Posted in: Movies | Tagged: bbc, bill, entertainment, film, horrible histories, yonderland

'Bill' Is My Favourite Film Of The Year – But It's Not Being Released In The USA

The film begins with a sixteenth century boyband called Mortal Coil. They literally shuffle off the stage.

Once upon a time there was a kids television show on the BBC. Loosely based on the popular kids book series that teaches history in an irreverent, it gathered a collection of writers and comedy actors who you might have seen playing bit parts in other shows. It was called Horrible Histories and it was extraordinary. It won a BAFTA Children's Awards with its first series in 2009 and then won Best Sketch Show in the British Comedy Awards the next year, beating all the shows meant for adults. It was truly brilliant, irreverent, silly, clever, and often moving, representing the history of the world in bite-sized, easily digestible and relatable formats. It was post Python and post Blackadder and it really worked.

After the show finished, the writers and actors reunited to make the fantasy show Yonderland, which I've described to friends as Labyrinth made by Monty Python for the British audience of Doctor Who.

But they had another project they were working on for BBC Films. Bill, just released in the UK, Ireland, Australia… and that's it. It aims to tell the story of what William Shakespeare was doing in his "missing" years, between leaving Stratford Upon Avon for London and becoming a recognised playwright.

And it's an incredible accomplishment.

So many seem to have their take on what Shakespeare got up to, whether he was Shakespeare or someone else, were did he get his educataion, inspiration and talent. Given some of the more ludicrous ideas, suggesting that he was a failed rock luteist, who tried to write plays about, as he tells Marlowe in a bar, "bum jokes, people hitting each other with sticks" and ending up embroiled in a Catholic plot by Prince Philip The Second Of Spain (his full name is used at every possible occasion) to kill Queen Elizabeth makes as much sense as any of them.

The film wears its influences on its sleeves. The two guardsmen in Monty Python And The Holy Grail are replicated down to their armour and costumes, and provide beats between scenes, while the woman collecting the dead also manages to take one away while he's "not ready", while the main cast play multiple parts. The court of Queen Elizabeth from Blackadder II are touched on with prickly personalities and obsequious earls. But what it is most successful at is creating its own world, from the moment, Dick Whittington style, Shakespeare walks into London, his knapsack knotted on a stick over his shoulder, which easily slips off the stick in the hands of a thief, leaving Shakespeare to discover the city, in innocence, carrying an empty stick behind him.

That St Philip The Second Of Spain successfully disguises himself with a fake moustache over his real moustache defines this world. People can get away with anything, murder even, as long as it's funny.

Damian Lewis kicks the film off as English agents Bill Hawkins, trying to steal Spanish treasure. He is instantly forgotten, save for popping up occasionally to remind the audience that everyone has forgotten him.

So we have the over the top Simon Farnaby, playing both the cowardly, overprivileged, Earl Of Crawley Croydon, and the clumsy idiotic Spanish assassin Juan. Matthew Baynton as the put upon Bill Shakespeare, but also the elderly double bearded advisor to Queen Elizabeth.

Jim Howick as both Christopher Marlowe, joining Bill selling vegetables while dressed up as them, but also Gabriel, the Spanish master of disguise who finds a calling when acting in one of Shakespeare's plays – and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it turn in city security, Martha Howe-Douglas as hard-pressed Anne Hathaway, but also the too-keen body gatherer, Ben Willbond as Prince Phillip The Second Of Spain, but also Earl of Southampton with lots of money and pomp, and Lawrence Rickard as the spymaster of the court, Francis Walsingham, the evil anal passage torturer Lope, Croydon's put upon serf who always ends up being stabbed, a great Customs official unable to see what is in front of his eyes, until it stabs him, an earl who always speaks out of turn, and a dancing guard getting down to the trumpets. Yup, he's versatile.

One of my favourite gags is a poignant one, Shakespeare standing on the stage of the empty Rose theatre, closed due to the plague, imagining the applause of the audience. Except it isn't applause, it is rainfall, and Bill gets drenched. The sound never changes, it's a wonderful example of slight of ear. But it then merged with the laughter of the audience in the cinema. We were suddenly the invisible audience in the Rose.

There is surprising audience growth too, as we are inclined to hate Walsingham for his attitude towards Catholics, as "unable to put on muscle mass" and equally "without backbone" but seeing his bigoted allegories as snakes and worms destroyed by a maid with knowledge of garden creatures, before hunting down Shakespeare as a suspected Catholic plotter, trampled underfoot by his own men – only for us to see him in a very different light by the end of the film, like Batman – without changing his nature one iota.

And that's what we become, William Shakespeare's first audience, seeing his frailty, enjoying his pratfalls and willing him to grow, to learn, succeed, and recognising the many almost and actual Shakespeare lines that riddle the script in a variety of different contexts. "The play's the thing" as a great way to indicate just how the Catholic plot might gain access to the palace. Oh and there's a certain password which could do with making a little snappier.

Oh and there's a song, there's got to be a song with this lot, and one in which ideas from about twenty of Shakespeare's later ideas get pushed into one play… " A Series Of Funny Misunderstandings". Oh look, here's a bit from it.

The film even manages to criticise itself for this, Queen Elizabeth, after watching a performance of a play that will never make the Folios, is told by Shakespeare that he has one or two more ideas. "Not all at once this time" she tells William. "It was very… dense." And Bill is that. Many plots, many characters, many gags, jokes, many everything, all squashed in together, but the slight parts made up for the characters being played by the same group of six actors. And a film that is devastatingly easy to fall in love with.

And I just did. There is no release date outside of UK, Ireland and Australia. It's time to start asking for one. Here are some trailers, clips, makings-of and the like…

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