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Fair(l)y Bored

Posted by Jamie on January 25, 2008 9:15 AM | 

VanOuten.jpg

The BBC certainly knows how to cling to a semi-successful concept.

After their jaunts in adapting the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare in to modern environs, this time around, they have turned their attentions to fairy tales.

Last week there was a brilliant twist on Cinderella, with Maxine Peake as the university cleaner who desperately wanted a plum research assistant job with an arrogant professor.

Last night (Thursday) it was the turn of the Emperor's New Clothes.

Written by Debbie Horsfield, the woman behind the brilliant Making Out, the Emperor became the Empress - Denise Van Outen as an aloof, permafrosty soap actress of limited ability who needed the perfect dress for a swanky awards ceremony in order to trump her co-star in the tabloids.

Squidged in to the mix was the WPC from Life on Mars (who always looks like she's just sat on a box of pins) who worships the soap Van Outen appears in, and finally gets to meet her when her - surprisingly camp - husband ends up as chef in the screen queen's restaurant of choice.

It sounds like it should have been lots of technicolor, heightened reality japes to get you in the mood for Friday morning, but for some reason, it just didn't work.

None of the charcters were especially likeable, Life on Pins was a completely wet hanger-on throughout who did little to gain sympathy, and the expected repreive of Van Outen's character, seeing the light about her vacuous ways, just didn't happen.

The crowd who refuse to see that the King is naked in the original story was very obviously replaced here by the millions of people who worship at the altar of Heat and OK!

It's a good point to make, but it could have been told so much better.

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