April 2012 Archives

Today marks the start of the BBC’s cross-network Shakespeare Unlocked season, part of the Corporation’s contribution to the 2012 Olympiad.

From Sunday, Radio 3 will devote its weekly Drama on 3 slot to new radio adaptations of three classic Shakespeare plays. The sequence starts with Twelfth Night, one of the Bard’s classic romantic comedies. It has a little bit of everything here: unrequited love triangles, drunken comedic characters, wilful pricking of pompous characters, sequences of jokes based on the double meanings of words and phrases, and of course a cross-dressing character (which, as all actors would have been male in Shakespeare’s age, can only leave us guessing at the physical work needed for a man to play a woman who is passing herself off as a man).

When I first heard that Ricky Gervais’ new comedy drama, Derek, would see the writer play an adult with severe learning disabilities, I was apprehensive. This, after all, is a man who just months ago was using pejorative terms for people with disabilities. On the other hand, the same Guardian writer who criticised him in that piece had previously — and quite rightly — praised him and writing partner Stephen Merchant for improving the representation of disabled characters on screen.

True, Gervais and Merchant’s most recent series, Life’s Too Short, came in for some criticism — but, having read the autobiography of its star and co-creator Warwick Davis (and interviewed him for a 2010 edition of The Stage Podcast), I do think that series does not deserve any criticism towards its portrayal of short people in general. My main beef with that series was it seemed to retread ideas and situations which had already been mined to death in The Office and Extras.

But still, Gervais’s stock in trade is making humour out of situations that skirt close to offensiveness — even in interview situations, such as during this recent conversation with The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, where (in a segment not in that clip) he suggested that Nazis were “stupid” for not finding Anne Frank earlier. So I was apprehensive about Derek.

I needn’t have been. It turned out to be a beautiful, warm story of people who need love, who give love and yet are all too often sidelined in society.