Mock The Weak

Whether you love it or hate it, The Office has to be respected for managing to get the mockumentary style pitch perfect. One thing BBC2’s new comedy The Cup ably proved, long before the first episode was over, was that if you don’t get it right the whole enterprise can fall spectacularly flat on its arse.

If it wasn’t for Mock the Week and the repeats of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the BBC’s ascertain that Thursday night was comedy night, or however it is they try and big this scheduled block up is, could be given a slapping by the Trades Description Act. Because the panel shows tend to be consistently funny, it puts the onus on whatever new sitcom is lumped in between, and few seem to rise to the challenge.

So to be fair, I gave The Cup a second chance on iPlayer, which meant that I allowed another half hour of my life to get pissed down the drain. There were, I suppose, one or two brief chuckles, although the Wipers gag seemed especially forced. But after all was said and done, the one nagging question that remained was, what was the point of putting it in a mockumentary format?

The Office gave its audience a familiar sitcom setting then used the format to make perfectly nuanced observations of the petty bickering and management idiocy that infuses every workplace. It also allowed the characters to show a complete lack of self-awareness during the moments they attempted to analyse their character traits.


Because its safe to assume that The Cup is aiming to be a broader comedy, where the adults act like children and the kids are wise beyond their years, the sitcom comes closer in format to Operation Good Guys, a comedy from the late 1990s in which cameras followed a bumbling police unit that cranked up the laughs but was just as hit or miss because, if memory serves, all three series were improvised.

But if it is aiming for broader strokes, especially with scenes like the football dad haranguing the team coach so much that the old guy keels over on the touchline with a stroke, why be a mockumentary? By the end of the first episode of The Cup the format seemed to be thoroughly ill-advised because it constrained the possibilities for comedy rather than giving it free range.

Without it much could have been made of the tensions between characters to whom the under-11s football team was obviously nothing but an intrusion into their happy existence. Instead they seemed to accept their lot in life, whether it was the hen-pecked undertaker underwriting the team, football dad’s wife lumped with all the laundry and adverse to the early Saturday morning starts, or the son who preferred cooking to kicking the ball about.

It makes you wonder whether it might not have been better filming it documentary style with all the vim and vigour of Armando Iannucci’s mercilessly barbed The Thick Of It, in which the characters paid the crew no heed. But then I suppose it all became clear when the end credits rolled. After the writing credit for Absolutely’s Moray Hunter and Jack Docherty came the announcement: Based on an original series by Marty Putz, Wendy Hopkins and Howard Busgang.

That series was The Tournament, a Canadian sitcom that centred around the Farqueson's Funeral Home Warriors hockey team in the small town of Briarside, which ran for a couple of seasons. Whether it was a success or why it deserves a UK makeover remains unclear. At a time when British drama isn’t that sparky I would have thought buying up the rights to Intelligence might have been a better bet.