Mack’s suburban sad sack makes for solid sitcom fare
There is something cheering about watching people have a worse time than you, as sitcom writers know. You may have a failing relationship or an annoying parent or a terrible job or a car that won’t start, but there is a certain type of comedy in which all these things and more happen to a character at the same time.
One of them is Semi-detached (BBC Two), which had a pilot episode last year and is now here for a full series. The lead character is Stuart (Lee Mack, with a moustache that makes him look like a cross between Paul Chuckle and Boycie from Only Fools and Horses), a hopeless everyman beset by disasters. In the pilot, his girlfriend went into labour, his ex-wife’s husband chopped off a thumb and his coke-snorting dad was arrested for a cow-related incident. That all happened in real time, in the space of 20 minutes.
The series proper is a little less manic. Stuart’s gay father (Clive Russell, taking what could have been a cringeworthy role and making it the best thing here) is still an unwanted house guest, luxuriating in a life of drugs, spray tans and sex with the Amazon delivery man. Stuart is still engaged in a passive-aggressive relationship with his ex-wife and her husband (Samantha Spiro and Patrick Baladi), who for some reason live directly opposite. And Stuart’s fugitive brother (Neil Fitzmaurice, who played the odious Jeff in Peep Show) is still hanging around.
At the heart of things is Stuart’s relationship with the much younger April (Ellie White), now that they have a baby together. This first episode sketched the backstory of their unlikely union: they met in Magaluf, where she mistook him for a carefree party animal, rather than a middleaged DJ with digestive problems and a house in suburbia. For every moment in which April fails to ring true – nobody, but nobody, uses the word “bonkers-tastic” – is another where she brings to mind exactly the kind of hippy-dippy posh girl who took an extended gap year in southeast Asia and now lives on spiritual self-help guides and green juice.
And for every moment when Semi-detached falls back on ancient sitcom tropes – the useless man who can’t cook, the warring neighbours – there is one that hits the target, like April’s backhanded compliments about Stuart’s ex: “So much energy for someone of her age…” It’s a decent stab at a mainstream comedy, although a whole series played at this tempo might prove exhausting.
Are we entering the age of the 15-minute comedy? David Tennant and Michael Sheen did it in Staged, noodling away on Zoom. Diane Morgan is about to do it with Mandy, which starts next week. It’s a win for the viewer because if it’s funny you’re left wanting more, and if it’s not, well, you’ve only wasted a quarter of an hour.
So here is Squeamish About… (BBC Two) squeezed in between Semi-detached and Newsnight. It’s a spoof documentary series featuring Matt Berry (Toast of London, What We Do in the Shadows) as “rogue historian” Michael Squeamish, a character first featured last year in the one-off mockumentary, The Road to Brexit.
Squeamish doesn’t appear to be based on anyone in particular – this isn’t a send-up of Simon Schama or David Starkey – and Berry has chosen not to mug away in front of the camera but to supply the narration. For this he deploys a fruity voice very like that of Patrick Allen (close your eyes and you can picture Allen flying over those Barratt Homes in a helicopter) and some silly pronunciation.
The comedy lies in the fact that everything we see or hear is wrong. So in this first episode, devoted to “popular entertainments”, Squeamish references the Beatles but the footage is of Gerry and the Pacemakers. He describes Gracie Fields as “the famous drag act from Rochdale”. Playing a clip of Joy Division: “I don’t know much about pop music but I reckon that’s a pretty feelgood sound!”
You get the idea. And this really is the show’s only idea. Sometimes Berry takes archive footage of real people, which seems to be from decades-old news programmes, and makes it the butt of the joke. There is footage of the working classes, mostly older people, on holiday or talking about racing pigeons or describing a day’s work as a blacksmith. The mockery isn’t deliberately cruel but it still feels a bit smug, in a laughing-at-the-lowerorders sort of way.
Had Squeamish About… been part of a sketch show, it might have worked. But as a stand-alone comedy series, even 15 minutes felt a bit too long.
Semi-detached ★★★ Squeamish About... ★★