Brian, Terry and an awful lot of lolly

PETER YORK ON ADS No 132: WALL'S FEAST

, Victor Lewis-Smith, the Haysi Fantayzee of television criticism, once pulled off one of the funniest practical jokes ever. The funniest part of this privately circulated, bootleg tape is a bit of audio-verite where Lewis-Smith telephoned the noted maverick art critic Brian Sewell at home, and talked to him in his own remarkable voice. There's a totally hysterical quality as Sewell moves from mystification, through culture shock, to very uncool rattiness.

Now, however, Brian Sewell has gone with the flow. He's entered the area of celebrity self-parody, appearing nude on his book-jacket and doing comic voice-overs.

Wall's Feast is a high-concept commercial, rather like one of those films dreamt up by a Hollywood agent (Schwarzenegger and De Vito as twins!), only at a somewhat more modest level. The concept here is: Brian Sewell and Terry Christian! Young, dumb Northern cred itself counterpoints the exquisite end of European civilisation!

The stars are in voice-over only, and the visual is short and cheaply made in the Monty Python/early Terry Gilliam animation manner. So we have a pastiche version of a classical feast painting, with Sir Brian warbling on about "a feast of larks' tongues and swans' brains" and our Terry responding in character that a Feast is an ice-cream with knobby bits on the outside and squishy and chunky elements elsewhere. At this point the Victorian instructive pointing finger appears on screen to indicate the virtues of a sort of chocolate-covered woodchip lolly, and there's some slow progress at the Feast table with a certain amount of eye-rolling, falling over, sicking- up and gobbling sounds.

The Terry voice calls the Brian voice "your imperial verbosity", the animated hand clears the animated table and the product positioning statement appears on screen: "A veritable banquet." More like a quick fumble, however.