Shane Meadows, the acclaimed director of gritty, working class dramas ‘This Is England’ and ‘Somers Town’ is taking a radical new direction with his upcoming movie. ‘Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee’ stars Paddy Considine as the titular Donk, a music industry roadie hoping to make it big with his new discovery – a Nottingham rapper played by real life MC Scor-zay-zee. What’s different from his previous films is that Meadows himself appears in this one, as the director of a mock documentary about the hapless wannabe music mogul.

The laughs come as Considine’s character begins to see the director as confident, forgetting he’s being filmed and opening up (a little too graphically) about his relationship problems.

Critics who’ve seen ‘Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee’ have likened it to the seminal ‘This Is Spinal Tap’, the first film to gain the term mockumentary (or “rockumentary” as fictional documentarian Marti DeBergi describes it). Directed by Rob Reiner, the 1984 cult hit follows a spoof English heavy metal band, long past their prime, as they attempted to crack the American market with a series of disaster prone gigs, and ill-thought out albums – shops refuse to stock the sexist ’Smell the Glove’ record sleeve and its replacement is printed entirely in black, leading lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel to ponder: “How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.”

‘This Is Spinal Tap’ is regarded by many as one of the funniest films of all time and it’s certainly one of the most quoted (although Liam Gallagher allegedly stormed out of a concert when he discovered the band were just actors!) Though the original script was written by Reiner, its stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer were responsible for many of its most memorable lines, as many of the scenes were improvised by the cast. The trio have gone on to make the improvised mockumentary their own with a string of successful films that follow the Spinal Tap formula.

Beginning with the rarely screened ‘Waiting For Guffman’, which focussed on a small town amateur dramatics company, Guest and co (with the addition of comic actor Eugene Levy) found humour in the minutiae of people’s personality quirks, rather than big gags with setups and payoffs. This was best illustrated in 2000’s ‘Best In Show’ as bloodhound owner Harlan Pepper explains, for the camera, his childhood talent: “I used to be able to name every nut that there was. And it used to drive my mother crazy… I'd say, ‘Peanut. Hazelnut. Cashew nut. Macadamia nut.’ She'd say, ‘Would you stop naming nuts!’"

The team’s final mockumentary (before a switch to conventional comedy with ‘For Your Consideration’) was a lampooning of the US folk revival in ‘A Mighty Wind’. As with Spinal Tap, the actors used their own musical abilities to write and perform almost-believable parodies of the genre, with songs like ‘Just That Kinda Day’ by The New Main Street Singers, Mitch & Mickey’s ‘Killington Hill’ and ‘Old Joe’s Place’ and ‘Corn Wine’ by The Folksmen, who performed as support for Spinal Tap’s recent ‘World Tour’.

Prior to Spinal Tap, Monty Python had often used the mockumentary style in their TV series, culminating in Eric Idle’s affectionate 1978 Beatles parody ‘All You Need Is Cash’, which was just as much a comedy about documentary making as it was about the Fab Four. George Harrison himself pops up as a stuffy, grey haired interviewer, reporting on an assault on Stig from The Rutles by the girlfriend of a Hell’s Angel (played by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood).

Meadows isn’t the first film maker to attempt a mockumentary about modern music. Both DJ culture and rap have come in for similar spoof treatments, with varied degrees of success.

Comedian Chris Rock penned and starred in 1993’s ‘CB4’, a hip hop parody loosely based on the careers of controversial rap outfits N.W.A. and 2 Live Crew. While it relied on gross out gags for much of its humour, the film also tried to make a point against the phony gangster posturing of many of the genre’s artists. As the father of Rock’s character points out: “You ain't tough. You ain't from the street, I'm from the street. And only somebody who wasn't would think it was something to glorify.”