Emma Kennedy

The Kennedys: more than just rose-tinted memories

Like Cradle To Grave and Danny And The Human Zoo, Emma Kennedy's sitcom mines a 70s childhood, but behind the nostalgia, there's a lot that is very timely.

Emma Kennedy is unlucky that her childhood-memoir sitcom comes so soon after Raised By Wolves and Cradle To Grave, but it doesn't help itself by sticking to such well-worn ground: tonight, Dad (Dan Skinner) fails to dissuade Mum (Katherine Parkinson) from learning to drive, while 10-year-old Emma (the ace Lucy Hutchinson) hunts for the sender of her first Valentine. The characters are well acted, but are either familiar types or wacky wildcards, and feel secondary to the light-brown 1970s nostalgia.

Emma Kennedy: how to make a sitcom

Three years in the making and birthing, The Kennedys is now on BBC One. Its creator and writer Emma Kennedy tells us how it happened.

How to make a sitcom

Three years in the making and birthing, The Kennedys is now on BBC One. Its creator and writer Emma Kennedy tells us how it happened.

The Kennedys had the tough job of following Have I Got News For You on BBC One. The Kennedys is based on the memoirs of journalist Emma Kennedy and just like Danny Baker's Cradle to Grave takes us back to the 1970s. Unlike Cradle to Grave, the family in The Kennedys isn't constantly shouting at each other and instead Emma's parents Brenda and Tony (Katherine Parkinson and Dan Skinner) are relatively demure when compared to their friends and neighbours. The opening episode sees Brenda live her aspirations of hosting the first dinner party in their small neighbourhood of Jessop Square. Brenda then instructs Tony to make a lasange, something that baffles him due to the fact that he has to use pasta that doesn't come from a tin. Tony asks friend Tim (Harry Peacock) to try and help him track down some pasta only to discover that his mate is conducting an affair. At the same time Brenda learns that Tim's girlfriend Jenny (Emma Pierson) is pregnant and hasn't told her other half yet. This perfectly sets up the comedy goldmine that is the awkward dinner party which includes Tim spending the entire meal bare-chested and his lover walking in on the meal to threaten physical violence against most of the guests. I was surprised by how much I liked The Kennedys and I think it had a certain sense of innocence that you don't see in sitcoms any more. That may have something to do with the fact that the comedy has a pre-teen protagonist in Lucy Hutchinson's Emma, with the young actress proving to be a comic revelation. Meanwhile the reliable Skinner and Parkinson were an absolute delight to watch as the social climbing parents with the former pulling off a great Welsh accent. Whether or not The Kennedys can keep the momentum of this first episode going remains to be seen but on first impressions this is a refreshingly likeable old-fashioned sitcom.

The Kennedys preview

No, nothing to do with the US political dynasty, this BBC sitcom is loosely based on Emma Kennedy's memoirs The Tent, The Bucket and Me.

This period sitcom is based on writer Emma Kennedy's account of her 70s childhood, and is a riotous look at "new town" life through the eyes of 10-year-old Emma. Autobiographical details take a backseat to the inherent comedy of the era itself - a time when aspirational consumption collided with guileless English provincialism. In this opener, Emma's mother (Katherine Parkinson) and dad (Dan "Angelos Epithemiou" Skinner) host a gathering, Abigail's Party-style.

Emma Kennedy: why I wrote a sitcom about my childhood

"I realised that... being useless in the 70s was suddenly funny," says Emma Kennedy.

In the 1970s no more than three minutes was permitted to pass without sighting a gentleman's handsome chest foliage, groomed as much as his luxuriant lip warmer, and this highly chucklesome Seventies-set comedy is careful to include a historically accurate man carpet.

Written by Emma Kennedy and starring Katherine Parkinson and Dan Skinner as Brenda and Tony Kennedy, it's Brenda's aspiration to exhibit her modern sophistication by holding their street's first dinner party and to serve a classy Italian dish called 'la-san-ier'.

But this is the 1970s, when 'la-san-ier' was harder to find than the bar in a pub, blanketed by full-strength tar fags, which forces Tony and daughter Emma (Lucy Hutchison) to enlist the aid of a neighbour with the connections to provide Italian grub. This undertaking has the anxious energy of a drug deal, and what the neighbour drags the Kennedys into is a dinner party which is even better than Abigail's.

The Kennedys preview

It's rare for a BBC One comedy to strike a chord straight away, but Emma Kennedy has certainly achieved that with The Kennedys, a semi-autobiographical sitcom about her childhood.