Morris: A life with bells on

A cringeworthy mockumentary. Photo / Supplied

Rating: * *

Verdict: Tries too hard.

The likes of Christopher Guest (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind) and Ricky Gervais (The Office, Extras) have set the mockumentary bar pretty high on both sides of the Atlantic. This film not only fails to clear it; it barely gets off the ground.

Laboured, awkward and too long - there are enough ideas in here for a 10-minute film, not a 100-minute one - it abounds in cringeworthy moments, but not the deliberate kind that Gervais induces.

Each slavishly scripted scene is delivered as faux ad lib, so the viewer is never quite in the magic "is this for real?" space that the genre requires. It's the story of Derecq Twist (Oldham, who wrote the script), a devoted practitioner of the English dancing that requires grown men with bells on their legs to hop around waving hankies.

When he invents a new dance, he attracts the ire of the governing body for "the wholesale butchery of our culture" who ban him. Devastated, he must reinvent himself by tapping into the Morris culture in California (!), where he takes his "new Morris - the Third Way".

Matters aren't helped by the obtrusive presence of a knowing interviewer (McArdle): the heavy silence on our side of the camera is a key to the success of Guest's and Gervais' work because it keeps the horrified observer at a distance, but the style here is ingratiating.

Even the presence of stars such as Jacobi and Hart in cameo can't rescue the project in which the jokes are either obvious or obscure. It will appeal to Morris dancers who like having the piss taken out of them - presumably a small constituency - but the rest of us may be left thinking a straight doco about Morris dancers would have been funnier.

Cast: Charles Thomas Oldham, Derek Jacobi, Ian Hart, Lucy Akhurst, Aidan McArdle
Director: Lucy Akhurst
Running time: 100 mins
Rating: M (offensive language, sexual references)