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Dark Ages | Changing Rooms meets Ground Force

© Hunter Peters

Take one half of the creative team behind the sci-fi comedy favorite Red Dwarf, add a cast of eccentric characters portrayed by actors with such plums on their resumes as Father Ted, Vicar of Dibley and Never Mind the Buzzcocks and sprinkle them into a historical comedy exploiting the pre-millennial tension of England circa 999 and you have a sure fire comic classic cooked up, right? Right? If only…

Rob Grant, that half brain behind Red Dwarf created Dark Ages, now available in Region 1 on DVD, a historical comedy starring rotund comedian and Never the Buzzcocks panelist Phill Jupitus as Gudrun, amiable block about village, medieval style. Gudrun's the stone mason for Sludgebrook, a blighted village if ever there was one, and his life is made no easier by his socially obsessed wife, played by Father Ted's Mrs. Doyle Pauline McLynn and lovely but domestically incompetent daughter Matilida (Sheridan Smith). Hilarity ensues, as it usually does, when local ruler Thane Redwald (Alistair McGowan) falls madly in love with young Matilda, who in turn gets the flaming hots for the family slave. Some of these plotpoints were old during the real Dark Ages and they fair no better here.

Falling somewhere between often hilarious Chelmsford123 and the hall of fame classic Blackadder on the history's timeline Dark Ages can't help but suffer in comparison to these, and other, more successful period yukfests. It's not that Dark Ages is bad, it's simply so deritive of it's more successfull processors that it fails to find an identity of its own. Jupitus, a talented comedian, comes off as Timothy Spall lite and the best part of Alastair McGowans turn as Redwald is his "hilarious" comic lisp. The incessant, and painfully obvious, canned laughter steals the spark from many of the series genuine laughs, Dark Ages just seems to be trying too hard, it seems born not of some creative brainstorm but by the exploitation of a proven comic formula as practiced by the series like Up Pompeii, Chelsford 123, Blackadder and the Python films Life of Brian and Holy Grail. Unfortuatly Rob Grant's no Richard Curtis, Phil Jupitus is no Rowan Atkinson and there's nary a Cleese, Palin, Chapman, Jones or Idle in sight.

Another sign that Dark Ages tries to hard can be found on the back cover of