Come Fly With Me

Ten blogposts later, I find myself drawn to Walliams and Lucas again.  This wasn’t planned.  I’m literally episodes away from finishing five series of Netflix’s first big boxset.  Celebrity Big Brother is back on and has, again, given drama more incredible than any scriptwriter could contrive.  We’ve even got more Great British Bake Off on the box.  But suddenly, I saw Come Fly With Me on the Netflix menu and, before I knew it, I had clicked play, devoured a whole episode, enjoyed it more than anything else in recent times, let the next one autoplay, and then, over the next few nights, raced through all six instalments.  Do I have any regrets?  No.  This is exactly how I pictured adult life: feeling guilty about not doing something more interesting while watching old sketch shows I have already seen before.

Come Fly With Me was brought out with huge fuss onto BBC1’s primetime schedule in 2010.  Little Britain had, as I have previously blogged (keep up!), become a cultural phenomenon.  Today, we might know David Walliams as Roald Dahl 2.0, dominating the top ten children’s books on Amazon, allowing me to delight my niece by reading her stories about grandmas that fart and grandads that fart as well (because toilet humour sells), and we might see Matt Lucas…  well, I know he was in Bridesmaids and that was funny.  In fact, the last time I saw him was in a café in central London.  He was wearing quite an interesting hat.  Seated nearby with friends I hadn’t seen for ages, I made sure to be as loud and funny as possible, expecting him to rush over and offer me my own broadcast platform for my incredible comedy.  He actually just rushed past, even though we had left our bags in the way as obstacles for him in a ridiculous attempt to increase our chances of attracting his attention.  Sorry Matt.  But yes, how do you follow up Little Britain?  Well, you basically can’t.

And you especially can’t if, in 2010, you choose to parody a show that was last culturally significant in 2005 (the BBC documentary, Airport).  Sure, airports are lame no matter what the year, but coming along with a mockumentary treatment five years later was never going to get the appreciation it deserved.  But now, with a bit of time and distance, we can look at things differently (even though we will still be outraged by some of the hair and make-up choices used to create the pair’s non-white characters).  The fact is: airports are ridiculous.  You just go there to wait to go somewhere else.  It’s either a work trip you don’t want to be on or a holiday where you can’t wait to get away.  It’s one queue after the other while you haemorrhage cash in a way you never would in real life.  This is because you have entered vacation mode, where Monopoly money flows freely and treats must be procured because you deserve immediate gratification (or you can charge it to expenses).  I’m particularly fond of how panicked my parents’ generation get about going through security, convinced a half-used packet of paracetamol will land them on Indonesia’s death row.  I always like to see how much liquid I sneak into my hand luggage, just to check the scanners.

In conclusion, all this nonsense makes for a great documentary.  There is no worse race in the world than British people abroad, so Airport’s mix of put-upon staff and dreadful, dreadful customers was a winning formula.  All Walliams and Lucas needed to do was make a few tweaks to bring Come Fly With Me to life.  People probably just thought it was a real documentary, what with characters like Jeremy Spake making himself a household name in the original.  I can still hear him urging me to go down to my local Euronics centre, yet I, to this day, have no idea what a local Euronics centre is.  His wide, goateed face would dash about the terminals solving problems and whipping out an impressive command of the Russian language to get stuff done.

Cue Moses Deacon, a Walliams character who surely owes Spake for his genesis.  Instead of being effective, however, he is useless and selfish, if you’ll pardon the pun (because one of his main jokes is asking viewers to pardon puns he hasn’t actually made).  Prancing down a staircase, collecting money for his charity WishWings (of which his gaycations are the main beneficiary) or getting taken for a ride by an elderly lady falsely claiming she has never flown before (Matt Lucas in epic prosthetics), this character deftly brings us into the world of Come Fly With Me’s busy airport.  And that world is nothing if not richly imagined.  And by richly imagined, I mean they have literally come up with three fake airlines that might remind you of real ones:

FlyLo

Garish colours.  Low-cost fares.  Appalling service.  Run by a foreign chap.  Could it be any more easyJet?  There’s Taaj in the ground crew who qualifies each sentence by asking “isn’t it?” and uses the in-terminal transport to try and pick up bitches.  A highlight for me is Liverpudlian Keeley on check in (“Hello, checchh in; Keeley speacchhing”), whose passive aggressive rivalry with Melody never stops either of them taking delight in telling passengers they are too fat to fly or explaining that FlyLo’s Barcelona route in fact lands in Barcelona Shannon, requiring ferry and coach transfers from Ireland to reach Spain, but all in good time for your evening meal, even if that meal is in a few days’ time.  The planes even have pay-as-you-go life jackets.

Our Lady Air

Ryanair doesn’t come away unscathed either.  We meet Fearghal, fulfilling all the air steward stereotypes, not to mention his nine gay brothers (although Finbar is bi).  Willing to give an allergic man peanuts, simply so he can increase his chances of winning Steward of the Year by saving his life, he also has a staunch approach to faiths that aren’t Catholic.

Great British Air

One of the main jokes here is Penny, the snobby first class stewardess who thinks that people in economy are scum.  Having frequently travelled economy, I can confirm this.  Having also travelled in business (not quite first class, and only because I was on standby thanks to a friend) I can also confirm that the staff are snobby.  There’s also the well-observed married couple, Simon and Jackie Trent, who happily let the underlying hatred within their marriage spill out over the in-flight comms system.

Away from the airlines, Peter and Judith Surname are among the best passengers, frequently experiencing holidays from hell which they recount with vivid imagery.  Unfortunate to suffer the disasters that befall them, it’s their plucky British approach to making the best of things that strikes a chord, even if this does lead Judith to BBQ Peter’s leg for sustenance after they survive a plane crash in the Andes.  Even though they are rescued within half an hour.

So, yeah, it will feel dated.  You’ll cringe at characters like Precious Little and the Japanese fans of Martin Clunes.  But for a mindless brain massage after a full day’s rat racing, you can’t beat the minimal attention requirements of a sketch show, particularly one that has layers and layers of familiarity.  You’ll recognise your own awful holiday behaviour.  And, worst of all, you’ll want to book yourself a holiday and perpetuate the cycle of airports being rubbish, and people making shows about them, and then people writing blogposts about them.