Too short on jokes: lukewarm reception for Gervais show

RICKY GERVAIS joked this week that in the light of Eddie Murphy pulling out of the Oscars, he would be happy to present the show himself next February, even though he's being tipped to host the Golden Globes again.
 
"I'll do it," he told Access Hollywood. "I'll do that [the Oscars] as well. I'll be in town anyway for the Globes... Two-for-one offer. I can knock off 20 per cent... I'll just stay up there."

The Academy have decided however, to go for the tried and tested comic actor Billy Crystal. Perhaps they got wind of the reaction to Gervais's latest TV show, Life's Too Short, which began on BBC2 last night and has received lukewarm reviews this morning.

Like The Office and Extras, it's a mockumentary written by Gervais and his TV partner Stephen Merchant. They appear in the series as two reluctant celebrities pestered by a self-deluded dwarf actor [Warwick Davis] who decides to make a reality show of his life in a bid to save his marriage and career.

It's a perfectly good starting point for a comedy series says John Crace in The Guardian - the only trouble is the show is not very funny.

"It felt like the show you'd have written yourself if you were trying to write like Gervais," says Crace. "Push the boundaries of taste. Tick. Blur the real and the imagined. Tick. Rope in a few celebs. Tick. Take the money and run. Tick."

Andrew Billen in The Times isn't much kinder. "The choices of Ricky Gervais and his accomplice, Stephen Merchant, increasingly look like a private joke that they have dared each other to inflict upon the world," he writes.

The best bit of episode one, all agreed, was Liam Neeson's appearance as a "po-faced grump", as The Daily Telegraph puts it, who asks Gervais and Merchant to help him get into stand-up comedy.

Here, however, there are concerns about Gervais's continued use of celebrity cameos.

"Increasingly," says Crace in the Guardian, "Gervais's own ego is getting in the way. There used to be a tension when real celebs started showing up in Extras because there was a lingering sense that they didn't quite know what they had let themselves in for and that the joke might be some way on them.

"That ambivalence is now long gone. Gervais' own desperation for fame is now utterly transparent." ·