The Kemps: All True review – Spandau Ballet mockumentary may not be indestructible, but some of it is gold

The Kemps: All True (BBC Two) is one of the stranger programmes I’ve seen this year. It’s a spoof documentary about Martin and Gary Kemp, apparently inspired by the non-spoof, but very funny, Bros documentary from 2018. It’s mad, uneven and sometimes hilarious.

The premise is that the (real-life) comedian Rhys Thomas is making a film about Gary and Martin Kemp rebooting Spandau Ballet for 2020. The hour-long film goes over the Kemps’ (real-life) careers, with archive footage and interviews with the brothers interspersed with flights of comic fancy using a mixture of actors playing themselves, and actors playing fictional characters.

I use “premise” in the loosest possible sense, because there is barely a plot. The hook is really just a tenuous excuse for a series of near-sketches involving the Kemp brothers. Gary is the songwriter but more highly strung than the smooth Martin, who needs the money more. It reminded me of an extended version of Rock Profile, except with the real stars instead of Matt Lucas and David Walliams. In an early scene, the Kemps visit their “childhood home”, where an owner played by Simon Day initially mistakes them for Watchdog. Confusion averted, the brothers go upstairs to their old bedroom and prise open the floorboards, where they find Gary’s old “jazz mags” and the remains of Martin’s pet tortoise.

You get the gist. I found it simplest to imagine the whole thing as one of Thomas’s stand-up bits brought wackily to life. The Kemps drive around in a converted Piaggio Ape three-wheeler, in the back of which Gary has installed a tiny recording studio. They run a charity for old rock stars, whose headquarters’ structural integrity has been affected by a vole infestation. We learn about Gary’s aborted vegan meat business, Wonge, and see him defending it on the Today programme, where Nick Robinson plays himself, and Anna Maxwell Martin plays Gary’s business partner. There’s a character called Ross Kemp – “not that one” – a fictitious third brother who they employ as an accountant and who’s trying to get a new cryptocurrency off the ground.

The joke behind the jokes is that the Kemps have had such strange lives, between global chart success and acting careers, that almost anything is plausible. They played Ronnie and Reggie Kray in 1990’s forgotten film, The Krays, and Martin had a good time as Steve Owen in EastEnders, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Martin would try to crowdfund a sci-fi British gangster flick that brought together Dick Turpin, Al Capone and the Hatton Garden robbers.

Rag’n’Bone Man might well sing on a comeback charity single, although he probably wouldn’t insist on having Calgon in his rider, as Tony Way’s portrayal does.

By its nature, The Kemps: All True is wildly self-indulgent, and it would have benefited from a tighter edit. Some of the jokes are outright groan-worthy, especially towards the end, where things start to fray. But it’s redeemed by Gary and Martin’s eagerness to show they are Good Sports, which gives the whole thing a puppyish likability, and you have to admire the energy that has been sunk into such a bonkers idea. It’s not all true, but some of it is gold.