The Invisibles- fun to make, less so to watch

Anthony Head, Warren Clarke and Jenny Agutter, the stars of BBC1's new criminal comedy drama The Invisibles, tell Michael Deacon about the worst crimes they've ever committed (not including appearing in this show)...

On The Invisibles, BBC1’s new comedy drama series, Anthony Head plays Maurice, a retired criminal genius with a dazzling history of heists. Head, it turns out, once staged a daring heist himself. Although it wasn’t quite on Maurice’s scale. ‘When I was about 10 I went to a friend’s party,’ he says. ‘We hopped over his garden fence and found this lock-up which was filled with table tennis balls. We went, “Wow, fantastic!” and filled our pockets. God knows what we were going to do with them – I didn’t play table tennis.’ Afterwards he proudly showed his parents his ill-gotten booty. Livid, they made their sheepish son return all the balls at once. ‘I learnt my lesson,’ Head says wryly.

His co-stars on The Invisibles aren’t much more villainous. The most heinous crime Warren Clarke (who plays Maurice’s sidekick Syd) has ever committed was failing a breathalyzer test in the late Sixties, for which he was given a one-year driving ban and a £15 fine. Dean Lennox Kelly (who plays Hedley, a younger crook who idolises Maurice and Syd) was thrown out of his local park as a boy for firing at passers-by with a pea-shooter.

Not the most intimidating rogues, then. But then, neither are their characters in The Invisibles. The premise is simple. Ageing Maurice and Syd, their criminal days long behind them, are returning to Britain to live as neighbours in a quiet coastal village in Devon, after years in Spain enjoying the spoils of their crimes. But when Syd’s feckless son runs up a huge debt, the two decide that the only way to help him pay it off is to try one more heist. They find, though, that they aren’t quite the master criminals they once were.

‘Basically they’re too old to run,’ says Clarke, who played Dalziel in BBC1’s long-running police drama Dalziel & Pascoe. ‘That’s the funny side of it. They’re trying to climb buildings and run and jump – and it’s not as easy as it used to be.’ It wasn’t easy for Clarke (who’s 61) and Head (54), either. ‘For one scene I had to run after a lorry,’ says Head, who’s perhaps best known for his roles in Little Britain and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ‘I didn’t recover for two weeks.’

Fans of New Tricks should feel at home watching The Invisibles. Both are family-friendly BBC1 comedy dramas about crime (except that in New Tricks the heroes are detectives rather than criminals). Both feature a largely middle-aged cast. Both carry the same central theme: that, although the middle-aged heroes may not be as fit as they once were, they’re still capable of succeeding in the end.

William Ivory, who wrote The Invisibles, admits that he likes New Tricks – but that a bigger inspiration was another popular comedy drama series: ITV’s Minder, which he himself used to write in the early Nineties.

‘Minder was a show about character, and the comedy all came from character,’ he says. ‘If people buy into your characters’ world enough, you don’t need to plot hysterically – you can just put them in simple situations. In the last episode of this series, they get stuck in a house together – and because the characters are good, it’s funny.’

Though criminals, the main characters are loveable. This is partly because they aren’t violent, partly because they steal only from very rich firms, and partly because they’re so winningly enthusiastic, even when they screw up. The hapless-but-hopeful Syd, Ivory says, was inspired by the bunglings of a petty criminal he used to play football with: ‘I remember once he couldn’t play for about eight weeks because he’d kicked in the plate-glass window of a shop – and the glass dropped down on his leg and practically took his foot off. He hadn’t quite thought it through – but a great enthusiast.’

The comedy doesn’t just come from pratfalls, though – there’s also observational humour, says another of The Invisibles’ stars, Jenny Agutter (who plays Maurice’s patient wife Barbara). ‘I’m sure a lot of people will recognise the domestic arguments,’ she says. ‘Things that aggravate, petty jealousies, stuff about where the toothpaste is.’

Viewers will recall the role that made Agutter’s name: playing Bobbie in the 1968 TV adaptation of The Railway Children when she was 16. Even today, she says, men of a certain age stop her in the street to tell her that she was their first ever crush when they were boys.

