Pass the secateurs! This messy bunch of Flowers needs a prune
Evening classes in flower arranging were once all the rage. it’s something of a lost art nowadays, perhaps because so many people have paved over their front garden for car parking.
The knack, as it was explained to me, relied on balance. it wasn’t enough to seize any stems that took your fancy, shove them in a vase and expect them to complement each other. The different blooms had to work together.
That’s a rule Will Sharpe, creator and star of the morbid sitcom Flowers (C4), doesn’t bother to follow. His oddball show, back for a second series two years after its baffling debut, combines extreme slapstick and gross-out humour with observational comedy, crude racist gags, classic homages and serious reflections on mental illness.
it veers from Addams Family pastiche, to sending-up the pretentious publishing world, to affectionate marital scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in a Terry & June repeat... sometimes in the space of 30 seconds.
if all these styles worked together, Flowers would be wonderful. But like a bouquet of tiger lilies and rhubarb garnished with bindweed, it’s simply a mess. Most of the components are good in isolation, though i could do without Will’s crass Fu Manchu accent — any director would surely order him to cut it out, except that Will is directing this farrago himself.
Olivia Colman is perfect as the unfulfilled mum, desperately lonely since her children have grown up, who can’t endure her self-pitying husband any more.
She’s written a book about her marriage, called Living With My Husband And His Depression, which is set to be a bestseller . . . now that the title has been tweaked to Living With The Devil.
if only Flowers revolved around her, it could be wonderful. But the show is just as much about her daughter Amy (Sophia Di Martino), in the grip of a psychotic delusion that the family is the accursed reincarnation of 18th century european nobility — and that murdering them all will break the spell.
Meanwhile, Daniel Rigby as her twin brother Donald appears to be auditioning to be the next sleuth on Death in Paradise. Terribly British, all repressed rage and aggrieved decorum, he’s in a constant meltdown of exaspera- tion. Julian Barratt is their father, Maurice: he was the centre of attention in the first series, but now his only role is to sigh whenever his daughter dashes into a church to play the organ wildly by candlelight.
Amid this mess, we can glimpse interesting ideas and intriguing characters. it’s just a shame no one took a pair of secateurs to the script. Fractured siblings were the focus of Long Lost Family: What Happened Next (iTv), as it revisited three cases where adoptees searching for their birth parents discovered brothers and sisters instead.
This is reheated television, an updated repeat with a couple of hurried introductions from Davina McCall and nicky Campbell, and a brief account of what the families have been doing since we last saw them. it must be the cheapest primetime format since the potter’s wheel.
But the stories never fail to make the throat swell.
especially haunting was the image from a holiday photo of teenager Marlene, who gave up her little boy for adoption in 1961, before remarrying and having another baby, a girl, within a year — and died five months later, all before her 20th birthday.
The show sketched out her tragic life, without dwelling on it or milking it for emotion.
That made the heartache all the more poignant.
METAL MYSTERY OF THE NIGHT: Philippe (Alexander Vlahos) is obsessed with the Man In The Iron Mask, on Versailles (BBC2). Small wonder! This silly costume drama is so wooden, he’s never before seen anything that wasn’t carved from mahogany.