Luvvies love looking in and TOAST OF LONDON is a luvvie fest that looks in on London’s likeliest contender for worst actor, Steven Toast.
Actually, Toast isn’t really such a bad actor, it’s just that he has either made bad choices or has had an agent make bad choices for him. At least he’s a working actor which is more than can be said by many. Although he does seem to spend an inordinately long time having tete de tete with his agent, Jane.
Co-created and starring Matt Berry as the eponymous Toast, TOAST OF LONDON is part sit com, part satire and part musical which takes to abseiling absurdity as gleefully as it does descending to the gutters of smut and potty humour in the best British tradition and does not scorn soft comedy porn or scoff at politically incorrect opportunities to lambast and skewer.
The Monarchy, the Masons, and the Media – the whole film, television and theatrical world is ridiculed, roasted and run through with an unsheathed prong in an orgy of unprotected vex.
Simultaneously sophisticated and scabrous, audiences in general should fall about laughing while actors, agents, producers will be apoplectic in peals of self-revelatory laughter.
Like EXTRAS, a show TOAST OF LONDON has some passing incestuous ancestral comparison with, it boasts a guest star list of real people like Peter Davison, John Nettles and Michael Ball, but it it also features a cast of regulars who are steadfast in their fabulosity.
As is his agent Jane Plough, Doon Mackichan is brilliantly brittle and pragmatic, a neat as a pin Pollyanna with a piranha instinct.
Robert Bathurst as his landlord, fellow luvvie and confident, Ed Howzer-Black, rarely if ever seen out of his dressing gown, sipping tea from dainty china and sporting a lovely line in eye liner.
The appellation appropriate Harry Peacock plays Ray Purchase, Toast’s pretentious thespian nemesis, whose wife, deliciously played by Tracy Ann Oberman, is Toast’s sex buddy, a prostitute who only makes her spouse pay for sex. Add Amanda Donohoe robust performance as Toast’s ex, and you have a support act you can truss.
TOAST OF LONDON began as a one off – the pilot is included in the extras package in Season 1 – and has since been commissioned for a third season.
Both seasons’ packages come with a squadron of extras including outtakes, songs, deleted scenes, commentary and assorted ratbaggery.
It’s anarchic, narcissistic, and narcotic – addictive viewing that should leave a blister on your remote finger.
SEASON 1 and 2 are now available through ABC DVD, each $19.95.
Sydney Arts Guide has 2 DVD packages of Seasons 1 and 2 to give away to the first two readers to email the Editor on editor.sydneyartsguide@gmail.com