Fackham Hall – This Fast-Paced, Humorous Downton Abbey Spoof That's Delightfully Lightweight.

It could be the sense of end times around us: after years of dormancy, the spoof is staging a comeback. The recent season witnessed the revival of this lighthearted genre, which, when done well, mocks the pretensions of overly serious genre with a torrent of heightened tropes, visual jokes, and ridiculously smart wordplay.

Frivolous eras, so it goes, give rise to deliberately shallow, gag-packed, pleasantly insubstantial entertainment.

A Recent Entry in This Silly Resurgence

The latest of these silly send-ups comes in the form of Fackham Hall, a takeoff on the British period drama that needles the highly satirizable self-importance of wealthy English costume epics. Penned in part by stand-up performer Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O'Hanlon, the feature has plenty of material to mine and uses all of it.

Starting with a ridiculous beginning to a outrageous finale, this enjoyable upper-class adventure fills every one of its runtime with puns and routines running the gamut from the puerile up to the genuinely funny.

A Send-Up of The Gentry and Staff

Much like Downton, Fackham Hall presents a pastiche of overly dignified aristocrats and overly fawning servants. The story focuses on the hapless Lord Davenport (played by a delightfully mannered Damian Lewis) and his book-averse wife, Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston). Following the loss of their four sons in separate calamitous events, their hopes now rest on securing unions for their offspring.

One daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), has accomplished the aristocratic objective of betrothal to the suitable kinsman, Archibald (a wonderfully unctuous Tom Felton). However once she backs out, the onus falls upon the unattached elder sister, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), described as a "dried-up husk already and and possesses radically progressive notions about a woman's own mind.

Where the Laughs Works Best

The spoof achieves greater effect when joking about the suffocating norms placed on Edwardian-era females – a topic frequently explored for po-faced melodrama. The trope of idealized femininity offers the best punching bags.

The storyline, as is fitting for a deliberately silly parody, is of lesser importance to the jokes. The co-writer keeps them maintaining a pleasantly funny rate. Included is a homicide, a bungled inquiry, and an illicit love affair featuring the plucky street urchin Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe) and Rose.

The Constraints of Pure Silliness

It's all in lighthearted fun, though that itself has limitations. The amplified absurdity characteristic of the genre might grate after a while, and the comic fuel for this specific type diminishes in the space between a skit and feature.

Eventually, audiences could long to return to stories with (at least a modicum of) reason. But, it's necessary to respect a sincere commitment to the craft. Given that we are to entertain ourselves relentlessly, we might as well find the humor in it.