Cringey family mishaps had me laughing aloud
Here We Go BBC1, Friday Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars BBC1, Thursday
Mockumentary comedy has been around for a while now. It’s a simple premise – a handheld camera follows a family, or roves around the workplace, seemingly capturing off-the-cuff unscripted moments, as if everything we see actually really did happen. On the big screen, it gained currency with the likes of This Is Spinal Tap and the Borat movies. On television, it was put to good use in The Office and Parks And Recreation, and also in Modern Family, for a time at least, before that classic American show settled into a more obvious sitcom format, with only the odd knowing glance to camera by one of the main characters.
It also now is the chosen format for Here We Go, a new sitcom on BBC1 on Friday nights. Well, newish might be a better word, because it has its roots in Pandemonium, a one-off comedy broadcast at the end of 2020 that looked at how three generations of one family were dealing with new ways of life during the pandemic.
Now renamed and back for a sixepisode run, it shows a great deal of promise. Here, the cameraman is teenager Sam, working on a media project for school. It’s his mum Rachel’s birthday (played by Katherine Parkinson from The IT Crowd and Doc Martin), so dad Paul (Jim Howick) buys her a family voucher for Jungle World, an adventure park with zipwires, archery and crazy golf.
Six months later, they realise it is the last day the voucher is valid, and they race to the car to get to Jungle World before it expires. A mounting series of mishaps awaits – the unexpected earlier closing time in the off season, the unexpected addition of a dog to the mix, brought along by gran Sue (the peerless Alison Steadman), and the loss of the dog in a park and subsequent kidnapping of another, leading to a race against time to play even one hole of golf before the park shuts.
Written by Tom Basden, who also plays Rachel’s brother Robin, it didn’t look like much on paper, but I actually laughed out loud more often than I had any reason to expect. Howick has been a comedy presence on television for years, in everything from Peep Show to Horrible Histories to the more recent
Ghosts, and he has a splendid gift for playing the everyman in a midlife crisis. He’s that classic archetype, the cringey dad, and while he’s nowhere near the level of Modern Family’s Phil Dunphy, he has enough to work with here to make
a memorable character in his own right. In fact, all the characters arrived fully formed in this first episode – Rachel the weary sole breadwinner in the family, Amy the daughter worrying about her relationship with her girlfriend,
the unseen Sam quietly providing wry commentary from behind the camera – and while it doesn’t yet bear the hallmark of greatness, it doesn’t seem much hardship to give it time to bed down either. As debut episodes go, it was a hell of a lot better than many that have come before – and, yes, gone too.
Talking of gone, we finally said goodbye to Amit on BBC1’s Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars. To be honest, I easily could have endured another week of him rather than Valentina, the most strident and the grumpiest contestant on any reality show in recent memory. Honestly, she’s a head wrecker. When teammates don’t agree with her ideas, she immediately becomes aggressive. When they retaliate, she accuses them of changing the tone, the classic behaviour of a passive aggressive narcissist.
Because of the way the show is structured, only those on the losing team each week are eligible for the chop, and since she always has managed to be among the winners, Ramsay hasn’t yet had the chance to tell her she’s had her chips.
Instead, it was the hapless Amit, who has been on the losing team almost every week, who was sent home, largely because of his failure to stamp his authority on any of the tasks, rapidly losing interest when rebuffed, and then blaming everyone else for his own failings.
The format is very similar to that of The Apprentice, with one major flaw. There are no chaperones here as is the case with Michelle and Claude who report to Alan Sugar in The Apprentice, so Ramsay places far too much stock in what teammates think of each other, leading to a lot of blame being shifted instead of admitted. I hate myself for watching it every week, but it’s oddly addictive. That said, it’s nothing a few warm, sunny nights in the garden won’t cure before it comes to the end of the run.
Talking of knockoff shows, The Great British Sewing Bee, also on BBC1 and hosted by Sara Pascoe, basically is Bake Off with frocks. I’d never seen it before and I’m pretty certain I won’t be tuning in again, because some of the creations that were praised this week, by judges Patrick Grant and Esme Young, looked pretty hideous to me. One of my late mother’s favourite expressions, the origin of which is lost in time, was to call someone ‘an awful looking decker’ – perhaps it was a substitute word for one that’s a little stronger.
Whatever, it sprang to mind while I was watching the unfortunate women who had to model the clothes thrown together from bits of other clothes. I’m all for sustainability, but that has to start with sustained interest, and that’s a leap I just can’t make.