Craig Cash

Craig Cash Interview

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

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Early Doors (BBC2) is a step brother of The Royle Family, having the same father, Craig Cash, but not the same mother, Caroline Aherne. It is such a slow-burning comedy that you only start to smile during the next programme.

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Programmes that score low in the ratings often do well in the Barb audience appreciation indices (AIs). Early Doors, a comedy by Craig Cash averaged only 1.7 million viewers in its first outing, but scored particularly highly on the AIs. Ms Root decided to commission a second series, partly because such a high proportion of viewers enjoyed it.

The new sitcom Early Doors is a sort of kid of The Royle Family, but now being raised by the father alone. The series was being written by that show's co-creators, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, until, we may guess, she decided that a show set in a pub was not the perfect subject for her at the moment. She left and Cash co-opted a new dialogue buddy, Phil Mealey.

Cash has said that the plan had been for Aherne to play a landlady but that they had difficulty imagining the character. But Cash's admission raises the project's main problem, which is that pubs are as familiar a part of television as televisions are of pubs.

In fact, one of the reasons that The Royle Family was so daring was that experience of the medium led you to expect that they must eventually get off their arses and go to the pub, but they never did. Early Doors aims for the same claustrophobia by trapping the characters on one set, but people stuck on alehouse benches don't have the same visual shock as a whole family beached on a settee.

Shot in dirty light without a laughter-track, the show begins with landlord Ken (John Henshaw) in his empty empire, decanting cheap brandy into a posher bottle and diverting the charity box into the till.

The regulars arrive and exchange banalities ("temporary traffic lights over at Samuel Street"), inanities ("Joe's having a shit"), incomprehensible in-jokes and semi-derelict slang ("Keep your hand on your halfpenny"). Future plot possibilities are laid down: Ken's daughter isn't actually his and there's also doubt about the father of her own child. Many scenes take place in the gents, the soundtrack featuring the meticulous drip of piss and plop of shit.

In the modern style - The Office, Phoenix Nights - it's the kind of comedy that should come with a bottle of paracetamol or a length of rubber tubing for the car. The theme could be described as the loneliness of company. It's potentially brilliant, but the pisser is that viewers have spent so much time in pubs. Though in Aherne's absence they've sensibly dispensed with a landlady, Ken keeps tripping over Al Murray's pub landlord.

Aherne walks out of Early Doors

Caroline Aherne has quit the BBC sitcom she was developing with her Royle Family writing partner, Craig Cash.

Mrs Merton And Malcolm (BBC1), a spin-off from the gas commercial, is an oddity. The life of Mrs Merton (Caroline Aherne) and Malcolm (Craig Cash) looks like a fifties commercial for Mothers Pride but there is a peculiar undertow of unease. It is Malcolm's 37th birthday, but he and his mother both behave as if he were seven. Sometimes they break into song and dance as women in TV commercials used to do when dusting. These Mrs Merton: The Musical moments are high points, but then everything around seems very flat.

God knows what's wrong with bedridden Mr Merton ('He's fine. I say fine, well, he's still in great pain.') Perhaps he's dead. It's the sort of happy household where sooner or later someone is discovered dead.

Which brings us to the last episode of The Royle Family (BBC2), Denise's wedding. This, like the series itself, was quite unique as nothing whatsoever happened. Unless you count Jim's diarrhoea and Nana's constipation, which cancelled each other out.

I came across the Royles while playing five-finger exercises on the remote control and was instantly transfixed. This is a rivetingly original slice of life, like a bomb-damaged house displaying its vacancy to the world. If it reminds you of anything, it is The Family.