Written by Karl Minns, who has previously worked on comedies such as Touch Me, I’m Karen Taylor, and Trexx and Flipside, it stars Anna Nightingale, Pippa Duffy and Ayesha Antoine as three young women preparing to enter TV talent show Fame Search.
The show avoids the theatre-set-and-audience mould of so many sitcoms, and instead is based around a series of intercut documentary-style monologues from the three girls, giving their different takes on the events leading up to their disastrous appearance on the reality TV show. There’s no canned laughter, no hilarious upsets involving revolving doors, and no catchphrases. Whether the show succeeds because of, or in spite of, these factors is up for debate. But it undoubtedly does. Mouth to Mouth is witty, stylish and at times genuinely touching.
Talking Heads
A comedy in which no two characters ever actually speak to each other must have been a fairly tough sell, and some viewers might find the continual narration off-putting. But it’s so refreshing to find a comedy with a story to tell, and a confident sense of how that story should be told. Minns puts his chosen format to good use, playing off characters against each other and tossing his viewers the occasional red herring which just wouldn’t have been feasible if the whole show was taking place on a sofa set in front a of warmed-up studio audience.
Much of the show’s appeal lies in the balance of its performances: Pippa Duffy is excellent as the Chloe, the would-be diva who’s only too aware of her middle-class background (“I joked that Cats’ Eyes was, quite literally, a middle-of-the-road name...she didn’t get it.”) Anna Nightingle plays the air-headed fame-hungry Meeshell with nice judgement - it would be easy to overbalance this character into crude caricature, and Nightingale makes her amusingly absurd whilst keeping suggestions of a real person in front of us.
Real Promise
It would be a real shame if a full series wasn’t commissioned off the back of this pilot. BBC Three has faced some pretty serious criticism in the past – no less a figure than John Humphries declared a while ago that it should be axed since only “six men and a dog” watch it. However, the recent success of Gavin and Stacey demonstrates that if the BBC provides a place where intelligent, writer-driven comedy can develop, some real winners can result. It might even save us from eternal re-runs of Only Fools and Horses, and sketch shows with the attention span of a gnat in need of Ritalin. All in all, Mouth to Mouth is a heartening example of what British TV comedy can do best – if we’re lucky, it might be a glimpse of the future.
