Campus (TV series)

Campus
The Campus title screen.
Genre	British sitcom
Written by	Robert Harley James Henry Oriane Messina Gary Parker Victoria Pile Richard Preddy Fay Rusling Christian Sandino-Taylor
Directed by	Victoria Pile
Starring	Andy Nyman Joseph Millson Sara Pascoe Will Adamsdale Dolly Wells Lisa Jackson Jonathan Bailey Katherine Ryan
Theme music composer	Trellis
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of series	1
No. of episodes	pilot + 6
Production
Executive producer	Caroline Leddy
Producer	Victoria Pile
Editor	Christian Sandino-Taylor
Running time	25m (pilot), 50m
Production company	Monicker Pictures
Original release
Network	Channel 4
Release	6 November 2009 (2009-11-06)
Related
Green Wing

Campus is a semi-improvised British sitcom set in the fictitious Kirke University. It is created by the team behind the comedy sketch show Smack the Pony and hospital-based sitcom Green Wing, lead by Victoria Pile who acts as co-writer, producer and director. The show follows the lives of some of the staff, in particular the power-crazed and callous vice chancellor Jonty de Wolfe, played by Andy Nyman.

Campus was first broadcast as a television pilot on Channel 4 on 6 November, 2009, as part of the channel's Comedy Showcase season of comedy pilots. A full series has since been commissioned, and commenced airing on 5 April 2011, with the first episode being a re-shot and expanded version of the pilot. When first broadcast most critics viewed it negatively, claiming it was too similar to Green Wing and that much of the humour was offensive. However, others praised the show's dark humour and surrealism.

Plot

Main article: List of Campus episodes

Campus revolves around the lives of the staff of Kirke University, a plateglass university under the control of vice chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Nyman). Wolfe is described as, "a comedy grotesque", who wants Kirke and himself to become greater, no matter how it is done. He himself often gives out what he sees as the harsh truth to people, but what others consider to be offensive and even bigoted remarks.

Among Wolfe's plans is to exploit the success of the newly promoted senior mathematics lecturer Imogen Moffat (Lisa Jackson) and her hit book The Joy of Zero, by ordering her to write a sequel and the other university staff to also write best selling books. His targets include English literature professor Matt Beer (Joseph Millson), an unrepentant womaniser, who does hardly any work and who is assisted by postgraduate student Flatpack (Jonathan Bailey), a man who reads hardly any books and instead is keen on sport. Matt therefore tries to come up with ideas, but instead spends more time annoying Imogen and mechanical engineering lecturer Lydia Tennant (Dolly Wells), who is annoyed by Imogen's success.

Elsewhere in the university, Nicole Huggins (Sara Pascoe), an accommodations officer, makes an error in the university's accounting system. As a result, everyone in the university has received twice as much pay as normal, giving away over £800,000. It is left to university accountant Jason Armitage (Will Adamsdale) to try to retrieve the money.

Production

Campus shares connections with an earlier Channel 4 sitcom Green Wing. It has six of the same writers: Victoria Pile, Robert Harley, James Henry, Oriane Messina, Richard Preddy and Fay Rusling. It also has the same composer, Jonathan Whitehead. Campus makes references to Green Wing. For example, the motto of Kirke University is "With wings." Filming for most of the external shots took place during the Summer months of 2010, at the University of Bath campus,.

Reception

Pilot

The pilot received a mixed reception when it was broadcast. Jane Simon in the Daily Mirror wrote that: "There are some very funny moments but the staff at Kirke are perhaps a little too eccentric for their own good. It's as if the challenge was how weird can we make these people and still have them breathe oxygen? Vice-chancellor Jonty (Andy Nyman) comes on like a more megalomaniac David Brent, while womanising English lecturer Matt Beer (think about it) and speccy maths star Imogen Moffat (Joseph Millson and Lisa Jackson) have big shoes to fill if they're to be Campus's answer to Guy [Secretan] and Caroline [Todd, characters from Green Wing]."

Sam Wollaston of The Guardian disliked Campus, saying: "Ah, I see, Campus (Channel 4) is taking that path: the offensive one. There's nothing wrong with that; offence can be good, if done artfully. There's plenty of it here - Jonty's bigotry and English literature lecturer Matt Beer's (comedy name, like beer mat, but the other way round!) sex pesting. There is talk of rape by pigs, and odd-shaped anal cavities that lead to odd-shaped stools. I'm just not convinced it is being done very artfully. It seems more like offence for the sake of offence. Compare it with the beautifully crafted filth of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It. If he is the Michelangelo of offence, this is Rolf Harris."

The characters in Campus. Top row, left-to-right, Flatpack (Bailey), Lydia (Wells), Imogen (Jackson), Nicole (Pascoe) and Jason (Adamsdale); Bottom row, left-to-right, Matt (Millson), Jonty (Nyman) and George (Ryan).

However, Caitlin Moran of The Times praised it saying she hoped a full series would be made. She wrote of the pilot: "Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character - a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn - wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw."

Series 1

The first series also had a mixed reaction with most critics giving poor reviews. Tim Dowling in The Guardian wrote that: "The central problem with Campus is that the gossamer-thin thread that tethered Green Wing to a plot has here completely snapped. Everything is too surreal and unmoored. Vice-chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman) is meant to be monstrously ambitious, but he's just monstrous. He's all over the place - shouting out the window, jumping out of cupboards, putting on accents and indulging in freeform sexist and/or racist rants. His character isn't identifiably pathetic, cynical, inadequate or insane; he isn't even a character, really."

Graeme Thomson wrote for The Arts Desk that, "Campus tilled familiar ground with diminishing returns and zero warmth", while Dan Owen for Obsessed With Film about Wolfe that: "He's David Brent meets Charles Manson. It's just a shame his performance is just one of many bonkers turns, because there's so much weirdness it almost becomes suffocating."

There were positive reviews of Campus. Rob Clyne wrote for Sabotage Times that: "The overall picture of Campus isn't yet a clear one. At times it feels a little like a few sketches have been slung together, especially as a lot of the Jonty stuff comes out of nowhere. But these are only small gripes – Campus is hugely original, some may say it is genre defining. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but this is pure entertainment which doesn't need to fall under a specific category."

Louisa Mellor from Den of Geek attacked some of the complaints against the show saying: "The complaint about implausibility in comedy always baffles me. No, you wouldn't meet people like these in real life. Yes, they are unrealistic. We are all talking about sitcom aren't we? Jonty, Matt, Lydia et al are comic creations, little grains of truth worked up into misshaped pearls of comedy weirdness. It might help to place it on the family tree of Kids in the Hall, Big Train or (at a fairly hefty push) Monty Python, rather than as having descended from the much more straightforward worlds of The Royle Family or The Office."

On BBC Radio 4 Extra's comedy discussion show What's So Funny? host Rufus Hound and guest Dom Joly both enjoyed the show. Joly described the show as, "one of the funniest things I've seen in three or four years. It me laugh so much, so quickly."

References

General

• Wolf, Ian. "Campus". British Comedy Guide. Retrieved 9 January, 2009. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
• Wolf, Ian. "Production Details, Plus Regular Cast and Crew". British Comedy Guide. Retrieved 7 November, 2009. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)

Specific

External links

• 'Campus' on Channel 4
• Campus at British Comedy Guide