Rich Hall’s Working For The American Dream (BBC4) was one of many descriptions of the religious, non-religious life of Uncle Sam, focusing, as the title suggested, on their founding myth.
Forget nutshells, you can sum up the American Dream in a word and that word is “bootstraps”.
Most people lack bootstraps nowadays but everybody gets the idea.
You pull yourself up by them and if you’ve got grit or pluck or something like that, along with a capacity for hard, hard, very hard work, you could be Donald Trump one day – or ideally someone better.
As gravel-voiced comic Rich pointed out last night, the American Dream is called a dream because one day you wake up and it isn’t true.
Plenty of people rise to the top without an ounce of pluck, just a bit of low cunning. Plenty of people, in America as elsewhere, work 16-hour days their whole lives without ever rising from the bottom of the heap.
But maybe that’s not the point.
Nobody ever argues that there might not really have been a bloke called Icarus who tried to fly, the point is what the story does for us.
However, I was never sure Rich Hall got the point throughout 86 minutes of angry, gravel-voiced but admittedly funny ranting.
He reminded me of a teenager who thinks he’s composed a great guitar riff then realises it’s from a Dire Straits song.
Nothing Rich said, from the obvious untruthfulness of the American Dream to the idea’s Calvinist origins, to the way work was stripped of its dignity by industrialism, was at all original.
Quite a bit of it had been said by Karl Marx before it had even happened.
On the plus side, Rich said it in an hour and a bit and was amusing whereas Marx wrote three of the thickest, dullest books in human history.
I once rented a little cupboard of a flat over a kebab shop.
I looked around, heard the snatches of Turkish and Kurdish floating up from the yard at the back, smelt the warm bread and the charcoal and thought, “Yeah!”
A fortnight later, sick of the smell of grilling meat and close to breaking point from all the sleepless nights, I realised I’d liked the idea of the flat, not the flat
I fear it might be the same with Stath Lets Flats (C4), in which its comedian and creator Jamie Demetriou plays an ambitious but hopeless LondonGreek lettings agent, forever stymied by the dad he works for, his sister and the hand of fate.
It’s a great scenario; you could imagine it making a clever book or a decent comedy drama.
Transformed into sitcom though and it’s just one long sketch with its main man doing a screechy, hand-waving performance that’s all on one, long note.
You’d like to be able to sympathise with Stath, the boss’s boy, clearly outshone by his colleagues and forced to drive his fag-smoking sister round putting up wooden signs.
You’d like to be able to applaud Jamie Demetriou for telling a story about a distinct kind of job in a distinct place and family dynamics in a specific community.
But instead of combining that insight and experience with comedy, he’s just plumped for plate-smashing and bouzouki music.
Literally, in some cases.
