24 August 2022
Harrison Cole’s uninspiring spoof detective comedy, Defective Inspector had an outing at the Brighton Fringe in spring 2019 and at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre later that year. It is not altogether obvious it merited a post-pandemic revival. Whatever the motive for its reappearance, some judicious reworking is surely called for before its next excursion.
Defective Inspector’s protagonist Richard P Cooper (played by writer Cole) is a bumptious, delusional, sexist ex-novelist and former detective. Drawn to the opportunity for self-expression the theatre provides, he chooses a dramatic reconstruction of his heroic exploits in America as launch vehicle for these burgeoning stage ambitions. Alas, Cooper’s call to a local drama school for student actors results in just two (played by a very hard-working Daniel Hemsley and Francesca Eldred) showing up. This makes recounting a narrative line with twenty characters challenging, but the trio do their best.
The story, such as it is, involves Cooper joining forces with a local city police chief to thwart an attempted assassination and rigged election. The late 80s and early 90s The Naked Gun series of American crime spoof-comedies seem to be Cole’s artistic inspiration, but really the narrative is secondary to joke-telling, visual humour, and audience interaction. Think a kid’s TV comedy show crossed with The Play That Went Wrong, with a fair few C words added in.
There are occasional glimpses of some intelligent writing. Cole’s satirising of the silliest tropes in detective fiction can be clever and there is a great joke about how filmmakers establish the tone through overused visual effects. But in the main, subtlety is sacrificed in a manic rush to the get to the next joke. One suspects Cole feels he will lose his audience if he gives us too few of them.
The protagonist’s first name is the predictable invitation to more dick jokes than you can shake, well, a dick at. Many of the other gags feature sexual innuendos that rarely reach the heights of a single entendre, let alone a double. One piece of audience interaction was decidedly near the knuckle, verging on ill-judged.
Fans of detective parodies packed to the brim with undergraduate humour about sexual performance and penises may well enjoy this. If this description does not apply, take a large measure of Jack Daniels into the theatre, because you are in for a very long hour.
Defective Inspector is currently on at the Hens and Chickens Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe.
Duration: 60 mins
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