W1A, TV review: Too cosy to be cutting but, moving forward, it's totes worth sticking with
Broadcasting House was preparing for a visit from Prince Charles in this opening episode to the second series of the BBC-based sitcom
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Your support makes all the difference.A visit to Broadcasting House from HRH Prince Charles meant "basically, a huge opportunity to not f**k it up" in this new episode of BBC-based sitcom W1A. As if that wasn't taxing enough for Head of Values Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) and the rest of the Way Ahead Taskforce, there was also the problem of Wimbledon being "too white" and, what is "traditionally the first item on the agenda" at every meeting, a petulant Top Gear presenter whose name had been bleeped to protect audience sensibilities.
This opening episode to the second series should have felt impressively prescient, airing so soon after Clarkson's real-life sacking. The fact that it doesn't is proof of W1A's greatest challenge to productivity moving forward (as it were); a BBC sitcom about the BBC will always be too cosy to be truly cutting.
If the real-life Head of Values is comfortable with this level of self-mockery, then we can only assume that the uncensored reality is even more absurd, and wish we were watching that instead. It's a tonal problem that W1A's predecessor Twenty Twelve avoided by airing in the immediate run-up to the London Olympics. Back then, disastrous humiliation was still a very real possibility.
Writer John Morton has been smart, therefore, to allow his series to evolve into a satire of corporate culture in general, rather than the Beeb in particular. Anyone who's ever worked in a large organisation will recognise the little frustrations and indignities that made up this episode: the corporatese gobbledegook (especially that dialect unique to PR Siobhan Sharpe), the middle-managers with nonsensical job titles and, of course, the interminable meetings in which nothing ever gets decided.
Even those with no office experience could have enjoyed the broad farce that was BBC Head of Security Dave Green facing off against his Clarence House opposite number over malfunctioning bollards. Phone Shop's Andrew Brooke and RSC veteran Samuel West made an unexpectedly good pairing.
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