My new favourite comedy
My 30-something friends and I have a new favourite comedy: Outnumbered on BBC 1 on Saturday nights, featuring the hapless parents of three children who live next door to “the perfect family”.
It’s a situation all parents dread - that your own feckless, half-arsed attempts at bringing up the next generation will be glaringly exposed for the inadequate posturings they are by a family who rise at dawn on a Sunday to embark on a charity bike ride (en famille) before dining on roasted adzuki beans and spending the afternoon finishing their collective entry for the National Portrait Gallery’s Christmas craft competition. Which they will win, hands down.
Such was (sort of) the beginning of the plot to episode 3, which I caught this weekend, introducing me for the first time to this beautifully observed and well-performed sitcom. Now I take the trouble to look it up, I see this is actually the second series of Outnumbered from acclaimed comedy writer Andy Hamilton. And a friend of mine helped produce it! Rejoice! and congrats to Wilson.
Obviously, I was tempted to ban television yesterday (Sunday), in imitation of mum Sue’s (Claire Skinner) attempt to get her whole family to enjoy a “traditional” family Sunday, playing games, doing homework and practising musical instruments (”which we don’t even know the names of”, according to dad Hugh Dennis). But I gave up that idea at roughly 8.15am.
My favourite line from ep 3 came when the young daughter practises her recorder, causing granddad to comment on the god-awful noise. The girl runs crying from the room. Mum Sue says: “We probably do over-praise her.” Modern parenting in a nutshell: damned if you do; danmed if you don’t.