Roger Mellie: The Man on the Telly Online

'Roger Mellie' is the vulgar compere in England's hilarious comic book 'Viz': the man who has a bollard-shaped head, and who seems to be famous without having any clearly defined job or talent. (There are many such celebrities in British television.) Mellie gets his surname from George Melly (an alleged authority on jazz music, who shows up on British TV a lot but never has anything important to say), and his vulgar vocabulary from Kenneth Tynan, who famously was the first person to utter a certain four-letter word on the BBC.

As readers of 'Viz' will know, Roger spends most of his time indulging in substance abuse and debauchery, while just occasionally keeping his hand in by appearing on television as some sort of celebrity. His actual line of work keeps changing: sometimes he's hosting a chat show, other times compering a game show, other times participating in some sort of documentary or reality programme. Whatever he turns his hand to, he's always a complete failure. Some sort of award should go to Roger's ill-defined business manager, agent and general dogsbody: the bespectacled and bearded Tom, who keeps finding new assignments for Roger and then is lumbered with handling the damage control after Roger (yet again) makes a dog's breakfast of it all.

The late lamented Peter Cook was a brilliant choice to supply the voice of Roger Mellie for these animated cartoons. Cook was many things Mellie is not: handsome, quick-witted, debonair. Yet there are many ways in which Roger Mellie could seem to be a parody of Peter Cook. Notoriously, Cook hosted a chat show ('Where Do I Sit?') that became one of the great clanging disasters in the history of British television, largely down to some very Roger Mellie-like actions on Cook's part: he showed up drunk for live transmissions, and didn't bother to learn anything in advance about his celebrity guests.

These five-minute animated episodes of 'Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly' are absolutely hilarious ... and Peter Cook (basically playing himself) has got the character down perfectly. My one complaint is that the cartoons are too short. On the other hand, maybe they're just right: the Roger Mellie comic strips in 'Viz' typically run only one or two pages, and I don't think I'd want to spend a long time with a bloke like Mellie. It's a tribute to the hilarity of these cartoon shorts that, after their brief running time, I'm still eager for more. I'll rate these cartoons 9 out of 10. I hope 'Viz' do more of them, but it's regrettable that Peter Cook is no longer available to lend his vocal talents to the role that he was born to play.