Redefining cock and bull

Last night, sat in the plush and felicitously comfortable artier-than-thou cavern that is the South Bank’s National Film Theatre, I hoped to receive an answer to a question that had been puzzling me for a long time. I wanted to know just what Michael Winterbottom, the director of A Cock and Bull Story, was thinking when he decided to try to film The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the finest—and one of the craziest—books ever written.

Having now seen the film, and having listened to the entertainingly enlightening post-performance Q&A with Mr Winterbottom, I’m afraid I’m still not sure.

We were told that the idea for making ACABS (as all the cool kids are already calling it) came during the creation of 24 Hour Party People, Winterbottom’s previous project with Cock and Bull’s co-stars, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. With this in mind, I have to conclude that drugs must have been involved.

Whatever the inspiration, the result is a masterpiece.

That it is a masterpiece is all you really need to know, before hopping off to buy yourself some tickets. However, this isn’t the Sun, so I should probably elaborate. And besides, I haven’t even mentioned the word ‘unfilmable’ yet, without which, apparently, no review of A Cock and Bull Story is complete.

So here we go: Tristram Shandy is the most ‘unfilmable’ book ever penned. Incorporating startlingly long passages about noses, chapters written concurrently in Latin and English, long lines of asterisks, a completely black page, a ‘burnt’ page and ongoing real-time contemplation on the writing of the book itself into a motion picture is not generally a job for the mentally stable to consider. This is without even considering the fact that our ‘hero’ is yet to emerge from the womb for a vast chunk of the narration.

Originally the plan was to turn Tristram Shandy into a sitcom, but in adapting the 500-page book, writer Frank Cottrell Boyce only came out with 30 pages of remotely filmable script. This, and the nature of the original, led to A Cock and Bull Story becoming a film about making a film about a book about writing a book, all padded with assorted nonsense for good measure. Because technically none of this makes any sense, one needn’t have read the book to enjoy the film; indeed, knowledge of Steve Coogan’s career (on- and off-screen) is arguably of greater benefit.

Coogan’s interplay with Brydon, which segues between the charming and the absurd and back again, provides the main drive, with an impressive array of British comic talent from Dylan Moran to David Walliams and Stephen Fry proving admirable assistants.

The real achievement of A Cock and Bull Story, however, lies not in assembling such a sublime cast, nor in successfully working with the baffling original material, but rather in paying homage to it. A Cock and Bull Story is not so much the film of Tristram Shandy, it’s more Tristram Shandy in film form—an hilariously eccentric romp that captures the crazy mood of an 18th century pastor and relates it to a rollicking 21st century audience.

As one of Coogan’s roles in the film, (that of an actor called Steve Coogan), explained, Tristram Shandy is a post-modern novel written before there was a ‘modern’ to be ‘post’ about. And if that doesn’t get you to the cinema out of pure curiosity, nothing will.