(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you were going to set out to be a fabled and mythologised highwayman in 1800s England, the first thing you’d do is make sure you had a killer wardrobe, a haute couture fashion statement that would make your victims gasp with sartorial envy, right?
Or perhaps, you’d ensure that those you robbed were surveyed after the act of thievery had taken place to ensure that the next time you flagged down a stagecoach, hopefully heaving with wealth-enhancing riches, that you fired a warning shot instead of just getting one of your gang to dance unmissably in a fabulously colourful, gilded costume?
No, on either count? Then, my friends, you likely would find yourself rejected from the gang of one Dick Turpin (Noel Fielding), a butcher’s son who decides that a life of garroting and slicing and dicing is not for him and that he wants some excitement, preferably with panache and the chance to really make a statement.
The real Dick Turpin did, in fact, set out to do all those things, his exploits glorified in a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth some 100 years after his hanging death in 1739 when his pell-mell race from the law finally and rather fatally caught up with him.
Given that century gap between the deeds done and the deeds written, you might suspect there was some invention thrown liberally in with the facts, such as they may have been, and it’s in this fertile imaginative space that Fielding makes gleefully merry with The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin.
A comedic delight that gets the tone just right at just about every juncture, The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin takes a sprinkling of key tentpole facts and has post modern fun with it, throwing in some decidedly modern perspectives on very olde England in an age where taking a coach from city to city was fraught with all kinds of danger.
Danger abounds in this more hilarious take on Turpin’s life too, with the would-be legendary highwayman, who rather wonderfully has a writer embedded with him, who chronicles all the somewhat inept but sort of successful exploits of Turpin’s gang which includes fashion tragic and avuncularly enthusiastic babysitter Moose Pleck (Marcus Wootton), Honesty Barebone (Duayne Boachie) who’s been gunning for criminal notoriety since he was seven, and Nicholas “Nell” Brazier (Ellie White) who’s the only one who takes the whole gang thing completely seriously.
To clarify, Turpin and Honesty and Moose do take it seriously but they also like to dress nicely and they have stars in their eyes that not only will they be brilliant thieves but they will be known far and wide for their derring-do.
They are, in effect, keen to have PR glow up their highwaymanic deeds while Nell, who crossdresses as a man since no one takes a woman criminal seriously, simply wants to be the best gang member possible, leaping at one point to another gang who’s higher up the rankings than Turpin’s is.
Yes, in this fantastically funny melding of dubious historical fact and modern sensibility, which balances on just the right side of the ridiculous, gangs are ranked, and corruption abounds in the form of thief-taker Jonathan Wilde (Hugh Bonneville) who’s a private individual charged to arrest criminals before there were actual police and the Syndicate, an enterprise on the wrong side of the law headed by the gorgeously coiffured and mercilessly intent Lady Helen Gwinear (Tamsin Greig).
It’s a wild and woolly time, the perfect setting for a show like The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin which manages, in the midst of all the quips, oneliners and archly silly observations of the wild strangeness and hypocrisy of eighteen century life to seed some real humanity into proceedings.
It doesn’t go overboard on introspective characterisation since that would interrupt the flow of a sparklingly crisp and highly clever script which manages to be silly and serious simultaneously (more silly than serious to be fair but it works) but these people are fleshed out enough that The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin isn’t just jokes and tomfoolery but also some neatly affecting flickers of meaningful humanity.
And that’s all for the good because as you see Moose come alive under Turpin’s caring leadership and Nell discover that being a little off the mainstream isn’t such a bad thing – at one point, Honesty goes all rhyming rogue trying to find a missing Turpin, and while Nell looks scornfully askance, she has to admit that his unorthodox gambit works – and Turpin himself become the touchy-feely leader he always wanted to be, in French silk no less, the show feels beautifully and fully formed.
This perfectly wrought show is exhibit A that you can be absolutely bonkers bananas and still create something super intelligent, very funny and meaningfully human that amuses no end to the point where you’ll be laughing out loud more than you expect to in any comedy and still care a ton about people who simply want to do something meaningfully lasting and look damn good doing it.
The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin streams on AppleTV+