PLATFORM ALTERATION

‘...And God Wept’, is, I believe, the generally-accepted suffix to the news that Dapper Laughs’ new comedy vehicle launched on ITV2 this week.

I’d read previews, from people in whom I have an unshakable faith, telling me to expect something really very dreadful indeed. I saw Vine clips made by Dapper himself - the very Vines which got him the commission in the first place - and almost vomited with despair.

So I sat down to watch his debut show on ITV2 fully prepared to enjoy my 24-minute hate.

Except, I didn’t. Enjoy the hate, I mean. What I enjoyed… was the show. I… I don’t know quite how to say this - I enjoyed Dapper Laughs.

My arms slowly unfolded, and I smirked, then smiled, then found myself laughing out loud.

Here’s the thing. Dapper Laughs might well be the most abominable thing ever to have hit our screens since Alf Garnett or Jim Davidson. But it might - it might, I need to see more - be one of the most brilliantly nuanced bits of character acting we have seen in a long, long time.

Such was our indignation at this little upstart chauvinist prick getting his own series, I suspect we might have been hoodwinked. I don’t think Dapper Laughs is wanting us to laugh with him, as we all originally thought. We’re meant to laugh at him.

The problem is not what Dapper is. It’s where he is. Putting a brilliantly-observed spoof of manufactured reality TV, featuring a generous portion of lad culture on ITV2 is akin to putting The Day Today on Sky News. It has left us too confused as to whether it’s real fake reality or fake fake reality. And I think it’s the latter (I think… I may have to draw a diagram).

And there is the hard-to-counter problem of the fact that, as with Alf Garnett, the stupid fuckwit misogynistic cockheads who he is lampooning so flawlessly are probably clasping him to their spray-tanned bosom as being One Of The Lads. Which is where the problem of where it’s being broadcast creeps in.

When Lee Nelson debuted on BBC3, no-one was in any doubt that here we were watching a character for us to laugh at and treat with derision. Because if Lee Nelson had actually been Lee Nelson, there is no way in this universe that the BBC would have gone anywhere near him with a barge pole. If Dapper Laughs had been on BBC3, I think we would have approached Dapper Laughs differently, given the tacit respectability that comes from a commission from Auntie Beeb. As it is, we’re left with this (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous phenomenon of seeing someone who at face value seems to be the average fodder of shows like TOWIE, taken to its logical extreme.

But I think it is more than that. The show is based on a makeover of a slobbish bloke, at whom we are invited to laugh - cruel perhaps, in the way that most makeover shows are. But the bloke is a brilliant performer, with some great lines and a honed sense of timing and delivery. He is not a punter. Definitely not. And the joke is on Dapper at the end as the slob makes some headway talking to a girl in a bar, going against all of Dapper’s advice.

I know I am flying in the face of Grace Dent and many other amazing people who I greatly admire, and yes, yes, if he was being, say, racist in the same way as he was being sexist it would be completely unacceptable… But those kinds of ‘geezers’ are unacceptable in the way he is spoofing, and shows like Take Me Out are deeply sexist, and yet enjoy being in mainstream media (on ITV and, well, ITV2…).

If this is a spoof (and I think it is) then what’s shocking is that it’s so believable. Because we’re too accustomed to this kind of language. Everywhere. And if he played the part in bolder colours, it would turn into something else - a sneering caricature that, in a snobbish way laughs at chavs.

Like Dapper’s creator, Daniel O’Reilly, I went to a south east London comprehensive school, and I have a character who is not a million miles (although perhaps a generation) away from Dapper Laughs. It is the coping mechanism of someone who has endured that laddish twattery for over a decade of their life. Just occasionally in the show he lets slip the occasional word like ‘joviality’ which betrays that there is more going on under the bonnet than he wants you to believe. Very similarly to Avid Merrion… Another staple of ITV2. And some of whose work I admire very much.

I think O’Reilly’s having a Bubble Bath with us. And I think, just as those people who wrote in to the BBC two decades ago to complain about what a dreadful chat show host Alan Partridge is… I think we’ve been had.