Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: Denis Lawson, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Tamzin Outhwaite, Larry Lamb, Michael Higgs, Tracey Ann Oberman, Eva Pope, Harry Lister Smith, Michael Fenton Stevens, Lucy Benjamin, Tim Chipping.
The world of fame has spawned some pretty weird moments, instances where to some the mind is blown that people would actively seek such celebrity without even having done anything in their life. The trickle-down effect of such adoration is even more prevalent when you can go into schools and ask what they want from life and the answer you can often hear is one, “I want to be famous”, yet they don’t know what for. Fame for fame’s sake is not something that truly should be encouraged and yet somehow the world of looking like somebody else, to pretend to be someone else is The Fame Game personified.
In what was a greatly envisaged but ultimately predictable episode of New Tricks, The Fame Game was perhaps, unfairly or not, an episode to which had the end of term feel thrust within it and that whilst the episode sparked with genuine thought, it nevertheless was looking forward to burning all the text books, placing the tie in a nearby bin on the way home and writing daft slogans on a plain white shirt that would not be seen again beyond Christmas.
The episode does, despite the plot not really catching alight and even languishing under the weight of the end being in sight, does ask the questions on legitimate fame and those who seek it. Like politics, fame is sought by some who have no idea on how to handle it, the old adage of corrupted greatness by Malvalio in Twelfth Night fits perfectly into this world of same hairstyles, same stance and near identical features; “Some are born famous, some achieve fame and some have fame thrust upon them”, yet is it ever worth the personal cost.
The episode was for the vast majority of the hour one in which seemed to be happy to sit in its own predictability, unusually so for the normally robust New Tricks and whilst the intention may have started out with good intentions, The Fame Game was a pale imitation of what had gone before.
A very average episode to which many may have felt let down by, the search for fame is not one without many a pitfall.
Ian D. Hall