Super talents Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson combine for the amusing elongated sketch "The Crystal Cube", a BBC comedy pilot that proved to be a one-off.
Of course Monty Python and many popular Britcom teams such as Peter Cook & Dudley Moore established this strain of humor, though writers Fry & Laurie stress a more intellectual approach than perhaps is necessary. Wordplay is paramount in terms of jokes and punchlines, while underneath it all is observant social commentary.
With Emma hosting, letter perfect in her satire of a snobbish uppercrust commentator, the Popular Science genre TV show deals with genetic engineering. Several filmed skits, giving the cast a chance to excel in multiple roles, give variety from the somewhat stiff Live TV format, replete with a studio audience.
Show launches with a black & white segment purportedly excerpted from a 1961 American sci-fi movie "Tomorrow" (oddly enough, that title spelled "Toomorrow" was used for Val Guest's ill-fated British sci-fi/musical feature made in 1970 starring a young Olivia Newton-John!). It's a mass of cliches in which wordplay (pronouncing bible as "bibble") dominates and includes a Gay joke, but does set the show in motion.
Further skits all seem to revolve around the Brits' obsession with the class system, here emphasized by repeated differentiation of people into Alphas, Betas and Gammas, with of course the studio audience predominantly composed of Gammas. And of course an occasional jab at Thatcher and the Tories is mandatory. Some of the skits don't work, notably a costume-drama history of a famed (fictional) geneticist, a dull Robbie Coltrane skit bringing in competition with the Soviets, or a labored skit run by Laurie pitting a scientifically engineered man versus an audience member in an egg-sorting contest that ends with weak slapstick by Laurie that isn't funny. In fact, the rather laid-back half-hour climaxes with a failed "saver" of slapstick breaking out all over - I much preferred the often clever wordplay to this intentionally lowbrow conclusion, as if Fry and Laurie believed it was necessary to lower themselves to pleasing the Gammas watching this BBC offering on the telly at home.
Emma is a masterful comic talent in addition to her skills as writer and actor; I treasure a thank-you letter I received from her back in the 1990s when I encountered her during my tenure as a film critic.
