De Emmony learned his trade on the studio floor of Spitting Image and the sitcom house, and his best work keeps a few people in a room and lets them talk. Reliable on television, sometimes better than that, never quite at home in a cinema.
Fi1m perspective
The parochial house on Craggy Island is a stage set with a window, a sofa and a door for people to arrive through, and Father Ted (1995) is at its funniest when nobody can leave. De Emmony directed the studio episodes of the final series, and he understood what the form wants: keep the trap visible and fill it with guests who do not fit. Kenneth Williams's flat in Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa (2006) is the same room with the laughter taken out: a man, a desk, a door that shuts. He has been directing that room, in one shape or another, for three decades.
He came to it sideways. He started at Spitting Image as a sculptor and art director, was sent on a multi-camera directing course, and ended up directing series of the show in the early 1990s. From puppets he moved to people who behaved like them, on the sixth series of Red Dwarf (1993) and then Father Ted in 1998. In the 2000s he became a drama director, on Sally Wainwright's At Home with the Braithwaites (2000), Debbie Horsfield's Cutting It (2002) and single plays: Fantabulosa, God on Trial (2008), The Wipers Times (2013). Three features came in between, West Is West (2010), Love Bite (2012) and Four Kids and It (2020), and then the series again, The Nest (2020), The Larkins (2021–2022) and Vigil (2021).
What he does well is stay out of the way of a good actor in a small space. We did not expect Fantabulosa to move us, since Martyn Hesford's script is a list of famous moments filmed in order, and it did, in the silence after Michael Sheen's Williams shuts his front door and the voice stops. De Emmony holds on the flat and offers no help, and the stillness is the performance. That is also the limit of him. He films what he is given, in the order he is given it, and when the writing is thin the picture is thin with it; years go by between scenes with nothing to mark them. The same holds, differently, on Vigil: the submarine carries three episodes, and once Tom Edge's plot stops deserving its setting, the direction does not step in to rescue it.
We have not reviewed the features, and the general verdict on them is broad and flat, which is roughly what you would expect when a studio-floor director is handed a wider frame and a budget for effects. It does not trouble us much. Hand him a room, a door and one actor worth watching and he will give you an evening. Hand him a submarine and he will do what he can.
Biography
Andy De Emmony is a British film and television director. He began his career as a puppet maker and later director on the satirical series Spitting Image, before moving into other comedy work.
He directed episodes of Red Dwarf series VI in 1993 and contributed to Father Ted in 1998, for which he shared a BAFTA Television Award for Best Comedy in 1999. His other television credits include The Bletchley Circle, Vigil and The Larkins. He has also directed feature films such as West Is West (2010), Love Bite (2012) and Four Kids and It (2020).
