CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: It takes a rare superpower to make superheroes super dull…
Mark Kermode’s Secrets Of Cinema: Superheroes (BBC4)
Meet The Richardsons (Dave)
Rating: 
There’s a great TV programme to be made about the obsession of the under-40s with super-hero movies in an era of atheism and empty churches.
Mark Kermode’s Secrets Of Cinema: Superheroes (BBC4) was not that programme.
For thousands of years, human beings have tried to explain our spiritual longings, our sense of the divine, with stories of gods. They are embedded in our religions and our language.
Now those stories are reinvented on the screen — good vs evil, the struggle against temptation.
Mark Kermode at the launch of his book in 2018, his new show on BBC4 is called Mark Kermode’s Secrets Of Cinema: Superheroes an in depth look at the superhero movie genre
Just as rock’n’roll is rooted in gospel and hymns, the art of cinema springs from our need to believe in God.
If you don’t believe me, consider that in the 2001 census, almost 400,000 people in England and Wales recorded their religion as Jedi, declaring their faith in the Force of the Star Wars films.
There are more Jedis than Jews or Sikhs in Britain.
Kermode didn’t give this a moment’s thought. Even though some of the genre’s central characters are plucked from religious myth, such as Thor and his brother Loki in The Avengers series, the connection didn’t occur to him.
All he could see were the tropes and techniques of movies.
For him, the history of everything begins with the birth of film, so he traced superheroes back no further than silent heroes such as Douglas Fairbanks as Zorro.
It’s an interesting detail that 1928’s The Man Who Laughs, starring Conrad Veidt, was the direct inspiration for Batman’s nemesis, the Joker. But if Kermode can’t see bigger parallels between the Joker and Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, he’s missing the point.
His knowledge of movies is compendious but, as we’ve seen before in this series, he tries to cram in so many cross-references that whatever point he’s trying to make is lost under the clutter.
In the end, the analysis was reduced to the level of a lecture for film studies undergraduates.
It takes some doing to serve up an hour of blockbuster clips with all the entertainment squeezed out of them.
Comedian Jon Richardson and his wife Lucy in their show ‘Meet the Richardsons’
Comedian Jon Richardson and his wife Lucy are doing their darndest to squeeze entertainment out of domestic life with their three-year-old daughter in the Yorkshire market town of Hebden Bridge.
Their mock reality-show Meet The Richardsons (Dave) started last month, pretending to be a fly-on-the-lounge-wall show where Jon and Lucy sat on their sofa and bickered about their marriage.
If they’d stuck with that concept, it might have worked better: the couple are obviously close but one can’t say a word without rubbing the other up the wrong way.
Lucy spent several minutes criticising her husband for the way he says ‘hello’.
And millions of wives will sympathise with her frustration that Jon can go into rhapsodies about a flash of football skill in a Sky Sports game, but fails to notice when she’s spent an hour doing her face and make-up before a night out: ‘You just say: “Come on then, let’s go.” ’
But the show falls apart when it descends to scripted hijinks. Jon got stuck on the stairs moving a sofa and had to phone for help . . . even though the camera crew was in the house. Are they professionally bound never to intervene, like wildlife photographers?
Jason Donovan made a cameo appearance as a guest at a celebrity Halloween party, sending himself up rotten when Lucy mistook him for Bros.
He was great in Dial M For Middlesbrough last year, too. Top chap.