Top ten film fatties

It’s time to look at the weighty subjects of the top ten ‘genre’ lardy-bums.

Pearl (Blade)
The excessively chunky bed ridden informant Pearl is the archaist for the Vampire clans in Steven Norringtons first Blade movie. A gelatinous mound of flab actor Eric Edwards only gets a few minutes of screen time while getting nicely roasted by a UV lamp where he literally spills the beans on his fellow vamps but whereas in the original script Pearl has a much bigger role and we find out how me keeps his trim figure with a diet full of babies…nice!

The Blob (X-Men)
While some X-Men have cool powers such as teleportation or optic blasts poor old Fred Dukes was lumbered with the power of being fat! An immovable object the Blobs powers revolve around his own mass and gravity providing him with superhuman strength a degree of invulnerability and the unenviable power to not be moved (wow). Soon to make his screen debut in Wolverine Origins the Blob is one of the first villains the X-Men ever met and probably wasn’t the most well thought out being really only a threat to all-you-can-eat buffets rather than Marvels premiere team of mutants.

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Dune)
While in the film of Dune the good Baron is portrayed as a slightly useless floating fatman with a large plug in his neck the novels version is much darker, intelligent, scheming and debauched. Obsessed with gladiatorial combat and having an unhealthy passion for his beautiful boy Feyd-Rautha behind the layers of opulent robes, acres of food and deviant pleasures hides a cunning and evil mind obsessed with conquering Arrakis and bringing down his political rivals in House Atreides.

Jabba The Hutt (Return of the Jedi)
The underworld don that puts Don Corleone corpulent form to shame the biggest bane of Han Solo and Pizza Hut alike Jabba’s underworld power is nearly as large as his abundant abdomen. So heavy he cannot move from his dais Jabba’s palace is a place of unearthly pleasures and horrific nightmares if displease him. Originally conceived as a chunky sheepskin coat wearing David Brent look-a-like Jabba was re-conceived as the giant slug we all know and love in Jedi and was then retroactively put back into A New Hope with the use of some ropey CG. A main figure in the up and coming Clone Wars Cartoon Jabba has become the poster boy with over indulgence and became a common nick-name for larger kids in playgrounds across the country.

Fat Bastard (Austin Powers)
A half metric tonne of meanness Fat Bastard had Mike Myers dons the fat suit to bring this ginger haired menace to the screen in Austin Powers 2. With an obsession with Sumo wrestling, baby-back ribs and wanting to eat mini-me Fat Bastard is Myers at his most repulsive. Whether it’s being in bed with Heather Graham, the abundance of ginger-back hair or fighting Powers in a Dojo Myers made Fat Bastard as abhorrent as possible and while eventually he turns away from the dark side, drops the weight and becomes a better person for it we still can’t help loving the ungracious rude and funny fat lad, ‘get in ma belly’ indeed.

Kingpin (Daredevil)
In the movie we have a tamed down, dull and underused Kingpin but in the comics the toned mind and body of Wilson Fisk has been a thorn in the side of Matt Murdock’s alter ego since the beginning of his career. Although he looks like an ex-roly poly Wilson Fisk’s bulk is actually mostly muscle, honed from many hours of sumo and intense weight lifting and is a formidable fighter as well as strategist and criminal mastermind and can hold his own both physically with the likes of Spiderman and Daredevil with ease. Interestingly the Affleck based Daredevil movie wasn’t the first time the Kingpin had graced our screen as the evil genius also appeared in the early 1990s Incredible Hulk TV movie where Gimli himself John Rhys Davies played a bearded, pointless and ineffectual version of the character.

