WRITTEN IN THE STARS
The first two decades of this century marked an explosion and eventual exhaustion of the mockumentary as a television comedy format. In the UK, that meant sending up an innate BBC-ness in shows pretending to film real life. The mock-doco era made big names of Ricky Gervais and Armando Iannucci, among others. But the best skewering of all things Beeb came from writer-director John Morton.
His late-90s first screen mockumentary People Like Us – developed from a BBC radio series that was his big break as a writer, having ditched a career as an English teacher – featured a deeply earnest narrator-interviewer following everyday Britons through a typical working day.
Morton’s mid-to-late 2010s show W1A went inside the BBC, mercilessly mocking the office politics of the public broadcaster. In W1A’s three seasons, Hugh Bonneville played mild-mannered executive Ian Fletcher, grappling with his role as head of values.
Fletcher had first appeared in the earlier Morton series , where he was head of deliverance for the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission. Two seasons were made in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics. It wasn’t the first show to mockument a games bureaucracy. The “marked conceptual similarities” to his own late-90s mockumentary , in the lead-up to Sydney 2000, miffed
