out of itself...
W1A is a British comedy television series that was first broadcast on BBC Two on 19 March 2014.
The four-part series is the follow-up to Twenty Twelve, a BAFTA-winning comedy series by the BBC. Its name comes from the postcode prefix of the BBC's headquarters, Broadcasting House (W1A 1AA). Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes reprise their Twenty Twelve roles alongside a new cast, and David Tennant's role as narrator also continues from the earlier series.
Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), formerly the Head of the Olympic Deliverance Commission, has taken up the position of Head of Values at the BBC. His tasks include the licence fee renegotiation and charter renewal in 2016 and 2017 respectively.
Just caught the first episode on BBC Iplayer, very funny.
The two areas in which writers are always told never to set comedies are firstly, the past, and secondly, television. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but apparently ever since Blackadder there’s been no point writing a historical sitcom (also it’s expensive) and, well, you can only set your show in the world of TV if you’re Ricky Gervais (dramas are different, which is why BBC’s recent The Hour was set in both television and the past).
The forthcoming BBC comedy W1A seems to have bypassed the no-television rule, possibly because it ‘s also a spin-off to the satirical London Olympic series Twenty Twelve. Featuring that show’s Hugh Bonneville’s puddingy Ian Fletcher and Jessica Hynes’s somewhat generic PR nightmare Siobhan Sharpe, W1A achieves the rare feat of putting its main characters in a different setting with similar results (a ploy which hasn’t been successfully tried since ITV’s Don’t Drink The Water transplanted Blakey from On The Buses to 1970s Spain), by moving its funniest cast members from a fictional Olympics management team to the very real BBC of 2014. The central logic of this idea seems to be that all modern organisations are essentially the same now, riddled with spin, middle management, jargon and incompetence.
Twenty Twelve’s main problem as a show last time round was it found itself, against the odds, mocking something which turned out to be a massive popular success, the first committee effort to become a National Treasure since the King James Bible. This time round, the show’s creators have found a more enduring target for parody: the BBC, once a paragon of statist values, is now – or so we are told - run like a large PR company, infested with accountants and managers, and apparently based, like the declining Roman Empire, in two different cities, with Manchester the new Byzantium.
W1A’s targets, then, are set up in a row. And it hits them with reasonable frequency. The meeting rooms named after comedians, which cause important decisions to be made inside Tommy Cooper. The idiot public school interns, an apparent feature of every modern office. The jargon, the management speak, the absurd, half-baked decisions. Everything is here, all filmed, excitingly, in the BBC’s own premises at shiny new New Broadcasting House, which is attached, perhaps tactlessly, to the old Broadcasting House like an uppity conjoined twin.
Does it work? Often. The scene in the second episode where Ian Fletcher has to take the train to Manchester to appear on Woman’s Hour sparks off a brilliant debate about just why someone has to leave the BBC in London to go to Manchester to appear on the radio. It doesn’t quite address the whole strange duality of the divided BBC, which sold off one of the greatest chunks of broadcasting usefulness in the world for flats and instead built a windswept set of studios in Salford, to which superstars and interviewees have to be specially ferried. But it does convey a world in which bizarre things are allowed to happen. Like the time I went into a room at TV Centre to use one of their phones and a middle middle manager leapt out at me and began bellowing that I wasn’t allowed to use the phones. Before I could even pretend to apologise, he fixed me with a manic stare and shouted: “What SECTOR are you from?”
W1A captures the balancing act - familiar to all programme makers - of trying to get top names to host shows, only to drop them when an even topper name comes along. I have no evidence that this happens, but comedically it works, as Fletcher turns even more puddingy as cuddly household names are thrown at him, live on air, in Salford. And as a whole it conveys all too well the strange corelessness of any modern company, where nothing seems to be run by anyone in particular, and everyone involved isn’t so much going forward as caught in a vague sludgy drift.
