Jamie Demetriou: known for his role as Bus Rodent in everybody’s favourite Fleabag (yes, I have just re-watched it for the fourth time), and the BAFTA-winning Steth Lets Flats, written and starring Demetriou himself. Although I’ve never seen the latter, with this track record, it’s safe to say I was feeling optimistic going into his latest production, A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou, which came out at the end of February on Netflix.
As you can probably guess from the title, the 52-minute comedy special follows a human’s life cycle, from inside the womb (yep, you heard that right), to the after life, with Demetriou occupying a series of different personas throughout. It’s split up into three acts: Youth, Adulthood and Golden Years, with the odd visit back to the womb in between.
whether you can actually call it a comedy remains to be seen
It all starts off a bit metaphysical. At first the frame is completely black, then we get closer and closer to Demetriou as a disturbing, long-fingered foetus in the womb. Accompanying the visual track is a singing narrator who tells the audience that we’re about to delve into ‘a journey through different lives.’
There are two parts of the show in particular that are objectively funny. The first sees Demetriou as a Scottish contestant on a Love Island-esque reality series. Given a fake tan and drawn-on hairline, he enters Kiss Villa and expertly parodies all the best bits of reality TV: the generically attractive contestants, the over-edited zoom ins onto their faces when something dramatic happens, and the shock when the big twist is revealed… that only two of the participants are actually attractive.
And then I’m afraid you have to wait until minute 43 before what is undeniably the best bit of the whole Netflix special. With his final persona, make up and prosthetics distort him so that he resembles an old man, which, paired with a fake body probably half the size of his real one, make him unrecognisable. In this section, Demetriou is ungracefully told he has two minutes left to live by a doctor who wants to do nothing but the bear minimum, so he lies there limply waiting to die.
His tangible body is then visited by the ghost of the man he was, Demetriou floating in to sing over his dead self, before he’s abruptly interrupted by a nurse undignifiedly chucking the body onto a table, and then into a bin since ‘the morgue’s a bit of a trek from here, innit.’
Don’t get me wrong, there are funny parts to this production, but whether you can actually call it a comedy remains to be seen – let’s just say my face remained unmoved for the majority of the 52 minutes. While it’s a nice idea to get a glimpse of different characters at different life stages, most of them were too niche to recognise in your own life, so it just felt more bizarre than funny, and left me with more questions than answers.