Brilliant Baz gives us the best comedy in a DECADE
Faithless Virgin Media One, Monday
The Completely MadeUp Adventures of Dick Turpin Apple TV+, streaming
Big Life Fix RTÉ, Wednesday
The single greatest piece of acting you’ll see this or any other year came courtesy of Dawn Bradfield. Recently dead, thanks to an altercation with an ice cream van, she is lying in an open coffin in the living room of her house. One of the mourners accidentally spills a glass of red wine over her, and Bradfield doesn’t flinch. Not even a millimetre. How she did it I will never know, but it is beyond impressive.
So, as it turns out, is Faithless, the new Virgin Media One sitcom in which she appears for mere minutes. Once her death has been dealt with, we pitch headlong into the aftermath. Her husband, Sam, is a feckless, unemployable writer who now finds himself the lone parent to three daughters. Like writer and star Baz Ashmawy,
Sam is Egyptian Irish, and while the comedy is broad in many ways, underneath it all is a gentle and not even remotely in-your-face look at grief, faith, culture, identity, and much more besides.
Ashmawy, better known for travelogues, and home makeover and quiz shows, proves an actor of surprising tenderness when it is called for, but also fully at home when portraying chaos, and lots of that unfolds.
His eldest daughter barely can tolerate him, The middle one, in reaction to her mother’s death, clings to whatever comfort she can find and rediscovers the hijab, while the youngest girl reminded me a lot of Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine, blithely just getting on with life in her own optimistic little world.
Unusually, even in the first episode, supporting characters are brilliantly fleshed out. Sam’s brother-in-law Cormac (the always excellent Art Campion, who played the trendy priest in Derry Girls) is casually racist without even knowing it, while his dad Mo (Raad Rawi) thinks every problem can be solved by throwing money at it.
The standout character, though, is
Sam’s brother Zein. It took me a minute to figure out where I knew him from, but Zein is played by English actor Amir El-Masry, last seen as an MI5 spook in BBC1’s Vigil before Christmas. What threw me was his almost perfect Irish accent, but also the cocky swagger he brings to a suburban Lothario who seems magnetically attractive to women.
We have no record of any note with comedy made on home soil, and usually leave it to Channel 4 to tell our funny stories for it. You’d have to commend Virgin for taking a chance on this one, and Ashmawy for getting what has been a pet project to fruition.
Like all the best comedy, there is darkness here as well as light, and some of the laughs will make you wince too. Overall, though, there is emotional resonance even in the black humour, and already it is the best homegrown comedy since Trivia a decade ago.
In a week that makes us feel like we’re being spoiled, Apple TV+ also offered a new comedy, The Completely Made-Up Adventures Of Dick Turpin. Noel Fielding, who I find irritating on The Great British Bake Off, plays the notorious highwayman as a rather fey vegan who turns his back on his family butcher business to become an altogether different sort of rogue than legend usually has it.
After accidentally killing the leader of a gang, Turpin finds out they hated him, and now want a new leader. This motley crew – including an earnest woman with anxiety issues who sees robbing the rich as an act of social justice, and a butch Friar Tuck type who discovers he loves the freedom of wearing smocks – soon are threatened by the local aristocrat (Downton’s Hugh Bonneville hamming it up with obvious delight), who had been taking 95% of the gang’s pickings and still wants the same cut. There’s a touch of Horrible Histories about it, and some of the jokes land with resounding thuds, but there’s a lot here to enjoy, not least young Irish actress Kiri Flaherty, playing a wise-beyond-heryears barmaid in the village pub.
If the weather is as bad this week as it was on Friday, an afternoon in front of the fire with the entire series would do you good.
That certainly was the case with the return of Big Life Fix on RTÉ One, in which engineers try to come up with solutions to improve the lives of people living with disabilities. In the first episode, one engineer invented a walker with air suspension to help a woman with Parkinson’s continue her favourite pastime, running.
The best bit, though, was a computer games rig designed for Dáire Gorman, the 12-year-old boy you might remember from a video clip of him crying during the singing of You’ll Never Walk Alone at Anfield, and the subsequent trip he made to meet Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp and many of his heroes on the team.
Dáire was born with a condition that limited growth of his arms and legs, but there is not a hint of bitterness in him. His gratitude for what everyone involved did for him in making it easier for him to play video games, do his homework on screen, and play music, was wondrously heartfelt.
It was the programme of the week.