Guy Jenkin

Outnumbered series 5 episode one review

Sitcoms have a limited life span, so when their creators - in this case, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin - stretch them out for a prolonged amount of time, one can grow resentful. After tonight's edition of Outnumbered I was left with the unpleasant aftertaste of having witnessed an old dog being begrudgingly dragged out for a walk.

A fifth and final series for Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's enduring sitcom. Modern life proves as irksome for Sue and Pete as ever: tempering the expectations of an increasingly gravelly voiced Ben ahead of his audition for Spartacus the Musical, guiding Karen through troubled times at school and dealing with a freshly inked-up Jake. The formula of Cute Kids Saying Cute seems slightly incongruous with a trio of t(w)eenagers chez Brockman, but they've earned this final furlong of hurrahs.

Sadly, our sole visit to the Brockman household this year suggests that the inevitable has finally happened: the young actors who play Ben and Karen are now too mature and self-aware for the comedy to work. Ben is alarmingly deep-voiced and large, and Karen - once the linch-pin of the show - has hardly any screen time at all. It's as if writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have realised she no longer works as a character. If you remove the eccentric charm of Ben and Karen from the equation, then Outnumbered doesn't have any reason to exist. I suspect the fifth series next year will be the last.

The enduring success of TV's comedy prophets

Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin talk to Benji Wilson about a career in comedy.

Having set a new benchmark for sitcoms with Outnumbered, writing partners Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton know that expectations are high for their new pilot, part of Channel 4's Funny Fortnight. This one also centres around a squabbling suburban family, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. James Bolam and James Fleet play a father and son-in-law trying to negotiate a post-apocalyptic Britain in which economic collapse and climate change have created a lawless society of scavengers - think Survivors meets Steptoe & Son.

Having created the reigning champion of family sitcoms in Outnumbered, Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton take the genre into new territory - the future. Not the distant future but, as the title suggests, a few decades hence when economic collapse and rising sea levels have transformed life in Britain. The Pilch family struggle by in a house powered by batteries on a street beset by floods. There's plenty of black humour: casual asides refer to the Isle of Norwich and when Mick (James Bolam) admits to gambling away the Triple-A batteries, he explains, "I put them all on a dog fight... I bet on the dog and the bloke won."

An unspecified apocalypse has hit the UK, but petty suburban concerns linger on for the Pilch family: curmudgeonly old geezer James Bolam, hapless son-in-law James Fleet and bolshy grand-daughter Jennie Jacques. The next-door neighbour is still an irritant, although arguments revolve not around parking or foliage maintenance, but who dumped the corpse over the fence. Laptops are used to squash flies. And a formidable 'area commander' is on hand to dispense summary justice. There's the kernel of a good idea in Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's show (their first since Outnumbered), but Just Around the Corner is a little too low key for its own good. The targets are soft, and the dull colours and dreary lives infect the writing and performances: the sitcom equivalent of a wet weekend.

Amid such sparkling absurdity this offering from Funny Fortnight, Just Around the Corner, lay like a damp squib. It is a comedy from Outnumbered creators Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, about the Pilch family (Jameses Fleet and Bolam as son-and-father-in-law, and Jennie Jacques as Fleet's recalcitrant teenage daughter Kia), who live in what is now the isle of Norwich in a globally warmed and flooded Britain. The script was waterlogged, but much could be forgiven for Daisy Beaumont's shining turn as terrifying regional tyrant Big Delia. When paired with Fleet's peerless dithering, you felt happiness begin to break out once more.

A climate-changed, bank- collapsed England of the near future, where the Dutch are the despised immigrants (Holland having disappeared under water), is the subject of this Funny Fortnight sitcom pilot from Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin (Outnumbered and Drop the Dead Donkey). A promising scenario delivered by James Fleet and James Bolam.