Among her admirers, it turns out, is her new screen husband. ‘Of course I had a crush on her,’ says Anthony Head. ‘And not just for The Railway Children; Logan’s Run, it went on and on. I thought it might get in the way…’

In the last couple of years, then, he’s got to kiss Jenny Agutter – and star in Little Britain opposite a naked David Walliams. Which experience was the more exciting? ‘It’s a hard one,’ he says drily. ‘I think I’d probably have to say Jenny Agutter. I hope that David isn’t too disappointed.’

* * *

Caitlin Moran thinks she knows why projects such as The Invisibles exist. And in almost every respect, they exist for positive reasons. They exist, she says, because of civilisation. A certain amount of drama has to be made every year, the rationale goes. Why not, then, ensure the bit of drama you're making that year is a very civilised affair? Let other dramas bring together actors throwing 3am tantrums about “integrity”. Let differing ventures tackle scripts that redefine the nature of storytelling, after turning the writers into gibbering, bald alcoholics. Let Robin Hood get shot in a hedge in Hungary, in the sleet, 3,000 miles from the nearest Carluccio's.

Instead - like Kingdom, Doc Martin and Jam and Jerusalem before it - The Invisibles says to its all-star cast, in a very reasonable way: “Hey guys. Guys! We've all been in this business a long time. By any measure, we've earned our chops. Let's shoot something very simple, by the seaside, with nice, long lunch-breaks. How about Devon? Chilled chablis and seafood. I'll even write complimentary cashmere sweaters for everyone into the script." We can totally understand it. As a great fan of almost any pleasant situation, I wholeheartedly applaud how very nice the whole thing must have been to make (physical exertions aside). There cannot be too much loveliness in this world. I'm all gung-ho for gorgeousness. The only problem is, it can make for decidedly unremarkable drama. In places, The Invisibles feels almost Eldorado - that unmistakable feeling that you should be watching it at 4pm, on ITV - and not, as in the case of both, wholly sober, on prime-time BBC One.

In a nutshell, Warren Clarke and Anthony Head are two former “high-class” burglars, who have just spent the past 20 years “going straight”, and turning very orange, in Spain. Returning to Britain, and a sleepy Devon fishing village, at the behest of Head's wife, Jenny Agutter, “the boys” find a reason to go back to their “old ways” within ten minutes. This then cues up a whole series of comedy-drama amusement, based around two OAPs pulling off “big jobs” while complaining about how much their backs hurt, how things used to be different in the old days, and how they'd love a sit down, a cup of tea and a Werther's etc.

Obviously, it could be quite amusing. But the whole thing trots along at a very odd pitch. The primary “Eh?”-prompter is their sidekick, Denzil from Only Fools and Horses (Paul Barber), who functions as the technical side of their operation. Indeed, such is the low effort of The Invisibles' script it's genuinely surprising that he isn't actually called “Techno”. He runs a bafflingly high-spec operation from his retirement villa at the edge of the village - sending encrypted police data to Head and Clarke's mobiles at the press of a button. Reception issues - such as the fact that, in every Devon fishing village I've been to, one has to stand on a bench merely to send a text, let alone upload video film from CTU in 24 - seem neither here nor there.

In addition to this, there comes the problem of Head. While Warren Clarke turns in a solid performance as some manner of loveable-but-dim sidekick - think John Prescott in a balaclava, crashing the getaway vehicle with the words “I only need my glasses when my eyes are tired!” - Head is a slightly ... less sturdy lead. Spending more than half his time engaged in angry Cockney shouting, saying plot-establishy things such as “We've 'ung up our boots! Forgeddit!”, Head unfortunately suffers from rampant, recurring Accent Slide.

At times, it becomes so acute he appears to be taking part in some manner of Accent Pentathlon - one that features the events “Angry Mitchell Brother”, “Someone a Bit Posh”, and “Anthony Newley, Slightly Pissed”. One wonders why the writers insisted he be an angry wideboy. The entire show wouldn't be affected one whit if they'd looked at the character synopses, crossed out “angry wideboy”, and written “Giles from Buffy” instead. Still, it adds another fact to humanity's sum total knowledge: Anthony Head cannot do angry Cockneys. We will know that for ever, now.

Alas, millions of people having to watch something as average as The Invisibles is far too high a price to pay for this information. It is best that you let me shoulder this burden alone. In a civilisation, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. We need to keep things pleasant.

The Invisibles is on BBC1 on Thursday, 1 May at 9.00pm