This Downton Abbey meets Naked Gun mash-up is light on laughs

FILM
Fackham Hall ★★½
M 97 minutes

The hero and heroine of Fackham Hall come from different social spheres, but find common ground in their love of great literature.

“When we read, we meet unknown friends.”
“That’s Balzac’s.”
“No, it’s true.”

That’s a fairly highbrow gag by the standards of a fairly lowbrow film, albeit one that relies on a certain knowledge of middlebrow TV. The game being played is a parody of Downton Abbey and the whole genre of stodgy British period drama (say the title fast, and what you get is a concise expression of the attitude of the gentry towards their social inferiors).

The lowly hero is Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe) pronounced “no-one,” a grown-up Artful Dodger raised in a London orphanage who finds his way down to Fackham Hall, “the most lavish manor house in all of Shropcestershire”.

Here he squeezes into the exceedingly cramped servants’ quarters, while seizing his opportunity to court Rose Davenport (Thomasin McKenzie), the youngest daughter of his new employers, who’s under pressure to marry her unlovely cousin (Tom Felton).

The burlesque humour is openly indebted to the Naked Gun films and other Hollywood productions in the same vein, though it’s not as if British culture doesn’t have its own long tradition of this kind of spoofing, going back through Monty Python to Gilbert and Sullivan (the plot is resolved through a familiar Gilbertian wheeze).

There’s also more than a trace of the off-colour humour associated with stand-up comic Jimmy Carr, who’s one of five credited writers as well as a producer, and probably deserves as much credit or blame for the finished product as anybody (the director is Jim O’Hanlon, who did the spoof crime series A Touch of Cloth).

Carr’s domain is the 21st-century equivalent of the realm of the seaside postcard, where, as George Orwell wrote, “the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser”. Here, it’s similarly axiomatic that posh people are inbred ninnies and the clergy are closely associated with paedophilia: Carr himself has a cameo as a wittering vicar prone to double entendres, who also wears a Hitler moustache, one of a handful of reminders that the action takes place in 1932.

None of this is to be mistaken for cutting satire. A different creative team might have come up with a version of the film that spoke as bluntly about colonialism and the British Empire as Blazing Saddles in its day spoke about race. But that just isn’t the direction Carr and company are thinking in, though thankfully there’s also little of the “ironic” racism Carr has dabbled in as a stand-up.

The gags I liked best were mostly the abstract ones, seemingly aimed at bright 10-year-olds: a mostly blank newspaper with a headline reading “National Ink Shortage” is closer to the original Naked Gun than most things in the Naked Gun reboot. The strike rate to my mind is about one successful gag in 20, but the delivery rate is rapid enough I never had to wait more than a few minutes for something to smirk at.

That said, there are ways in which the joke density might have been increased, especially visually. Half the fun of the Naked Gun films used to be watching out for what was happening in the background, and O’Hanlon emulates this approach to a point: a car on fire here, a Trainspotting poster there.

But the dull landscape paintings on the walls of Fackham Hall seem mostly to be just dull landscapes. During the lulls in the dialogue, I often found myself staring at them, wondering if there was something I’d missed.

Fackham Hall, in cinemas from Thursday.

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