TV: The return of the Mack
PICK OF THE DAY
NOT GOING OUT BBC1, 9pm
WE’VE been staying in with Lee Mack’s hit sitcom for more than a decade now (longer if you don’t count the brief hiatus when the BBC naively cancelled the show) – and we’ve been laughing all the way.
In fact, it’s now the BBC’s longestrunning sitcom currently on air, and it’s already been commissioned for another series.
Starring Lee Mack and Sally Bretton as flat-mates Lee and Lucy, the comedy always hinged on the will-they-won’t-they romance.
So who would have thought the sitcom could bridge the process of growing up, now that Lee and Lucy are married and live in the suburbs with three kids?
Even mega-hit Friends was cancelled the moment the stars got too old for dating.
Having morphed into an Outnumbered-style sitcom, at least the title still works – who’s going out when they’ve got three young kids?
As series nine kicks off, Lucy has a cool new hairdo, but otherwise everything remains the same. Which means that Lee Mack performs his usual astonishing feat of levering several gags a minute into the storyline, bouncing off Sally Bretton, who makes a wonderful sparring partner.
Sometimes it feels like his stand-up show has been wedged into a sitcom, but the one-liners work.
In this episode, Lucy’s father Geoffrey (Geoffrey Whitehead) reluctantly agrees to let Lucy and Lee look after their house while they are away.
All they need to do is clear up the builder’s mess, and well, you know, not burn the house down. Cue plenty of laugh-out-loud moments as everything descends into comedy chaos.