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Friday 9 January 2009

Winning formulas

Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased.

Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. But I genuinely found his sitcom, Outnumbered (BBC 1, Saturday), co-written with his long-time collaborator Guy Jenkin, terrifically funny. It is set in a well-worn situation — the family — and the first episode was a cliché plot, the wedding where everything goes wrong, but that didn’t matter. I watched it on my portable DVD player during a crowded train journey. People miserably standing, propped upright only by each other as we bounced over the points, watched in resentment as I sat curled up and cramped, laughing my head off.

The cunning of the show is to script the adults but have the children ad lib their lines. Not every one, clearly (‘Did you have a boyfriend who knew the Queen? Mummy said he was a guest of Her Majesty...’), but most of them. The star is the younger boy Ben, played with unconscious brilliance by Daniel Roche. Every parent of a male child knows Ben. He makes Just William look like a model of unflinching logic as his mind wanders off hither and yon, up hill and down dale, away with the fairies. They’re late for the wedding, and his little sister is locked in the bathroom. ‘We could put beavers through the window and they would eat the door...’ His conversation with the almost panic-stricken vicar (‘If God can do anything, why didn’t he zap King Herod?’) was a piece of sustained comedy that a professional ten times his age would have been proud of. The adults manage to keep up, but only just.

I had to watch Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1, Saturday) to see if my old chum John Sergeant survived another day. Until this past week the judges detested him because he subverts the whole thing — indeed undermines the notion that ballroom dancing is more important than any other hobby, such as collecting beer mats. One of them moaned that having the public vote for him and his partner ‘makes a mockery of the whole show’.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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