W1A: Initial Lockdown Meeting review — Yes. No. Brilliant (original) (raw)
★★★★☆
“Every problem is a solution waiting to happen,” Hugh Bonneville says as he reprises his role as the BBC’s head of values, Ian Fletcher. And right now he tells four other characters from the satirical sitcom W1A in a mock-Zoom meeting to determine the corporation’s lockdown strategy. “We are looking at one of the biggest solutions any of us have ever seen.”
It’s full of timely zingers like that, this new five-minute YouTube sketch from _W1A_’s writer and director John Morton. By the time the show reached its third series in 2017 its characters were such a gorgeous collection of tics and buzzwords and opposing attitudes that each episode was an almost perfectly orchestrated mix of the familiar and the surprising.
Could they replicate their meetings-room interplay in the era of dodgy internet connections? Could they ever. Monica Dolan as senior communications officer Tracey announces, “I’m not being negative or anything,” then is negative. Fletcher fears that Anna Rampton, played with nonstick obliviousness by Sarah Parish, is suffering from a frozen screen. No, she tells him, mouth open and loft-style living space stretching out behind her, her screen is fine.
Jason Watkins, as Simon the director of strategic governance, still slathers everything with a mock-chummy veneer of cheer. “I feel better about everything,” he declares once Ian has decided they should label their cabal the “bounceback group”. Only David Westhead, as Neil the head of news, cuts through all the bounceback bogusness, safe in the knowledge that now, as before, nobody pays him much attention.
A real Zoom chat is all awkward pauses and clumsy interruptions. Morton uses the odd cut to keep everyone in perfect sync, to keep the pace pleasurably fast. Most of all, it’s a chance to see Bonneville’s Fletcher unveil the future nobody wants, the new normal that is replacing the old normal, “or as I think we can safely call it now, ‘the past’ ”. Shame not to have Jessica Hynes as the awful brand consultant Siobhan Sharpe still in the gang. Now more than ever, though, you can’t have everything. It is, along with Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe from last week, the sharpest satire on the state of things in the media since the old normal ended.
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