Fackham Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway
Period drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback . This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun , starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues . Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun. The latest of these goofy parodies, which premi...