This year’s BBC4 series The Life of Rock with Brian Pern was an unexpected delight; a would-be retrospective of an enigmatic musical figure that managed to muscle past the inevitable Spinal Tap comparisons thanks to the sheer force of its own relentless silliness.
Reeves and Mortimer were there, free-associating as Mulligan and O’Hare. Nigel Havers was there, playing a randy keyboardist. Even Noel Edmonds was there, proving for the first time in his entire life that he’s capable of self-awareness.
And then there was Brian Pern himself, played by Simon Day – an inscrutable artist with an unplaceable accent and an alarming penchant for plasticine. As well as being beautifully observed and screamingly funny, the series hinted that there might be almost Partridge-esque levels of depth to Pern, drawing on his days with prog band Thotch, his unexpected solo success and beyond.
Fortunately, Tuesday’s new series of Brian Pern – now promoted to BBC2 – seemed to back this theory up. It took the Pern skeleton and exploded it in all directions, making it bigger and sharper and richer and sillier. As well as throwing a perfectly aimed jab at jukebox musicals, the episode managed to be an uproarious character study of an estranged band and contained the best Mike Batt joke ever written. We’re a week into December, so all the end-of-year-lists have already been written, and that’s a shame. If 2014 throws up a British programme funnier than this new series of Brian Pern, I’ll be staggered.
Admittedly, it’s easy for Brian Pern to have such a rich history, because most of it is directly cribbed from the life of Peter Gabriel. He dresses as a plant in one scene, gurns at plasticine or invites bone-flute virtuosos to play in the studio he built in another. He plans impossible projects, performs protest songs about succulent Chinese meals and is despised by the former members of his band. Just about the only aspect of Gabriel’s life that Pern doesn’t mock is his tendency to make good-natured cameos on Brian Pern programmes, which is probably for the best.
Outside of Day, who hasn’t been this good in at least a decade, Brian Pern has an incredible cast. The opening episode starred Paul Whitehouse and Havers as the former members of Thotch, Martin Freeman and Jack Whitehall as fictional stage versions of Thotch, Kathy Burke as herself and – best of all – Michael Kitchen as Pern’s manager. Kitchen is an absolute revelation here; delivering endless, breathtakingly profane run-on insults to everyone in sight that miraculously manage to continue long after the conversation has ended.
If you saw how depressing The Fast Show revival was this year – and it really was especially depressing, so much so that turning the TV off halfway through felt like pulling the plug out of a life support machine – you might be forgiven for thinking that the BBC4 Pern series was a fluke. It absolutely wasn’t. Although there will hopefully be more along soon, only three episodes of Brian Pern are being broadcast in this run. This means we should soak up every last drop he has to offer while we can. Characters don’t get any more succulent than this.
