Danny And The Human Zoo
Monday, 9pm, BBC One
Cradle To Grave
Thursday, 9pm, BBC Two
Across the 2000s, British television drama’s most notable trend was the rise of a new kind of biographical piece, grappling with famous, usually departed faces from our recent TV past, from the Carry On team to Fanny Craddock.
We’re now witnessing the birth of a potentially queasy spin-off genre: the autobio-drama, as, rather than waiting to see if any writers will find them worth the bother once they’re dead, celebrities are taking up the pen themselves, to treat us to re-enactments of their pre-fame childhoods. One of the earliest examples remains one of the best: Kathy Burke’s fantastic miniature Walking And Talking, a loose sitcom recollection of a 1970s girlhood that resembled a mix of Shane Meadows, Ghostworld and a Peanuts strip, with an X-Ray Spex soundtrack.
In its wake, we’ve had The IT Crowd’s Chris O’Dowd’s memories of 1980s Ireland, Moone Boy, and writer and broadcaster Caitlin Moran’s slightly less convincing depiction of her Wolverhampton adolescence, Raised By Wolves. This week, confirming a rash, come two more: Danny And The Human Zoo and Cradle To Grave in which, respectively (if confusingly), Lenny Henry and Danny Baker plunder their 1970s memories.
Baker’s eight-part sitcom fits the template Burke’s set down: loose, believable but shaggily embroidered little stories about his formative years in London’s East End, growing up in a house dominated by his dad, Spud, an explosive Del-Boy-like wheeler-dealer and wind-up merchant, played by Peter Kay.
Filmed in the now-regulation brown-beige-orange 1970s palette, era aficionados will find much to relish: plotlines about the right trousers, and proper music nerd detailing: check out the White Noise poster on young Dan’s bedroom wall. (Baker and Henry’s shows suffer an attack of the I Heart The 70s soundtracks, but Baker’s music choices are more considered.)
It’s played affectionately by a good cast, although it’s hard not to be distracted by the piercing weirdness of Kay’s attempted Cockney accent. Still, the first episode doesn’t quite click. There’s enough to warrant a second look, but I was left wondering whether it might not have worked better just to have Baker sat in a chair telling us his stories himself, in the fitting throwback style of a Dave Allen, Ronnie Corbett or Jackanory.
A one-off, Henry’s Danny And The Human Zoo corresponds to the regular BBC biodrama format. Kascion Franklin is brilliant as his surrogate, Danny Fearon, a quiet black teenager in mid-1970s Dudley, whose playground talent for impersonation earns him a shot at New Faces, the Britain’s Got Talent of its day.
Telling a captivating against-the-odds story, Henry’s script benefits from a superb cast – Cecilia Noble is great as Danny’s mum, and Henry looms as his taciturn dad – and deals insightfully and affectingly with the era’s open racism. But it’s because so much feels true that it wanders into a murky area. Just like Henry did, young Danny ends up working with The Black And White Minstrel Show and experiences a crisis. Unlike Henry, he stages a show-stopping onstage rebellion.
It’s a rousing moment of retrospective fantasy, but it’s false about the era, and confusing for the audience, left trying to work out how much else in this fictionalised biography is fictional. It’s Henry’s story to tell however he feels, and he tells it well. But it’s hard not to ponder how another writer might have handled it – whether they would have felt obliged to stick by hard facts, and produced a harder piece as a result.
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