Overworked humour

Watching the episode of the Simpsons (Sky One, Sunday) written by and starring Ricky Gervais was a bit like going to see a friend in a West End play: so constant is your worry that something might go wrong that you can’t relax enough to enjoy it. But even through all the buttock-clenched well-wishing, you could tell it wasn’t a classic episode.

The problem — as I’ve found myself on those rare occasions when I’ve been paid lots to do an article or it’s a commission from a new editor I’m striving to impress — is that when a writer cares too much about something he almost always messes up. As Gervais well knows, The Simpsons scripts constitute the most clinically brilliant, subtle, wide-ranging, incisive, ingeniously allusive, sophisticated, funny-because-they’re-true writing in TV history, and the moment you start thinking in those terms and try to match it the first thing to go is that slouchy, couldn’t-give-a-toss flippancy which fuels Gervais’s best comedy.