who features in a minor plot point involving Susan wondering if her new boyfriend is a gold digger or not (spoilers: he isn’t).
With all these characters in mind, the major humor of the series is Gerald Wright is overly pedantic in a way that would make Gordon Brittas proud with a good helping of sexual innuendoes and knob jokes. Plus, dirty acronyms and an arc about a ballroom night that I didn’t really care for.
What did everyone think of it?
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Let’s just say they were very unkind to the show. For some examples, The Guardian describes the show as “a shamelessly broad, deliberately lowest-common-denominator sitcom aimed squarely at the perpetually outraged heart of middle England.” and that “the whole thing is irredeemably dreadful. Worse than The Life of Riley. Worse than My Family. Worse than Big Top, even, and that was a sitcom about what a circus would be like if it had Amanda Holden in it”. Meanwhile, The Telegraph described it as “Formulaic, hackneyed, exhaustingly unfunny… It’s political correctness gone bad”, There were some slightly positive defenses of it, but not by much – The Radio Times suggested that it may become one of those “so bad, it’s good” sitcoms, in the vein of “Heil Honey, I’m Home”.
Heck, the opinion pieces were so critical of it that Digital Spy posted an article on what they felt were the 7 worst gags to come out of Episode 1.
In the end, though, there were signs that the public liked it – whilst it wasn’t overly successful and the viewing figures apparently declined over time, it did commander an audience of around 3.5 million to 4 million, with it’s cancellation mainly coming about because of it’s savaging online on Twitter and other social media platforms.
Nowadays, the show is almost completely forgotten, only really popping up on critics’ lists for the worst sitcoms ever.
My Opinion on the Show
The first thing to note – a popular viewpoint that I got from my look through the reviews is the idea that health and safety as a comedy topic are, if maybe not one of those comedic topics that should be best avoided, one that is mainly utilized by grumpy old men complaining about the youth and not the sharpest form of satire. Whilst I understand this viewpoint, I do think spoofing health and safety, in general, can work if done in an overly cartoonish, absurd way. Indeed, this is one of the aspects of the show that it shines at, with gags such as Wright creating a swing so safety proof that it’s impossible for the child to do anything with it proving to be some of the best in the show.
I did also like Wright to be fair – David Haig does his best with the script and I did feel somewhat sympathetic for him, even if he does little that other comedy giants have done (and much better to boot).
As for the rest of the show, let me put it to you this way: whilst trying to find footage of the series, I came across something on Youtube called “The Wright Way Redux” which aimed to highlight the best bits of Episode 1 and 2.
They’re at most 4 minutes long.
So how is it bad, you may ask. For starters, let’s look at the rest of the cast, which as said earlier in this post are nothing too remarkable. The worst offenders are Victoria (who speaks and talks like a stereotypical dumb teenager) and Len Wrinkler (whose tendency to talk backward gets really grating after a while). And then there is their acting. Oh dear god, the acting. It’s too over-comic, with everyone practically shouting out their lines as if they’re in an opera besides a very noisy rock concert.
And then there are the rest of the jokes, which are either the most cringe-worthy things I have ever seen or probably originate from some long-forgotten sitcoms from the 1970s. There are a lot of jokes which are basically Wright doing something which can be interpreted in the most sexual way for instance. In fact, a lot of the show’s humor seems to be sexual innuendos – see Wright’s use of the word erection to refer to speed bumps in the first episode. They also don’t make much sense – take the joke from “The Rogue Speed Bump” of Wright drying his crotch in a sexually suggestive way – it’s a punchline whose set-up requires him to be dumb enough to figure out how a tap works. Granted, the show begins moving away from this over time, but not until the very end, and without any real fleshing out of the characters.
On a final note, there is the Running Gag of Gerald’s acronyms being quite dirty like “UTTER KRAP” or “TOTAL TOSSPOT”, which are mildly amusing the first time, but not as much after the sixth and seventh time the gag is used. Indeed, it gives off the feeling that the show doesn’t have that many jokes. And it’s true – the show really doesn’t have that many real jokes.
Best Episode?
Probably “The Deadly Receptacle” – it’s nothing really remarkable, but there were some amusing jokes involving oversized coffee cups and Wright getting a prostate exam.
Conclusion
To conclude, it’s not as bad as I think it’s portrayed, and my belief is that some people would definitely enjoy it still, especially those who love their retro sitcoms. However, it isn’t great either and you would be better off watching something different. Heck, The Brittas Empire (a sitcom from the 1990s) outclasses this sitcom in every way and that’s including the gay couple.
Well, at least he redeemed himself with Upstart Crow.
Still, if you’re masochistic enough, you can find it on Amazon here. As a final treat, however, I give you “The Wright Way Redux” (credit to Ken Cheng for the video).