Mitchell and Webb triumph in a very British sitcom
‘Mum’s gone for a wicker coffin. Reminds me of the baskets we used to serve pub food in. Dad’s like a giant scampi.” Pitch-black comedy (Channel 4) began with a death in the family and immediately found the funny side.
This series came galloping out of the sitcom stable with thoroughbred credentials: written by Simon Blackwell of The Thick of It and Peep Show pedigree, starring the latter’s double act of David Mitchell and Robert Webb. It didn’t disappoint.
Failed lawyer and divorcee Stephen (Mitchell) was preparing to take over the family pub following his father’s death – until the shock arrival at the funeral of a long-lost foster-brother. Was smooth stranger Andrew (Webb) who he said he was?
With wry playfulness, the script knowingly referenced its own premise. Stephen called the cuckoo-in-the-nest “a glib, dangerous sociopath who’s about to steal my family, my business and my life” and asked: “Is this a con? A Martin Guerre thing?”
This wasn’t Peep Show part two but it wasn’t a million miles away. It swapped concrete Croydon for sleepy Stroud and twentysomething hedonism for thirtysomething angst. Mitchell and Webb’s personas loosely fitted the same template: a repressed, awkward one (Mitchell, sporting the 21st-century’s obligatory beard) and a feckless fantasist one (Webb, enjoying the chance to play an enigmatic charmer).
Thankfully, Blackwell’s astute writing soon banished the spectre of Peep Show and made Back work beautifully on its own terms. Characters were skilfully drawn. The fictional world arrived fully fleshed out, with none of that clumsy scene-setting you often get with a sitcom opener.
It wrung laughs from an incontinent dog, a dishwasher cutlery holder and Andrew’s reluctance to visit his father’s body at the funeral home. Targets for scorn included Facebook, hipsters, homeopathy and psychobabble about “getting closure”. The humour didn’t flinch from darkness: “There’s a music festival here every summer. It has four stages. Like cancer.”
Eighties flashbacks lent poignancy, as well as being evocatively nostalgic. The country pub was a fertile setting, with Stephen hoping to haul it upmarket via chorizo and brie paninis and “glamping” in the beer garden. A strong supporting cast delivered the sardonic dialogue with relish.
If it maintains this standard, Back might just join Channel 4 stablemates Catastrophe and Chewing Gum as one of our best home-grown sitcoms. After all, exchanges don’t get more British than: “You never told Dad you loved him?” “It never came up.”
The picture of a scared six-yearold with a machine gun pointed at him may sounds like an anti-war poster but that’s how most of us recall Elián González from 2000 news footage.
Storyville: The Boy Who Changed America (BBC Four) re-examined the saga of the boy found floating on an inner tube off the Florida coast after his mother drowned attempting to flee Cuba – and the bitter custody battle that played out in the public glare after Elián’s rescue.
For the first time, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s death last November, Elián (now a 23-year-old engineering graduate) and his family could tell their side of the story: a tense tug-ofwar between his Cuban father and his American cousins, unfolding across two countries.
Magnified by the lens of rolling news and stoked by opportunists on both sides, Elián’s fate came to represent the fight between the American dream and the Cuban revolution. Riots broke out when federal agents stormed his relatives’ Miami house and seized him. It’s an unedifying spectacle when a child’s life becomes political. I was reminded of the recent Charlie Gard case.
At least there was a happy ending here. Elian was reunited with his father, returned home to a hero’s welcome and became emblematic of changing Cuban-american relations. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Pope John Paul II played walk-on parts. Pundits suggested that Elián even swung the 2000 election in George W Bush’s favour.
At 85 minutes, this ponderous film would have benefited from judicious use of the editing-suite scissors. The case itself got mired in multi-agency red tape and the film did too, meaning momentum sagged in the middle. That aside, Elián’s predicament remained emotionally charged.
Back Storyville: The Boy Who Changed America