Craig Cash

The Stage Review

That Sunshine succeeds so effectively as both comedy and drama is down to a witty and original script by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey combined with a very impressive performance from Coogan, who manages to strike just the right note between amiable and infuriating, amusing and appalling.

Indeed, Sunshine is so well done that it is almost too painful to watch, and it's going to require something of an act of will from me to return for a further helping of Bob's wilful self-destruction. The jokes and great lines certainly come thick and fast, but the underlying mood is one of despair with just a hint of impending doom.

Sunshine was a feel-good north country drama co-written by Craig Cash. It was The Royle Family drenched in syrup, but with a feel-bad central character. This was an uneasy mixture. Steve Coogan was Bing, a father with a gambling habit who gets stitched up in an illegal gambling club, having blown his partner's holiday savings in an attempt to pay back the mortgage arrears. Playing the part with a convincing mixture of bumptious charm and desperate vulnerability, Coogan is a pretty good character actor if you can ever forget that this is Steve Coogan. By the end I had just about managed it.

Blog Review

Writers Craig Cash and Phil Mealey are perfectly aware of the situation they've created and they're perfectly aware of the audience's expectations of that situation. They know what they're up to, those two. They're having a ball, with a script littered with double-takes and surprises.

It never got the recognition accorded to The Royle Family or The Office but Early Doors was every bit the equal of those two benchmark comedies. Written by Phil Mealey and Craig Cash (Cash also co-wrote The Royle Family), the bittersweet tale of a pub landlord and his ragged regulars mixed laughter and tears into an addictively warm-hearted brew.

Independent Review

He's not afraid of sentiment, Craig Cash. Indeed, he's not even nervous about painfully cute, judging from the opening of Sunshine, BBC1's new comedy-drama.

This is the latest series from Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, who wrote BBC2's quietly brilliant Early Doors. Cash also co-wrote (and played Dave in) The Royle Family, so there's pedigree here. You'd expect wry Mancunian wit and warm character comedy - and that's exactly what you get.

The story centres on Steve Coogan as Bing, a lovable but hopeless chancer given to joking his way out of trouble. He leads not so much a hand-to-mouth existence as hand-to-bookies, and so spends much of the time in the doghouse with girlfriend Bernadette (beautifully played by Lisa Millett). There's quality support from Bernard Hill as Bing's dad, whose idea of babysitting is to wake his grandson up for an evening of tall stories about how he gave Hitler a Chinese burn. And Cash and Mealey turn up as bin-men. It's gently amusing, with a loving attention to detail, but don't expect belly laughs - it's classed as a comedy drama.

Sunshine is wonderful stuff. This particular type of sunshine, written by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey (the team behind Early Doors and The Royle Family: Queen of Sheba), tells the story of three generations of a family from the 1970s. Steve Coogan plays a likeable young man who married his childhood sweetheart; he is funny, cheerful and optimistic, someone capable - according to Grandad (Bernard Hill) - of charming the nuts off a squirrel. Sadly he is also a compulsive gambler who squanders what little money the family has and risks losing everything that matters to him. Sunshine doesn't have the fly-on-the-wall naturalism of The Royle Family, but it does share its warmth and its humanity.

Steve Coogan takes the lead in a gentle but affecting comedy-drama about addiction. Scripted expertly by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, it's the story of Bob 'Bing' Crosby, a man who loves a flutter.

As you'd expect from Cash, the setting is resolutely northern and ordinary, and the focus is on Bing's family - the young son who narrates the action, the long-suffering childhood sweetheart, the dad with a part to play in how Bing turned out.

Compared with the usual stuff of prime-time slots, Sunshine requires emotional investmnet. In the course of three episodes, this should be richly rewarded.

Craig Cash and Phil Mealey script this bittersweet comedy drama about 'Bing' Crosby, a lovable loser with a destructive streak of gambling addiction that keeps him never too far away from the bookie's counter. It has that essential northern grit to it that you'd expect from the writers of Early Doors and The Royle Family, and Steve Coogan is great as Bing, giving the character a more paired down reality than grotesques like Alan Partridge and Tommy Saxondale. Cash and Mealey pop in as comedy bin men, but the real honours here go to the exceptional Bernard Hill as Bing's dad. A highly promising start.

Craig Cash Interview

It's a beautifully observed drama with a number of dark moments.