Bernard and the Genie ( TV Film)

 "If you need anything, you just call and I'll be up there faster than a poker up a pervert."

For those of us who are of a certain age- and yes, it causes me a certain amount of distress to type those words- this excellent TV special is a hilarious memory of that telly Christmas of 1991 after Only Fools and Horses had finished. (Wasn't that the year in Miami?) Yet, in hindsight, this is a fascinating halfway house: a TV film by a recently post-Blackadder Richard Curtis, in a period when Blackadder was a justly worshipped recent memory, that would pave the way for his film career, which would prove to be at once increasingly successful and increasingly successful.

There's some sentiment here too. The bromance between Bernard and Josephus is deeper and more full of feeling than anything which the hilariously cynical Blackadder would have tolerated. Yet the opening scenes, where Bernard Bottle's high-flying life falls apart, are played purely for Blackadder-type laughs. As for Rowan Atkinson's delicious baddie... well, hiss ye, hiss ye. Oh, and nice beard,

Bernard is a sympatheic character- nice, naive, more than a little uncool, and portrayed with real comic charisma by an appallingly young Alan Cumming. And Lenny Henry really steals the show as Josephus, a characyer that could easily have been a stereotype but turns out to be a witty commentator on modern society- modern society being so very, very 1991, with even bloody Leonardo turning up, and I mean the chelonian kind.

But while this is, perhaps, plot-widse, a precursor to the sort of stuff Richard Curtis would go on to do. it's every bit as funny as Blackadder and absolutely the same sort of humour. This is a very, very good thing.

Anyway, Merry Christmas. Unless you're the sort of person who whinges that "we're not allowed to say Merry Christmas these days because of wokery and that", in which case, Happy Holidays.