The Love Box in Your Living Room, review: Harry Enfield's bewildering BBC send-up veered close to genius

A large part of the point of The Love Box in Your Living Room (BBC Two), a spoof history of the BBC by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, was that it was being shown on the BBC at all. Only an organisation in the rudest of health, concrete-sure of itself, its 100-year past and its boundless future, would allow a satirist like Enfield free rein to tear into his host. It was a bit like one of those comedy roasts where the miffed roastee is in fact parading their broad-mindedness at submitting themselves to a roasting in the first place.

But then Love Box was a bit like a lot of things. It was a bit like giving camcorders to primary school kids who’d been fed hallucinogens and displaying the results on the Piccadilly Circus videowall. Occasionally it veered close to genius. Often it just veered.

These stylistic oscillations, we should say, were also wholly intentional: Love Box in Your Living Room was "inspired by" the director Adam Curtis’s distinctive video theses. If you know Curtis’s work – most recently the wonderful TraumaZone, about the collapse of Russian communism and democracy – then you’ll have recognised Love Box as a pitch-perfect parody. The Curtis method is to use fast cuts and dissonant archive material to mimic the state of endless distraction that is living in an always-on media land.

Enfield and his director Danny Kleinman (who tellingly is best known for his work in commercials) are plainly Curtis fans – much love and effort had gone in to aping his technique.

The problem, I suspect, is if you watched Love Box knowing zip all about Adam Curtis. In that case it might just have made you feel like you’d gone 10 rounds on a VR Waltzer. Add in Enfield’s pun-laden voiceover ("Muffin was a drug mule"), indeed his pun-laden theorising about the BBC itself ("Are the BBC’s enemies Right? Is the BBC Left? What’s Left of the BBC?") and you were left with Monkey on a Typewriter telly: there were moments of real insight ("The more inclusive the BBC became the more it worried about being not inclusive enough") but there was a lot of errant nonsense too.

The irony was that to truly appreciate what Enfield and Kleinman were trying to do you had to pay very careful attention, yet the programme was deliberately confounding. It would have been better served as two half hours, with time between to pause for thought. Then again, perhaps the BBC schedule wouldn’t allow it.