The Luke McQueen Pilots: Britain's Hidden Vampire Crisis – review

Director: Paul Taylor

First aired: 2018

Contains spoilers

I received a message that this was showing on the BBC and went onto iPlayer to have a look. Luke McQueen is a stand-up comedian known for pulling stunts or using conceits as a basis for his act. This episode was entirely based on the conceit that McQueen had been given the opportunity to make a pilot episode for a show by the BBC and aimed to make a documentary about a subject close to his heart. Throughout the show he repeats that he is making a documentary like Stacey Dooley or Reggie Yates.

montage

The subject close to his heart is Britain’s Hidden Vampire Crisis and he (at the insistence of his producers) interviews Dr Nick Groom as an expert. This moment of the show worked as McQueen played with an affected faux-naivety to spin his interview incorrectly. When asked how many vampires are in Britain, Groom responds that for lifestylers it is upwards of 15000, labouring the point that they are not really vampires. He explains that actual people who believe they need to drink blood is a much smaller number but McQueen ignores this, speaking over him and runs on a “15k vampires in Britain” message from there on in.

childhood view

McQueen’s obsession, we learn, comes from the fact that his dad (Mark Silcox) had told him that his mum had been taken by vampires – when she had just left. More could have been done with this and would have been a much better focus (though perhaps edging towards too sitcom for the programme makers). His thought that the NHS blood donation service is a Government front for vampires was lukewarm in a comedic sense and his accusation that Theresa May is a vampire ascribes her way too much personality and goth-cool to be funny.

stunt

There are stunts through the show – though how stage managed they are, and thus how much the “public” were in on the stunt, is unclear. Going into a Metal gig in faux-Count outfit and stripping naked on stage, offering himself to any vampires there, and pouring milk over himself in the street and calling for the age of consent to be lowered were both cringeworthy rather than funny, though the joke remains centred on himself. The lowering the age of consent moment comes from the thought that vampires prefer virgin blood so sex will protect them – comedy slasher horror film Cherry Falls played with the concept of promiscuity being apotropaic with more panache – and the programme steered repeatedly to child abuse when he poses as a 14-year-old boy online, to lure a vampire, and lures a sexual predator. The fact that he nearly misses realising what the man is becomes indicative of the faux-naivety he is displaying as a character.

Luke McQueen

All in all, I found this disappointing. The mocumentary aspect was thin, insipid and we know too little about the character to laugh along with or at him. If you think to a character like Alan Partridge, the character was built over time on the radio and, when transferred to TV, was a cameo part that allowed the joke to develop over time and ultimately to a point where the character could command a full series. The McQueen character didn’t command a single episode. The stunts weren’t funny, to me, but there were moments where he did shine. The aspect around his mother could have been brilliant, but was left dangling, and the abuse of expert opinion to the media’s agenda was inciteful. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.