Bishop of Bath and Wells (Black Adder 2)
Or for his full title ‘The Baby Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells’ is by his own confession a colossal pervert that would do anything to anything, animal vegetable or mineral. When Edmund Blackadder has to repay his debt he unwisely took from the Bishop it isn’t long before the repugnant ‘Bish comes a calling, red hot poker in hand wanting back his money plus interest. It is only using a cunning plan and conning Percy to perform numerous unspeakable acts with a drug addled Bishop that Blackadder managed to blackmail the Bishop to forget his debt. So impressed with Blackadders guile, underhanded tactics and creative use of blackmailing, debauchery that the bested Bishop admits defeat, wiping the slate clean and even goes as far as to offer Blackadder membership to the clergy.

Roland Browning (Grange Hill)
With taunts a-plenty Ro-Land was the epitome of every fat kid in school. Semi-popular but never anyone’s best friend but always there in the group with a snack in hand Roly professed he had a glad problem but with the likes of Mr Bronson , Mr Baxter and Gripper Stebson on his abundant back to loose weight or extort money from him Rolys days at the ‘Hill must have been a nightmare. Even as he grew up his school days didn’t get any better as he was followed around by Janet St Clair, a sensible, caring girl who tried too look of for him but ended up looking like a stalker and was robbed by his friend Zammo to fuel his drug habit. Erkan Mustafa has made a good career from his portly alter ego but I am sure with every bit of fame that came with the ‘Just say no’ must have also come thousands of ‘Hey RO-LAND’ taunts in every pub he ever visits.

Lawrence ‘Chunk’ Cohen (Goonies)
Having the innate ability to smell Ice-Cream, and for offering to foster giant Superman loving intimidating men without even asking his parents Chunk is of course the stand out star of one of the best 80s movies of all time. Famous for spilling the beans on all his friends and explaining to the Fratellis his puke induced escapades in a movie theatre Chunks loyalty is mostly to his stomach and to food rather than to his fellow Goonies. Although his lack of conviction in his fellow ‘friends’ is fully justified as, even though he might be on the irritating side he is constantly the butt of every joke or taunt made by fellow Goonie Mouth whose insistence that Chunk must do the Truffle Shuffle that while embarrassing has become one of the best introductions ever seen in film. The ‘Shuffle has become an iconic moment in movie history and while actor Jeff Cohen has long since lost the puppy fat will always be famous for lifting up his shirt, gurning and jiggling away to the applause of Mouth and the entire engrossed audience in general.

Eric Cartman (South Park)
Spoilt, rude and hateful Eric Cartman tops our list of film fatties by being the most obnoxious, self obsessed and in all honestly the most funny overweight character ever to grace our screens. Whether its beating up midgets, creating catchy tunes about his friends mum, freezing himself to await his Wii or making a rival eat his own parents in a chilli cook off there has never been a more evil, sadistic and endearingly spoilt chunky character in recent film history. It’s hard not to like Cartman, for all his hatred and distain for his friends there is something fascinating in watching just how nasty he can be. Whether it’s little digs at Kenny being poor, his hatred for hippes his anti-Semitism, racism, sexism or general dislike for everyone who won’t feed him, make him money or spoil him rotten Cartman is everything that can be wrong with a spoilt child, adored by his mum, pandered to and the centre of the universe even the attempts of the ‘Dog Whisperer’ were to no avail as Eric thinks he is the be all and end all of everything, and who are we to disagree with him…sweet!

So this is comedy?

I am an avid fan of British comedy .

I was born in the seventies and had a diet of comedy that involved Monty Python (even the rubbish bits), classic stand up from Dave Allen, Bob Monkhouse and even Les Dawson. I was exposed to the madness of Kenny Everett from an early age, was fascinated when a giant white Kitten attacked the BT tower in the Goodies and had the pleasure of growing up in an era of Dads Army repeats, Allo Allo and fed a diet of the ‘governor’ Ronnie Barker at his very best.

