More ado should be made of this! PATRICK MARMION reviews BBC’s Much Ado About Nothing 

Much Ado About Nothing (BBC iPlayer)

Rating:

Verdict: Gorgeously cosy nostalgia

Treasure (BBC iPlayer)

Rating:

Verdict: Crafty tale of the unexpected

First Things (Scenes For Survival, nationaltheatrescotland.com)

Rating:

Verdict: Sweetly sentimental elegy

We were supposed to have news this week of Andrew Scott in Stephen Beresford’s one-man play Three Kings, live-streamed from London’s Old Vic.

Unfortunately, Scott was taken ill and is unable to perform — although it was not thought to be serious, or Covid related. We wish him a speedy recovery.

But the Old Vic’s misfortune offered me a golden opportunity to sneak another look at what, to my mind, remains the RSC’s finest show of the past decade: Christopher Luscombe’s gorgeously nostalgic 2014 staging of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, available now through the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine programme.

It starred the indomitable Michelle Terry and the inimitable Edward Bennett. Would that I could watch them every week!

Terry and Bennett play feuding lovers Beatrice and Benedick, who are brought together in a pact for revenge after Beatrice’s friend Hero is falsely accused of infidelity.

The play was cunningly paired, when it ran in Stratford-upon-Avon, with Love’s Labour’s Lost (as a prologue); with Much Ado assuming its lesser known subtitle Love’s Labour’s Won and set after World War I. I recommend seeing both.

Terry is a potently emotional Beatrice, still fuming over her lost love of Benedick; and Bennett is no less sore as her disgruntled former beau.

But Terry is also deliciously snippy — the Bard’s finest quips trip effortlessly off her tongue — while Bennett makes his plaited verbal conceits wryly approachable.Where she goes on to prove a furious firebrand in defence of her slandered friend, he rises to her challenge of revenge with deadly seriousness.

It’s a show jam-packed with juicy performances, including a deliciously sinister turn from Sam Alexander as the muck-raking scoundrel Don John.

I found myself chuckling again at Nick Haverson’s dim-witted policeman Dogberry.

It’s a role that can be toe-curling to watch; but Haverson is resplendent in his character’s gibberish, and gives a Norman Wisdom masterclass in physical comedy.

While you’re on iPlayer, look out for a couple of nice lockdown shorts.

Treasure features Samantha Bond and husband Alexander Hanson in a crafty tale of the unexpected. 

And Elaine C. Smith, Scotland’s first lady of comedy, can be seen in First Things, a new short by Val McDermid for the National Theatre of Scotland’s Scenes For Survival series available on BBC iPlayer from Monday.

In Treasure, a family are caught up in an interactive parlour game no one wants to play. Their London house looks so immaculate I wondered if they had put it on the market.

But it’s good to see these theatrical stalwarts keeping busy. Hanson looks rakish with his goatee and silk dressing gown.

I was amused to spot a sly piece of product placement in the sweetly sentimental Smith-McDermid effort about a radio DJ broadcasting from home and keeping a secret.

One of Val’s books has been cunningly exposed on Elaine’s inevitable lockdown bookshelf background.

As I’ve discovered during the pandemic, there’s sometimes as much pleasure to be had scanning people’s libraries as listening to what they are saying.

Meet the the Beavis and Butt-Head of OAPs

Oh, Hello On Broadway (Netflix, 15)

Rating:

Verdict: Nice and sleazy does it

Digging around in the basement of Netflix, I discovered this brilliantly seedy Broadway spoof recorded live at New York’s Lyceum Theatre.

Imagine if cartoon wastrels Beavis and Butt-Head reinvented themselves as miserable old Muppets Statler and Waldorf — and then became flesh

Comedians John Mulaney and Nick Kroll are disreputable double act George and Gil (right), a couple of geriatric, theatre-going bachelors living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — ‘the coffee breath of neighbourhoods’. 

They send up myriad theatrical conventions, including shouting to wake up dozing members of the audience and dancing ‘like walking swastikas’. It’s tasteless but appealed to my childish sense of humour.

As a 90-minute sketch it’s a tad too long, and best enjoyed in half-hour chunks — once the kids are tucked up in bed.