Smug, self-important, cliched... this new sitcom’s a real howler
TO HEAR the creators of Raised By Wolves ( C4) tell it, you’d think there had never been a comedy that starred women before. Their female family sitcom is unique fare, they boast — we haven’t ever seen or heard anything like this.
They’re wrong, obviously. For a start, we can hardly ignore comedy classics like the booze- sodden, nicotine-choked Ab Fab, or the Scouse mouthiness of The Liver Birds, or Victoria Wood’s brilliant Dinnerladies.
And for another thing, anyone who has spent an interminable half-hour stuck in a railway carriage with a crowd of sweary, smug, teenage showoffs has already seen everything Raised By Wolves has got to offer.
Newspaper columnist Caitlin Moran and her sister Caz have written a sitcom about their own home-schooled upbringing in Eighties Wolverhampton. They don’t seem too sure whether it’s set in the past or the present — the cardigans and flowery dresses predate the miners’ strike, but everyone has a mobile phone.
It takes a special kind of selfimportance to decide that what the world needs is a comedy about your own hilarious upbringing. We all know workmates who insist on passing round photos of themselves on holiday or, worse yet, as children. This show is like that.
Helen Monks plays Germaine, the Caitlin character. She’s ‘daring’, ‘earthy’ and ‘unashamed to be a woman’. Her younger sister Aretha is played by Alexa Davies, and based on Caz — ‘wise beyond her years’ and ‘a nurturing soul’. It’s so crudely drawn, they might as well have their character traits tattooed on their foreheads.
They live with their three younger siblings and their single mum, Della, a sort of female Humphrey Bogart who can solve every adolescent problem with a sardonic quip.
Supermum Della (Rebekah Staton) doesn’t have a boyfriend because, frankly, what mother would need a man when she has daughters as wonderful as hers?
The first episode saw the family going to the park to pick mushrooms and berries for their tea . . . but thanks to a series of ‘ uproarious mishaps’, they wound up having a takeaway. This week they went shopping for a birthday present for Supermum, and got her a can of cherry cola and a car-wash token. The adorable mites.
Raised By Wolves doesn’t tell us much about Caitlin and Caz’s real childhood. Instead, it clamps a pair of rose-tinted specs to our eyes and says, ‘Look at that — that’s us as kids. Amazing, weren’t we!’
But for a truly extraordinary vision of family life, we needed The Mafia With
Trevor McDonald (ITV). The 75-yearold former newsreader has reinvented himself as a student of America’s extremes, and this investigation into the psychology of organised crime was superb.
After months spent winning the trust of former gangsters, he obtained long, honest interviews with street-level hoodlums and ex-captains of crime.
One was John Elite, a tattooed muscleman once known as ‘the Sheriff of Death-haven’ — a district of Queens, New York, that he ran for the Gambino family. Elite talked casually of putting a bullet in the brain of a dying man after a gunfight outside his own house.
Another was Michael DiLeonardo, alias Mikey Scars, a former consigliere, who helped put 80 fellow gangsters inside jail to escape a life sentence of his own.
Now he can’t sleep, and lives in hiding, with the fear at every moment that his family will be killed as a reprisal. But he couldn’t resist driving Sir Trevor through New York’s Little Italy district, and pointing out gangsters that he recognised.
The lives of men like these really could make a TV series — and did, of course, in The Sopranos. Sir Trevor couldn’t resist paying tribute to that show, driving across the New Jersey turnpike like Tony Soprano did in the title sequence of every episode.
All the gangsters boasted with pride about what they’d done, even the most thuggish crimes. They were nostalgic for that brutal life.
If they could write and star in a sitcom about the Mob, every one of them would sign up for it like a shot.
But just because they could, doesn’t mean they should.