Added to this was the weird and wonderful The Young Ones (as well as Filthy Rich and Catflap, Mr Jolly and Bottom) and was older enough to appreciate the budding alternative comedy scene. I loved Red Dwarf, and would spend hours with friends debating the best era Blackadder (second season – which is a stroke of luck which sounds awfully similar to ….) and chucking away later on as a student at Slade in Residence courtesy of Vic and Bob, knowing that ‘that’s your mum that is’ from Mary Whitehouse experiencing the ‘real’ Rod Hull on Fist of Fun. For the past forty years for the most part comedy was funny, at times edgy but always entertaining and the output of both BBC, Channel 4 and ITV was for the most part of really high quality.

Admittedly there was dross – from the hugely racist or sexist stuff of the late seventies (I’m looking at you On the Buses) to just plain televisual bum-wash like ‘Birds of a Feather’ there has always been bad comedy but over the past few decades us comedy fans have been able to take a boat trip to Craggy Island on Wernham Hoggs expense account, gone via the new road in Royston Vasey and stop off along the way for either a coffee Dr Rick Daglas MD at Darkplace Hospital or to have lashings of Ginger Beer with the Comic Strip the world of comedy in the 80, 90s and even the 00s was a superb landscape of weird, wonderful and more importantly creative comedy. From Black Books to Big Train to Snuff Box to Monkey Dust via the Wrong Door to land up the Zooniverse British comedy has been diverse and entertaining, up until this week.
This brings me to my main point – where is the comedy on television today? Or more specifically Tuesday the 23rd April 2013 the day officially that comedy ended on television. I am of course refereeing to Ben Eltons ‘The Wright Way’ a programme so dire that a repeat of that mornings Jeremy Kyle would have been more entertaining and engaging.

I have never had the misfortune of sitting through a worse piece of ‘comedy’ in my entire life and cannot for the life of me see why, with so much talent out there that the BBC see fit to give the man that subjugated the world to the jazz hand awfulness of ‘We Will Rock you’ another platform to display his ‘talent’.
Now there are a few variations of Ben Elton – the one most people liked or at least respected in the 1980s, a biting satirist and the cutting edge of the political comedy and alternative scene of the 80s. There is even a slightly more liberal version who got into writing novels with a comedic and political slant in the 90s who people accepted and appreciated as a more mature artist who was crafting some good work though a new medium but it seemed that during the last decade we have a Ben Elton who has lost his bite, appeal and is now producing work he was mocking back in his heyday – and made a series based on everything he was fighting against comedy wise on Saturday Night Live.

For some reason a decade in the theatre has made Elton something that is just unappetizing comedy wise – he seems to have run out of ideas and headed back to his box-sets of the 1970s and produced a piece of work that even in that heyday of non-PC mediocre situation comedy that ‘The Wright Way’ would happily sit there next to ‘Mind your Language’ and ‘ George and Mildred’ a piece of work that in every single way is so crap, dated and just out of touch that its laughable.
The irony is that people like Ricky Gervais have already done something like this – but in a tongue in cheek way. In Extras Gervais had Andy Millman create a grimace inducing sitcom full of one-line catchphrases and out of date double-entendres and innuendo called ‘When The Whistle Blows’ – this was nearly a decade ago and was done firmly to show that shows like this do not have a place on television any more, and yet here we are on prime-time evenings slots having to endure this very rubbish.
I would rant on about the fact that the writing was lazy, designed for cheap laughs and that David Haig is playing exactly the same character as he did in ‘The Thin Blue Line’ but I won’t as really its just too easy a target.

However what I will say is that this show, no matter how dire and what an unmitigated disaster it is still has nothing on the potentially worse ITV effort along the same vein that will also be insulting out eyeballs within the next week or so Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellan will be in a show called ‘Vicious’ which has two of Britain’s best thespians camping it up as if they were on the floor of Graces Brothers department store to such a cringe-worthy degree that even Larry Grayson would be embarrassed.
So my recommendation – if you want something that resembles comedy on television stick to (if you have to) Miranda or Not Going out for a vanilla and average chuckle but really the best thing you could do is switch off the television, hop onto Youtube and see what hot new British comedy talent like Tomska or Victorious Sponge are doing.