Hotel Babylon is funny. Well it's not actually, it's really bad, but that's what makes it funny. It was the last in the series last night - I won't bother you with the details but Tamsin Outhwaite made her exit for good. It was an incredibly sentimental episode, in which Max Beesley offered voiceovers about how all the cogs are important to Hotel Babylon, how every worker helps it to run like "a well-oiled machine". The cliches and commonplaces took on the status of great profundities by the end of the programme, so that the final voiceover had Outhwaite claiming, "What is a hotel? A hotel is a place to stay." Can you hear it? Can you hear the words coming from Outhwaite's mouth like some latter-day Plato?
Funny thing, voiceovers. They're able to generate automatic gravitas just by virtue of being voice-overs - they sound as if someone is looking back on something years later with greater wisdom, or perhaps like the universal consciousness part of their brain is at work rather then the petty, day-to-day, individual bit. So when a writer expresses the banal or stupid through this device it becomes hilarious; similar to Tony Blair answering PMQs after having inhaled helium. I wondered also - disturbed by the final scene between Outhwaite and Beesley - if the workers at Hotel Babylon are like family as the voiceovers told us OVER and OVER again, does that make Tamsin's kissing of Max incest? The final V/O should have started during this - "What is incest? Incest is sex with a close relative....."
No comments:
Post a Comment