Writers: Chris Addison & Carl Cooper
Director: Adam TandyCast: Chris Addison (Dr. Alex Beenyman), Geoffrey McGivern (Professor John Mycroft), Jo Enright (Cara McIlvenny), Daniel Tetsell (Brian Lalumaca), Selina Cadell (Dean Mieke Miedema) & Margaret Cabourn-Smith (Secretary)
Lab Rats has failed to really burn into life, despite a few sparks in every episode. Last week's "A Bee" was rather tedious, so it's disappointing to find this week's penultimate episode continue that trend. "A Seven Nighter" finds the quartet of dim-witted scientists working in a secret government bunker for the titular seven nights, as part of a hazily explained science experiment. Of course, placing characters into a confined space is one of the best ways to focus comedy, although the cast of Lab Rats were already restricted in their university workplace, so it all seems a bit pointless...The set of the underground bunker looks to have been transported from 1982, further evidence of writer/star Chris Addison's celebration of the '80s studio-based sitcom that Lab Rats aspires to be. Trouble is, the characters are still incredibly half-baked and the jokes practically shout their arrival. The moment a computer system called "SPARTACUS" is mentioned, I think we can all guess the ensuing gag. Funnily enough, it actually went over the heads of the live studio audience!
The cast try their best, but Alex (Addison) has quickly devolved to become the "feed man" for everyone else's quips – often seen shepherding characters around to their next comedy set-piece. Geoffrey McGivern gives everything he's got (bravely stripping down to a thong in one instance), but there just isn't the strength of material and characterisation to justify his determination. Here, his character's stuck recycling a clichéd joke about chapter titles in his book echoing exactly the current situation. You can just about get away with doing that gag once, maybe twice, but it was returned to continuously...
Another problem was the situation itself, which contained no sense of peril or difficulty. It just seemed to be a boring chore the characters were stuck doing for 7 days. Why not have them "imprisoned" 24/7, instead of going home to sleep in the daytime? And what was the experiment about, anyway? It was all too vague and uninteresting to provide a strong throughline for the comedy.
As such, "A Seven Nighter" became stuck in a rut very quickly and, for every enjoyable gag that appeared almost by accident (a chair being whipped away, but the sitter's bodily stiffness prevents them from falling to the floor) there were jokes that 10-year-olds might think up (the instructions for a complicated machine resembled easy-to-remember nursery rhymes and songs).
Most episodes tend to escalate into a final tableau of surrealism, and "A Seven Nighter" was no different. By the end of the episode, events had imaginatively conspired to have every character resemble a circus act (Mycroft in his "strongman" thong, Cara dangling from the ceiling like an acrobat, Alex in a "clown" costume, Brian fending a "lion" off with a wooden chair, and the Dean's "ringmaster"-style jodhpurs.) While I applaud the ingenuity in arriving at that visual climax (forgiving how strained it was), I was left with one underlying thought: WHY?? Circuses hadn't even been mentioned throughout the whole episode, so it wasn't clever to arrive at that tableau.
Overall, Lab Rats' few moments of dim promise are being extinguished in recent weeks. The characters are still very lazily written, the jokes mostly uninspired, the overall aesthetic and tone incredibly dated, and the glimmers of hope (a well-written line here, a bizarrely amusing visual there) are few and far between.
7 August 2008
BBC2, 9.30 pm
