Regressing way past The Velvets back to the timeless throb of Buddy Holly’s Crickets Richman’s tour of his past took
Regressing way past The Velvets, back to the timeless throb of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, Richman’s tour of his past took in selections from his Goes Country collection, a “Pablo Picasso” which was still a very funny and pointed response to jock culture, “Dancing In The Lesbian Bar”, which inspired an audience frug marathon and a heartfelt “Talk To The Girl”, a tender reminder of his effectiveness as the Greek Chorus in the Farrelly Brothers’ movie Something About Mary.The ability to combine the comic and the serious was to the fore in “You Can’t Talk To The Dude” where, employing a ventriloquist’s style, he delivered a conversation between himself and a girl stuck in a destructive relationship. But “Surrender” was laugh-free and swoon-worthy, a reminder that while he may have Velvet roots, he still nurtures a heart of pure pop gold.. In The Suicidal Dog, a new BBC short film to be released in cinemas this week, the eponymous hound is so distraught about being castrated, he contemplates various methods of ending it all. In a pivotal scene, the camera focuses on a fairground cannon marked: “Captain Gunpowder, the human cannonball.” It then pulls back slowly to reveal the dog sitting beside the cannon, sizing it up as a means of committing suicide.
Moments later, we see him flying through air – and then landing safely on the bouncy castle on the other side of the fairground. The sequence has all the elements of the deft, daft brand of humour that has become its director’s trademark. Paul Merton has made his directorial debut – and it’s very far from a dog. It’s a poignant comedy, full of visual gags that would not have disgraced a classic silent movie.
In The Suicidal Dog, a new BBC short film to be released in cinemas this week, the eponymous hound is so distraught about being castrated, he contemplates various methods of ending it all. In a pivotal scene, the camera focuses on a fairground cannon marked: “Captain Gunpowder, the human cannonball.” It then pulls back slowly to reveal the dog sitting beside the cannon, sizing it up as a means of committing suicide. Moments later, we see him flying through air – and then landing safely on the bouncy castle on the other side of the fairground. The sequence has all the elements of the deft, daft brand of humour that has become its director’s trademark. Paul Merton has made his directorial debut – and it’s very far from a dog. It’s a poignant comedy, full of visual gags that would not have disgraced a classic silent movie.
But what is most remarkable is that the man who has made his name as an improviser par excellence on Have I Got News For You and Whose Line Is It Anyway? has now proved he can cut it in a much more meticulous art-form – film-making.
This is not a matter of just rattling out gags off the top of your head, but of sweating over a script for three years and then pouring for weeks in an edit suite over a single effect. Merton spent days, for instance, refining the reflection of a steam train in the dog’s eye – a shot that only appears on screen for a split second – and worked for weeks on a key moment when the film shifts from black and white to colour as the dog enters the fairground “I wasn’t happy with that for ages”, he sighs. “The quality of the black and white looked like a public information film Lambeth Council might have produced in the 1970s – ‘Keep Your Bins Indoors At Night’.”In person, Merton is much cheerier than the curmudgeon who grumps his way through Have I Got News For You each week That’s an act, of course. “I took a lead from Buster Keaton, who was known as Old Stoneface”, he reveals. “If you say something funny, but look as though you don’t know it’s funny, people laugh a lot more.”Perhaps buoyed by the whooping reception accorded to the premiere of The Suicidal Dog the previous week, Merton is on ebullient form when we meet. He bounces in wearing a fetching fedora – “I feel like I should be advertising port in this.”It soon emerges that the only surprise about The Suicidal Dog is that Merton didn’t make it years ago.
The man is simply steeped in cinema, and so he was particularly delighted to secure the services of Jack Cardiff, the 86-year-old cinematographer whose credits include The African Queen and Black Narcissus, for which he won an Oscar. “It had always been my ambition to make a film, but it was the old working-class thing of nervously holding yourself back It was only me that was stopping me. Then I suddenly thought, ‘hang on, I’ve done The South Bank Show. I’m allowed to make a film now, aren’t I?’” The BBC agreed and stumped up the cash.His conversation is peppered with allusions to film-makers.