Review of The Love Box in Your Living Room

Whitehouse and Enfield are the exact level of daft satirist needed to give the Beeb its centenary drubbing. They're allowed to go to town here, for better or worse, and what you get in "Love Box" is essentially a kaleidoscopically dense Adam Curtis parody. Whether it succeeds or fails depends entirely on how familiar with Curtis's idiosyncratically existential documentaries you are. If you're not it feels like a wild mash of callbacks, surreal asides, skits, parodies, cameos, impressions, in-jokes, found footage and title cards. The most successful part for me were the parodies (Joe Dempsie in an avant-garde 70s genre show was the best) and as it hurtled towards the conclusion I was rather stunned to discover it was actually casting itself as a eulogy for the BBC rather than a celebration of it. In amidst the clutter and silliness there was a serious point being made about the ownership of media in the UK and for whose benefit it operates. However, not to worry, this is more about foolishness and nostalgia than hard interrogation. This is Smashy and Nicey, not Curtis himself, after all.