A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou, review: ribald sketch comedy with flashes of sublime genius
It wouldn’t be quite right to call A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou (Netflix) a difficult second album. The actor and comedian has, after all, produced a full three series of his inspired sitcom Stath Lets Flats, each as funny as the last, with the Bafta awards to prove it. A Whole Lifetime, however, does represent the beginning of Demetriou’s difficult second act. How do you follow up the copper-bottomed, critically adored hit that has made your name?
Taking a leaf out of Monty Python’s book isn’t the worst idea. They followed up their films The Holy Grail and The Life of Brian with The Meaning of Life, a wild, ribald musical sketch comedy special which takes the viewer on a surreal – and often disgusting and undignified – trip from cradle to grave. A Whole Lifetime is a wild, ribald sketch comedy special that… well, you get the idea. And like The Meaning of Life before it, it shows, in flashes, its creator’s sublime genius, offering moments of sheer joy, punctuated by longer, more baffling sections that ultimately disappoint. Like life, really.
The great question for Demetriou was how he might leave the character of Stath Charalambos behind. The idiotic, big-hearted, rubber-faced north London lettings agent is a modern sitcom great, with the wild flailing limbs of Basil Fawlty and an ability to mangle language so majestically it would make the Two Ronnies jealous. Demetriou’s answer is to ease us in gently, opening the show with a Stath variant – a north London teenager skulking in bed with his girlfriend, both monosyllabic, both glued to their phones.
It’s a peach of a sketch – one that leads you up the garden path before smacking you over the head with a kipper. The teens are goaded into having sex by a disparaging Tweet sent by his mother – “I don’t want to be doing retro stuff,” he tuts – and what at first seems like a fitfully amusing if puerile comedy number about willies and bums is soon hijacked by a comedy interjection of the highest order. I was left completely helpless by the words “Turkish soap”.
The “youth” section of the show continues nicely, with a brutally simple sketch in which Demetriou’s irritating office worker gets his bag caught on a door handle, over and over and over again – an opportunity for Demetriou to show off his superb, praying mantis/John Cleese physical clowning – and a neat twist on the “the weird mate from university” who organises a horrendous stag do. A Royal Wedding crowd skit displays Demetriou’s ability to write lip-smackingly silly sentences – “It’s the best day of my life, what a day, and what a fantastic day as well,” says one onlooker, encapsulating the banality of the live vox pop – while a parody of Love Island, called Kiss Villa, works by sheer dint of how aggressively weird it is.
However, when A Whole Lifetime falls flat, it falls flat on its face, particularly in the trio of scenes about old age, which all land on the wrong side of awkward. They aren’t terrible sketches, but you squirm rather than smile. By the end of the hour, hurting your throat guffawing at “Turkish soap” seems like a long time ago.
Demetriou’s second act, then, begins with fitful promise, but the nagging suspicion that the comedian needs to branch out, take on something new, totally surprise us. A Whole Lifetime is an enjoyable snack for Demetriou fans but one that leaves you with the feeling of “yes, and what now?” and the suspicion that, if only for a short moment, another writer needs to take hold of Demetriou’s natural pathos and unforced mania, and force him into a different shape. Stath, let go.
