THE IMDB summary for the first season of American comedian Tim Renkow’s comedy Jerk (BBC1), broadcast in 2019 on UK-only online channel BBC3 and then BBC1, reads: “Tim has cerebral palsy, which means that people judge him and his crumpled tissue of a body. But usually they judge him wrongly. Because what they don’t realise is that inside that severely disabled, fragile body is a bit of an asshole.”
He’s lazy, selfish, work-shy and spiteful. He behaves appallingly to almost everyone he comes into contact with, whether he knows them or not. He pulls outrageous scams and says things no one else would say. He delights in guilt-tripping timid, PC do-gooders.
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He knows he’ll get away with all this and that there will never be any consequences. He regards his disability as a sort of superpower. He can do anything he wants, because he knows nobody would ever dare call out his bad behaviour, because of his disability.
In season one, that behaviour was pretty bad indeed. In an effort to get himself fired, he turned up for work barefoot and wearing pyjamas. When that didn’t work, he tore open his colleagues’ payslips and loudly announced what everyone was earning, causing them to turn on one another.
Spotting an able-bodied man using the disabled toilet in a café, he poured a glass of water down the front of his trousers to make it look like he’d peed himself while waiting for his turn. In another episode, he pretended to be a refugee.
This is Jerk’s sole comic idea — disabled man behaves shockingly and obnoxiously to everyone around him, just for the fun of it — and Renkow and his co-writers Shaun Pye and Stu Richards battered us over the head with it again and again across those initial episodes until it hurt. Repetition didn’t make it any funnier.
A sharp comedy series about a disabled person calling out the patronising attitudes and assumptions they encounter every day would be welcome. Jerk is definitely not that comedy series.
It’s obviously aiming for dark, edgy and challenging; personally, I found the first season crass, mean-spirited and nasty.
The second, showing in double bills, serves up more of the same, only this time around the scripts are particularly scattershot.
In the first episode, Tim arrives back in the UK and, after a brush with an airport immigration officer, hooks up with his carer worker and chief enabler Ruth (Sharon Rooney), who’s even more unpleasant and self-centred than he is. Once again, Tim imposes himself on Idris (Rob Madin), the meek, long-suffering friend he and Ruth treat like a doormat.
Tim decides to enrol himself on a postgraduate course tor the sole purpose, it seems, of bagging some free accommodation. But seeing as Tim can’t be bothered to make it up a flight of stairs to register, the deadline passes and he ends up crashing down in Idris’s cramped house. Ruth moves in too.
He attracts the attention of a gullible, super-woke student who identifies as pansexual and shows her right-on credentials by only snorting cocaine through ethically sourced straws — the one barely passable joke in the whole thing.
Naturally, Tim winds everybody up by identifying as able-bodied and defying anyone to tell him he’s not. For a series that sets out to puncture the smugness of those who would stereotype people with disabilities, Jerk is quite happy to dole out a few tired, crude stereotypes of its own.
Episode two is even more threadbare. Tim visits a gym run by an aggressively positive Paralympian and finds himself pressed into a challenge race against his nemesis Keifer, played by comedian and Britain’s Got Talent winner Lee Ridley.
Lorraine Bracco from The Sopranos returns as Tim’s non-PC mother, who offers him inappropriate advice in video calls.
Jerk has received gushingly positive reviews from the UK critics — largely, I suspect, because being seen to not like it wouldn’t be the PC thing to do.
If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.
Jerk *
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