British comedian Marc Wootton has a new comedy series called La La Land, set to premiere on 25 January at 11pm. I know, I didn't know anything about this either! The really interesting thing is, it's a six-part Showtime series made for US audiences. I daresay the cable channel are essentially looking for their own Little Britain, which HBO developed a US version of with creators Matt Lucas and David Walliams last year, or at the very least another Sacha Baron Cohen-esqe character-comedian to push...
Of course, the peculiar thing about this is that Marc Wootton's hardly in Lucas, Walliams or Cohen's league here in the UK. A trailer for La La Land hypes him as a "British comedy sensation", but that's stretching the truth to snapping point. Wootton's won some awards (the Rose D'or Golden Rose for Cyderdelic, say) and has a fanbase, but his last two television projects (2005's High Spirits With Shirley Ghostman and 2008 sketch show Marc Wootton Exposed) both failed to impress audiences or critics alike. I find it rather bizarre that he's upped sticks and gone to the USA to try his luck there... but, rather brave and indomitable in spirit, too.
La La Land's a mockumentary where Wootton plays three different "wannabe" characters, each trying to become successful in Hollywood. There's Brendan Allen (a talentless British filmmaker who dreams of becoming "a more right-wing Michael Moore"), Gary Garner (an East London taxi driver using his late pornstar mother's inheritance to help finance his dream of becoming the next Jason Statham), and the aforementioned Shirley Ghostman (an effeminate, charlatan psychic medium determined to become a superstar in America.)
There are some trailers over at Showtime's minisite (which I would have embedded above, but for some reason they don't play to international audiences that way), and first impressions are actually rather good. It looks fun (so glad Wootton's kept his characters British), I've always liked his Ghostman character* (a brilliant pastiche of psychics that prey on simpleminded TV audiences), and it'll be interesting to see if Wootton becomes a star in the US off the back of this, having failed to do so in his native land...
* Does anyone else suspect that Wootton's horrifically bad interview on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (where he appeared in character as Shirley Ghostman), was at least partly responsible for his failure to make it big in the UK? That whole interview was cringemakingly unfunny, and I've always suspected it was a key reason why mass audiences never took to his High Spirits series.
