Modern living

The sublime Outnumbered (BBC1, Thursday) is back. It’s customary to compare it favourably to The Life of Riley, another BBC family sitcom, from this week shown on the previous night. I have declared an interest before: the onlie begetter of Riley is Georgia Pritchett, who years ago nannied for us. So I’m disposed to like it. And it’s wrong to write it off as just another bland comedy with sassy kids and put-upon parents. It’s about life as lived in the real modern world, with teenagers so old beyond their years that they’re not even rude to their parents, families reduced to communicating through post-it notes, and mean-spirited, bottom-line-obsessed employers. And there are well-pointed gags. The faultless au pair who made it possible for Maddy (Caroline Quentin) to go to work has moved to another family. Maddy is furious with the new Mum, a neighbour, who pleads that she didn’t know where the girl came from. ‘She said they ignored everything she did, and they lived like animals.’

‘So you must have known that was us!’ she says, face crumpling with despair.

In Outnumbered, the adults are the straight men to the children, who reflect the adult world back to them. Ben, the little boy: ‘In some pictures it looks as if Gordon Brown has two eyes — do they paint the other one on?’ Karen, the little girl who steals the show every week, is explaining why you can’t be prejudiced against anyone: ‘gay people, ginger people, people who come from Liverpool’. Her voice tails off like any child trying to recall all the things she has to recall. Now and again the parents are allowed a gag line: passing Parliament, Karen asks how the people decide what laws to make.