Wednesday 01/01/97, BBC2
reviewed by Steve Williams
http://www.offthetelly.co.uk

It's 1996, and Steve Coogan's at the peak of his career; Paul Calf and Alan Partridge have both become well-loved comedy characters, and his series Coogan's Run has just added some more popular creations to his portfolio. All we needed now was the Gareth Cheeseman sitcom we'd been promised (whatever did happen to this?) and the new Alan Partridge series and we'd have been happy. But what's that, Steve? You've invented a new character? It's a spoof Portuguese singer? And he's going to release records? Oh dear ...

Early indications suggested that Tony Ferrino was going to be Coogan's least successful venture since that corporate video he did for Ruffles in 1990. Surely the comedy song was always excruciatingly unfunny, and what points was he intending to make anyway? Whereas Partridge had been a truly fantastic parody of a genre of television - so much so that "Partridge-esque" is now a benchmark for TV criticism - and Calf was a recognisable figure, there didn't seem to be much point in spoofing Julio Iglesias and the like; this was the sort of thing Kenny Everett had been doing about 15 years before.

Then we had the pre-show publicity, as Coogan went on practically every chat show on television, but - oh no! - in character. Of course, the interview in character is almost always guaranteed to make even the funniest comedy characters seem unfunny and awkward, but as this was the first sight we'd had of Ferrino, it certainly didn't help matters. Then for Christmas we had the threatened record releases - an album, which shifted virtually nothing, and a single, with on one side, a fairly straight cover version of Tom Jones' Help Yourself, and on the other, a comedy song Bigamy at Christmas. This song was in fact very witty, but the general public weren't convinced and the single stalled at number 42.

After all this, we finally got to the actual programme, transmitted on the first day of 1997, some two months after Ferrino had first been "unveiled". The knives were certainly out, but from the opening moments - stock footage of celebrities "arriving" to attend the recording accompanied by a smarmy voice-over ("And no party would be complete without former political correspondent of the BBC, John Cole!") - viewers' worries seemed to have been placated, and by the time we'd seen the title sequence of Ferrino and a "bevy of beauties" travelling through London on a double-decker bus - with "The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon" on one side, and "Always Ultra" on the other - it was obvious that despite a shaky start, we were in for a fine hour of comedy.

The hour itself was a spoof of the Audience With ... type of programme which, given ITV's current penchant for these sorts of shows - such as the recent Audience With Ricky Martin - actually means that it seems more relevant today than it did then. The programme takes a familiar form; songs, some special guests, little sketches and some forced chat. It certainly looks unlike any other comedy show, with obvious edits and fades-to-black used on a number of occasions, to generate the feeling of a bought-in, overproduced programme made by someone more more equipment leasing contracts then talent. The only problem with this set-up, though, is the same as Knowing Me, Knowing You - there's a live audience in the studio, who Ferrino addresses, but this audience also laughs at the jokes, which cuts through the parody. There are lots of obvious one-liners in the programme, so an audience is necessary to stop it seeming empty, but it does rather spoil the illusion.

A further problem could, of course, have been the songs, but thankfully this doesn't arise. Written by Coogan and Henry Normal (who wrote the whole programme), along with Steve Brown and Coogan's brother (and former member of The Mock Turtles) Martin, the songs work because they are actually proper songs, with full arrangements. They're also full of funny lyrics; a favourite is the song where he describes how he doesn't just go for perfect women - "I've got Lisping Lolita from Lisbon/I've got Stammering Mandy from Amsterdam/But my Stuttering Sadie from Stuttgart/Sh-sh-sh-she makes me feel like a man". Thankfully Coogan can hold a tune as well - there was a danger that the programme would fall down if he was blatantly a crap singer, but he tries his best, and his Bee Gee-style squealing during Short Term Affair ("Woo-hoo-yeeeee-eeeeah!") is a real highlight.

As well as avoiding these perils, the script also avoids too many "funny foreigner" jokes, getting laughs from broken English. The few they do include are worth it, like when Tony has both his assistant, "the lovely" Maria, and Kim Wilde on stage, and claims "I cannot choose between you, I must toss. Who wants head?" while producing a coin. Wilde is one of three special guests who join Tony to sing and chat, and they help to add to the authenticity of the programme. Wilde is treated to a look back at Ferrino's life, using nicely-produced "archive" footage to show his musical debut as part of a group with his brother, Peron and Herod ("Herod is dead, Peron is missing, presumed dead." "But he could still be alive?" "No."), and his solo breakthrough as winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. The latter is a great parody, and perhaps it's no coincidence that the director Geoff Posner went on to actually direct the following year's contest. Then Ferrino and Wilde perform Short Term Affair. This song was also performed on 1997's Comic Relief, with Ferrino accompanied by Bjork, but Wilde works rather better in the context of the programme, as she's the sort of slightly low-rent celebrity that you'd expect to see on this sort of thing.

Better still is the guest appearance from "Britain's number one funny guy" Gary Wilmot, who joins Tony "fishing for girls". Wilmot is genuinely brilliant throughout, excellently parodying this sort of poorly-scripted "funny" routine, and pulling a range of great comedy expressions. The whole segment works really well, Wilmot clearly relishing the chance to send up the sort of thing he used to do a decade ago, and proving himself a fine comic actor. It's much more successful than the appearance from "Mr Simply Red" (the joke being that Ferrino thinks his name actually is Mr Simply Red) Mick Hucknall. The two perform Help Yourself, and despite their great showbiz walk onto the stage, this section is all a bit aimless, and the basic joke - that Hucknall starts to take over and sing the whole song, with Ferrino reduced to butting in with "wooh"s and "yeah"s - is fairly obvious.

Still, the programme gets back on track with Tony performing the bombastic ballad What Is Life?, accompanied by sweeping strings, tinkling piano and a troupe of dancers. This is a suitably grand ending to the show, and you really do feel that you've watched a programme. Coogan said that one of the things they tried to do in this special was to create a proper, well-produced piece of television, where every shot is choreographed and a lot of time is spent getting everything right, and this certainly seems to be the case. It's clearly a very cleverly-made, loving parody.

Alas, this couldn't really be said of the follow-up programme, transmitted two days later. This was promoted as an "exclusive interview" with Ferrino, and parodied the sort of bland, unchallenging PR material that is often spawned by the music industry, but aside from a great title - Introducing Tony Ferrino, Who and Why? A Quest - and a fine performance from Peter Baynham as the interviewer, it was all fairly joyless. The parody in this case seemed to get in the way of the comedy, as they tried just a little bit too hard to get everything "just right", and maybe the nasty elements of the character - Ferrino was obviously hideously unpleasant in "real life" - that were hinted at in the first programme were too overt in this, making it a chore to watch.

Tony Ferrino was considered a flop by Coogan's standards, and despite further appearances with an equally high level of humour, the character never really became an Alan Partridge, a Paul Calf, or even a Duncan Thickett. The two special programmes have still not been repeated on terrestrial television, but I feel that the first programme is extremely amusing, and in my opinion is much funnier than some of Coogan's other, more critically-acclaimed projects (the Patrick Marber-scripted episodes of Coogan's Run, for example). It was screened on the same night as Eddie Izzard's Cows, as well, and managed to make that programme look even more self-indulgent and unfunny than it would have done otherwise.

And I mean, how can you not like a character whose routine included a song called Valley of our Souls, which the writers said was "just a way of being able to say 'arseholes' over and over again"? Now that's class.