Daniel Roche

Outnumbered Christmas special review

Christmas is the season for catching up with old friends and so Boxing Day night seems an ideal time to entertain the Brockman family.

The Outnumbered kids on returning to TV

BuzzFeed UK chatted to 17-year-old Daniel Roche (Ben), 15 year-old Ramona Marquez (Karen), and 20-year-old Tyger Drew-Honey (Jake) about their time on Outnumbered.

Ben from Outnumbered turns 17 today

What happened to those boyish curls?

So after seven years and five series we must say farewell to Outnumbered (BBC One), which has at last been outmanoeuvred by Mother Nature and the pulsating endocrine systems of its now only semi-juvenile leads. Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey), Ben (Daniel Roche) and Karen (Ramona Marquez) were 11, eight and six respectively when the sitcom about life in the overscheduled, underdisciplined Brockman household began in 2007. Now Karen looks like a 25-year-old model, Jake is a tangle of gangling limbs and Ben - well, Ben still looks like Ben, but galumphs stolidly now rather than pinballs round the house, more usually mortified these days than gratified by the havoc he creates.

In the beginning, most of the art and all of the craft went into assembling the children's semi-improvised performances into workable narrative wholes. As the exhausted parents, Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis gave lovely, understated and endlessly, beautifully generous performances that left the children room to perform while gently trammelling them in the right direction. It was all very ... parental, really, and doubtless almost as exhausting as the real thing.

But now the kids have minds, scripts and marks of their own. They manage them all very well. To say that the magic is gone is not to do them a disservice but simply to recognise that Outnumbered was a series built round the unfakeable pre-adolescent world-weariness of the 11-year-old oldest child, the irreproducible childish ebullience of Ben and - words almost fail me. What was it about Karen? The sense of nascent megalomania within? The slow, styptic blink when she spotted an inconsistency in an adult's story or an incompatibility with her world view? The moral sense of a snake coupled with the unforgiving judgment of a Puritan preacher? The sociopathic detachment with which she scanned for personal weakness and the elegance with which she struck? ("So you've been a bridesmaid? But never a bride.") The composure remains, but she has grown into it now. The preternatural element of her gifts-slash-unnameable threat has lessened. The family and viewer are less tense. It's a relief, but the laughs are fewer and our time together is over. It was great while it lasted though.

For a show based on sarcastic back-chat, this last-ever episode turns the tables with a Disney-style finale. Karen's even offering tea and biscuits when dodgy Auntie Angela (Samantha Bond) turns up with her latest toy boy. But how will Spartacus: The Musical go for Ben? And what about the search for Tommy the hamster? Claire Skinner, Hugh Dennis and the kids - Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche, Ramona Marquez - make a surprisingly sentimental exit.

We've been dreading this day, the day when we finally have to cut the apron strings and let go of the kids from Outnumbered. Sorry, we thought we'd be able to stay strong but it's just too... *dabs eyes with hankie*

Yes, after five series, the show's child stars Tyger Drew-Honey (Jake), Daniel Roche (Ben) and Ramona Marquez (Karen) are starting to dwarf their on-screen parents Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner, meaning it's time to bring the beloved BBC sitcom to an end. In this final episode, Auntie Angela (Samantha Bond) returns to show off her latest toy boy, there's a cringeworthy performance of the school play, Spartacus: The Musical, and, most shockingly of all, there are signs that the Brockman kids might actually have turned out... alright?!

One of the biggest problems with TV sitcoms centring on families is what to do when the child actors get older. This is particularly problematic with a show like Outnumbered, which returned for a fifth and final series this week, primarily because the comedy relied on the innocence and naivety of the kids. Almost seven years on, the children are looking incredibly old most noticeably Ramona Marquez who started playing Karen when she was only five. Now twelve years old, Marquez's Karen was the centre of the action this week as parents Pete (Hugh Dennis) and Sue (Claire Skinner) worried that she was fitting in at her new challenging school. To an extent I feel that writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have updated the character well as she has now entered her stroppy pre-teen phase. She is a lot sulkier and I was shocked when I actually heard a swear word come out of her mouth. The school that Karen has been sent to has a very strict dress code and Karen is finding some of the work incredibly hard. She's also not fitting in all that well, as we see when she is forced to spend time with her one of her classmates after school. Karen's problems at school lead the ever-worried Sue to send out a late night e-mail to the parents of her daughter's classmates asking if they've had similar problems. The responses she receives are fairly shocking, prompting Pete to tell her that sending any e-mails after 11pm is a bad mistake. Whilst Karen's problems at school ring true, I was less interested in her search for a missing hamster. It just seemed to me like this story was something that Karen would've done while she's younger and I fail to believe that this new sulky brunette girl would be that bothered about a pet.

Elsewhere Karen's two brothers are more ill-served by the storylines especially Ben (Daniel Roche) who is auditioning for the school play. The character of Ben was great when he was a destructive young lad but as a teenager he seems to be a little lost. Though the thought of him playing the lead in a musical version of Spartacus did raise a few chuckles, this was the least realistic of the three plots. I did feel that there was more truth in the antics of older son Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey) who this week got a dodgy tattoo. This was a rite-of-passage story that a lot of teenagers have experienced and the fact that Jake wanted to remove the body art by the end of the episode was also incredibly realistic. Indeed, one thing that Hamilton and Jenkin have always excelled at is making their comedy feel as believable as possible. That's why Outnumbered worked so well when it started and why, for the most part, it still survives in 2014. Jake and Karen's story suited their progression and Pete and Sue continued to be the stereotypical fretting parents. The main thing I found about this series of Outnumbered, as compared to previous outings, is that I didn't laugh as much. While there were a few chuckles and a couple of titters I mostly felt that the comedy was well-observed but didn't find it funny enough to laugh out loud. Despite this I still found a lot to like about Outnumbered and feel that the chemistry between the five actors is still as fine as it was seven years ago. My only hope is that the Brockman family is given a fitting send-off and Outnumbered gets a suitably anarchic final series.

Locating a hamster under the floorboards is just one among the parental crises tackled by Sue and Pete (Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis) as they return for a fifth - and final - series of the sitcom that makes a virtue out of being out-manoeuvred by your offspring. The kids are no longer cute youngsters, their barbed teenage backchat more sullen than sparky. Except for the now strapping Ben (Daniel Roche), who has high hopes of landing a part in his school's production of Spartacus: The Musical.

The Brockman children are growing up fast

Ramona Marquez is almost unrecognisable with her new straight, dark haircut; Daniel Roche, 14, seems to have grown three foot since the last series and has a deep, booming voice; while Tyger Drew-Honey, 17, has left school and drives a car.