I must lay my cards on the table and say that I have found Lynda La Plante the most overrated scriptwriter of the late 20th century . She's at best very average who was lucky enough to have often worked with Verity Lambert who is probably the greatest TV producer of the late 20th century . With a dynamic and ground breaking producer like Lambert at the helm it's almost impossible for something like this to fail , but the credit should be given to the producer or director , not the scriptwriter
COMICS opens with a young boy called Johnny Lazar seeing the fate of his mother to the strains of Stay With Me Baby . This sequence is grand , operatic and I promise a shiver will go down your spine when watching it . However as the next scene jumps forward twenty years to Johnny as an adult it becomes very clear that the opening sequence with its superb direction and great production values is very disposable and unnecessary
Johnny Lazar is now a stand up comedian in America but because of his attitude finds himself unemployable and on the run from loan sharks so he buys a one way ticket to London where he is witness to a murder . Again there's little niggling things about this script that jump out at you . Lazar can't find work in America but gets booked on Michael Aspel's chatshow . When did totally unknown stand up comics appear on Aspel's show I wonder ? Especially foul mouthed crazy guys like Lazar ? There's also a ridiculous resolution to the ending that involves a chase involving Lazar and the bad guy which had me screaming " Why didn't you jump out of the car you idiot ? " . The answer is simple of course - Because Lynda La Plante couldn't be bothered coming up a decent ending
It's said that if a movie's good it's because of the director and if a movie's bad it's because of the screenwriter . I wouldn't say COMICS is bad since it has a legendary producer ( Would DOCTOR WHO have been a success without Lambert ? , a high budget and a good director but I doubt it wouldn't have been made if it was scripted by an unknown writer
