Father Figure

Jason Byrne: BBC 'buried' my family sitcom

Jason Byrne said the BBC 'buried' his sitcom Father Figure before he had time to iron out the kinks.

There's a long and troubled tradition of stand-up comics turning their hand to sitcom and Jason Byrne's Father Figure - with its poo jokes, 'bumbling husband' clichés and dodgy slapstick - was undoubtedly the worst example of the form since Frank Skinner's Shane.

A sitcom where the "sit" involves a man who - shock, horror - stays at home to look after his children while his wife goes to work. Imagine that! Unsurprisingly, the "com" here is severely lacking, unless you count skits about making cupcakes, vacuuming up Lego and drinking gin. This week Tom (Jason Byrne) enters the House Husband Of The Year competition, which gives his mum Mary (Pauline McLynn) the chance to administer a violent lesson on how to perfect his "mammy face", using a rubber glove as her weapon. Lame.

BBC One's new sitcom, Father Figure, which started on Wednesday, has a disturbing premise. It's about a family, every member of which - including the two small children - has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. It isn't actually mentioned anywhere in the script, nor in the publicity material given to journalists, but it's perfectly clear that that's what's happened. The characters have all undergone some form of devastating trauma. It's the only explanation for the way they behave.

Take the hero, Tom, a father of two. We saw him wrestling his mother on the kitchen floor in a way that made it look as if he was having sex with her. We saw him charging upstairs with one of his sons on his back in an effort to break down a lavatory door. We saw him and his mother taking turns to slam each other's heads against the fridge door. There was no plausible reason given for any of these actions; no one who hadn't suffered acute psychological damage would act like this. Plainly, these poor people were ill, and in urgent need of help. It was profoundly harrowing.
And yet, with shocking callousness, the studio audience was laughing.

I suppose there is a minuscule possibility that the characters haven't had nervous breakdowns, and that the relentless falling over and fighting was merely meant to be slapstick. But it seems unlikely, because for slapstick to work - as it does in, say, Laurel & Hardy and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em - you have to be able to believe what you're seeing. The characters must have a reason for what they're doing; they're sane people who set out with good intentions, but, thanks to a combination of clumsiness, stupidity and bad luck, everything goes disastrously wrong. What happens may be absurd, but it follows a certain logic, one calamity leading to the next. Whereas in Father Figure there's little if any logic. The characters just do irrational, silly, horrible and violent things. That's it.

But the weirdest thing about Father Figure is this. Jason Byrne, who both stars in it and wrote it, is a really good stand-up. He's funny. I'm baffled.

Then again, the similarly crude Mrs Brown's Boys has been a big hit for BBC One, so maybe this will be too, and everyone else in the country will love it, and go on and on about how hilarious it was when the father of two looked as if he was having sex with his mother. In which case I'll be the one having a nervous breakdown.

It appeared as if the BBC had little confidence in Father Figure from the get-go as it was broadcast in the post 10 O'Clock News death slot. Sitcoms previously scheduled in this slot include the horrid Citizen Khan and Ben Elton's recently atrocity The Wright Way.

To be fair to Father Figure, it was slightly better than both of those shows as it did have an innate likeability to it which was mainly due to the cast. At the same time though it had plenty of problems including one-note characters, a predictable script and gags you could see coming a mile-off.

The story of the first episode saw Tom Whyte (Jason Byrne) cooking a dinner for his neighbours to apologise for covering them in baked beans while they were trying to sunbathe. Then followed a well-worn script where the juvenile central character attempted to cook while fending off the interference from his family members. His mother (Pauline McLynn) tried to take over with the cooking while his friend Roddy (Michael Smiley) steals a giant cake from a hotel lobby. Meanwhile Tom's children are incredibly annoying and his wife Elaine (Karen Taylor) is presented as a serious alcoholic.

The episode climaxed with a scene which saw the neighbours being hit by the cake and covered in chocolate mousse while Tom's mother punched him in the face with a roast chicken. If any of these situations are putting a smile on your face then you probably would've enjoyed Father Figure more than I did.

The show was yet another addition to the list of poor sitcoms that have been produced in 2013 and to me Father Figure feels incredibly dated. As I said, the majority of the cast are incredibly likeable, particularly Pauline McLynn whose gift for physical comedy is put to good use here. But ultimately Father Figure feels doomed to fail and after watching the show I felt like Tom's neighbours - incredibly embarrassed and ever so slightly dirty.

Jason Byrne's Father Figure at least began with a good visual joke involving exploding baked beans. Unfortunately it then ran out of them.

Jason Byrne has a very endearing quality about him, which is just as well, as his new sitcom Father Figure has precious little else going for it.

Byrne plays a house husband attending to the domestic chores while his wife holds down a job and his two children go to school. He has a friend who pops round occasionally to distract him and tease him with comments about men in pinafores. That is the 'sit' part of the sitcom, and it is not exactly cutting edge.

The 'com' part just baffles me. It consists of a conveyor belt of silly moments and rudimentary sight gags loosely attached to a plot - and I use the term 'plot' in its widest possible sense. In the absence of any decent one-liners or characterisation, Byrne, the writer as well as star, attempts a frustratingly half-hearted surrealism, usually stuck on as fantasy inserts but which sometimes intrudes into the action itself.

To say that I didn't get the humour would be the grossest of understatements. The show seems to hover in a comedy limbo all its own, somewhere between the conformity of My Family and the madness of The Mighty Boosh, the end result being messy and unfocused.

The strange thing is that although I didn't laugh once, I didn't actually dislike Father Figure. As I said, Byrne is an amiable performer and has surrounded himself with an eminently watchable supporting cast, including Pauline McLynn and Peter Serafinowicz. Half an hour passes pleasantly enough, but I won't be rushing back to Father Figure anytime soon.

Father Figure, BBC One, review

All of it was implausible, but, that's not really the point. We don't need our comedy to be plausible. Peep Show was rarely plausible, neither was Blackadder, nor Red Dwarf, nor Fawlty Towers, but that didn't stop them being funny. What we need is for these implausible situations to be delivered with wit, brilliant timing and a superbly funny script. Father Figure failed on every count.

Jason Byrne is an accomplished stand-up comedian, an expert in working a crowd and making them feel as if they are the stars of the show. All of which made his sitcom debut in Father Figure (BBC1) something of a mystifying misfire.

As if nicking your title off one of George Michael's best songs wasn't bad enough, Father Figure managed to commit every sitcom cliché crime in the book: dopey bloke, interfering mother, long-suffering wife, victim neighbours, bonkers relatives. All of it wrapped up in an unsavoury mess of vomit and poo 'jokes'.

It's an unholy marriage of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Mrs Brown's Boys, with Byrne as an Irish spin on Frank Spencer, a hapless idiot to whom disasters naturally occur - most of which involve spraying anyone who ventures across his path with everything from baked beans to chocolate mousse.

Byrne brings a certain haphazard charm to the part, but his material is pretty puerile. Still, if you find a child running around screaming 'I'm a human poo!' the height of hilarity - and the canned laughter soundtrack was having fits - then this is the show for you.

As is the 1970s, where a man protecting his genitals with the line 'You'll crush me Curly Wurlys!' would, at least, have been vaguely contemporary.