24-hour smarty people PREVIEW PREVIEW THIS WEEK

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jun 10, 2007 | by Damien Love

24 HOURS WITH . . . BOBBY BROWN MONDAY, STV, 10PM

TALK TO ME TONIGHT, 9PM, STV

TALK TO ME WEDNESDAY, 9PM, MORE4

OVER the past five years, Jamie Campbell has sought to position himself as a missing link between Louis Theroux and Chris Morris. From Theroux, Campbell takes deadpan shtick and annoyingly polite persistence, staring at interviewees and letting them ramble until they give themselves away. But, with his big unblinking face, he throws in carefully odd, provocative behaviour, too, gesturing toward places Morris staked when he started his mediasavvy media savaging in the early 1990s.

Campbell made his first ripple with a prank documentary in 2002, when he persuaded a prominent New York literary agent he was Alex Garland, bestselling author of The Beach. More recently, he was the "me" in Martha And Me, a BBC Two film on the Martha Stewart phenomenon, and made BBC Three's rather tawdry Come Home Gary Glitter.

He's clearly smart, and he has nerve. But he lacks Theroux's woolly charm, and neither does he have Morris's brilliant technical facility, bleakly surreal bent and outraged sense of mission. His targets are often too easy, and when they are, he comes across as sneery, a self-satisfied self-publicist.

His best film is Candid Cameron, a short made for Newsnight while David Cameron was campaigning for the Conservative leadership. Seeing Campbell hanging around the increasingly irritated Cameron, like a posh bad smell, asking him what he actually meant, was revealing and entertaining. But Cameron wants to be prime minister. Seeing Campbell go at Martha Stewart fans, on the other hand, was like watching a public schoolboy kick puppies.

His latest undertaking, 24 Hours With . . ., has a post- Celebrity Big Brother set-up that is cleverly stupid and so blindingly obvious it's a miracle no-one thought of it before: an interview show in which interviewer and interviewee spend 24 hours locked together in a single, slightly nightmarish room.

As host, Campbell plays it with a blank, obtusely straight face, but his (understandable) thinking seems to be that anyone who would agree to take part is either a fool, desperate, or both and fair game. He remains disingenuously polite, but subtly (or, in the case of a surprise moment next week with Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen, not so subtly) winds up subjects, hoping for meltdown. If Big Brother is a pressure cooker, this is designed as a microwave.

The programme has already generated some infamy, thanks to a bizarre explosion by this week's guest, Bobby Brown, the 1980s R&B star whose career crashed in a blaze of cocaine and Whitney Houston.

When Campbell makes a lame, passing joke about trying some "sex moves" on his new roommate, Brown flips out in a mean, homophobic, genuinely threatening rant, and a shrewdly-leaked video clip "What the f*** do you mean 'sex moves?' On live TV, I will f*** you up" quickly, inevitably, shot around the internet. But, you know: it's Bobby Brown being burned out, offensive and nutty. That stuff isn't hard to find, and is easily lived without.

What's more, Campbell, while keeping his cool, seems as surprised as anyone by the outburst. I think he actually planned for Brown to blow a gasket later, when he asked him to teach him some dance moves. As with so many movie trailers, Brown's paranoid tirade turns out to be the single briefly interesting moment in an otherwise uncomfortably dull 30 minutes.

Bobby Brown being unpleasant isn't much of a hook, and look at the guests to come: Llewellyn-Bowen (who, remaining resolutely unfazed, comes out of it better than anyone, Campbell included); Steve-O from Jackass; David Gest. Who cares? What's to discover? Are we getting Paul Daniels and Vanessa Feltz, too? Campbell isn't kicking puppies. But shooting fish in a barrel isn't much better.

There are two programmes called Talk To Me this week. First, another new drama about 30-something friends and relationships and sex and that, written by Daniel Brocklehurst, who previously wrote the BBC's grating sexy-postmen drama, Sorted.

Max Beesley plays an edgy talk DJ and ladies' man. But, oh, irony: he secretly loves his quiet buddy's long-term girlfriend, Laura Fraser. Down to the scene where Fraser runs through a rainstorm weeping, it plays like it came free with Cornflakes, although Kellogg's demand better dialogue.

The other Talk To Me is by documentarymaker Mark Craig who, for 22 years, has saved all his answerphone messages. Don't ask me. Splicing snippets of them together, though, he has made a short, trancey film that is slightly awkward but very touching, highly personal, yet deeply resonant. It probably cost about 1000th of the other Talk To Me, but it says far more about relationships.