Jason Byrne

Jason Byrne has a very endearing quality about him, which is just as well, as his new sitcom Father Figure has precious little else going for it.

Byrne plays a house husband attending to the domestic chores while his wife holds down a job and his two children go to school. He has a friend who pops round occasionally to distract him and tease him with comments about men in pinafores. That is the 'sit' part of the sitcom, and it is not exactly cutting edge.

The 'com' part just baffles me. It consists of a conveyor belt of silly moments and rudimentary sight gags loosely attached to a plot - and I use the term 'plot' in its widest possible sense. In the absence of any decent one-liners or characterisation, Byrne, the writer as well as star, attempts a frustratingly half-hearted surrealism, usually stuck on as fantasy inserts but which sometimes intrudes into the action itself.

To say that I didn't get the humour would be the grossest of understatements. The show seems to hover in a comedy limbo all its own, somewhere between the conformity of My Family and the madness of The Mighty Boosh, the end result being messy and unfocused.

The strange thing is that although I didn't laugh once, I didn't actually dislike Father Figure. As I said, Byrne is an amiable performer and has surrounded himself with an eminently watchable supporting cast, including Pauline McLynn and Peter Serafinowicz. Half an hour passes pleasantly enough, but I won't be rushing back to Father Figure anytime soon.

Jason Byrne is an accomplished stand-up comedian, an expert in working a crowd and making them feel as if they are the stars of the show. All of which made his sitcom debut in Father Figure (BBC1) something of a mystifying misfire.

As if nicking your title off one of George Michael's best songs wasn't bad enough, Father Figure managed to commit every sitcom cliché crime in the book: dopey bloke, interfering mother, long-suffering wife, victim neighbours, bonkers relatives. All of it wrapped up in an unsavoury mess of vomit and poo 'jokes'.

It's an unholy marriage of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Mrs Brown's Boys, with Byrne as an Irish spin on Frank Spencer, a hapless idiot to whom disasters naturally occur - most of which involve spraying anyone who ventures across his path with everything from baked beans to chocolate mousse.

Byrne brings a certain haphazard charm to the part, but his material is pretty puerile. Still, if you find a child running around screaming 'I'm a human poo!' the height of hilarity - and the canned laughter soundtrack was having fits - then this is the show for you.

As is the 1970s, where a man protecting his genitals with the line 'You'll crush me Curly Wurlys!' would, at least, have been vaguely contemporary.

Father Figure review

It would have been bad enough if a new writer had penned Father Figure. In fact, that could even possibly have been forgiven. But the fact that such a much-loved stand-up as Jason Byrne is responsible is simply baffling.

The success of Mrs Brown's Boys has left everything up for grabs, confirming that certain TV phenomena are just inexplicable. Who cares what critics think when viewers vote with their eyeballs in such large numbers? This Jason Byrne sitcom, transferred to telly from a Radio 2 series, is wretched: clichéd, derivative, predictable and crass. But that doesn't mean no one's going to like it.

Father Figure is trad. Looking to the gentler end of domestic comedy (Not Going Out, Outnumbered) for its inspiration, it leans towards the obvious at all times. Wondering what's going to happen to that large and elaborate cake in the living room? Don't expect to be surprised. But Byrne lacks Lee Mack's sheer relentlessness and the knack of taking things one step further than they might - done well by Outnumbered.

So Byrne's bumbling dad Tom just feels like an accumulation of his predecessors, but a dead end rather than a culmination. There are some decent performers in Father Figure including Michael Smiley and Pauline McLynn. But they just haven't been given anything to work with. Poor.

Jason Byrne created and stars in this sitcom as house husband Tom Whyte, whose attempts to be a domestic god result in chaos and grief, not helped by his rambunctious sons. A joke about a malfunctioning bathroom door evokes reminders of Outnumbered, which this isn't; it's more like a superficial sequence of calamities. However, an incident concerning some baked beans is well conceived, while Father Ted's Pauline McLynn, with her old-school vegetable-boiling methods, adds solid support.

Jason Byrne, veteran of the comedy stand-up circuit, makes the transition to TV sitcoms with this adaptation of his own Radio 2 series.

It's deeply traditional stuff - Byrne is a hopeless suburban dad (no, the title isn't riffing on George Michael) whose infuriated ineptitude is a source of endless hilarity to his chortling family.

Byrne's Irish so his mum is played by Pauline McLynn - because that's the sitcom law.

Another old-fashioned family sitcom involving an interfering Irish grandmother, broad slapstick and a studio audience? Mrs Brown's Boys has a lot to answer for.

Comedian Jason Byrne adapted this from his Radio 2 series. He plays groaningly hapless suburban dad Tom, who, in the opening moments, accidentally showers his prissy next-door neighbours with hot baked beans then pulls their garden fence down.

As he prepares a dinner to apologise, his eccentric family intervenes (Pauline McLynn plays his mad mother) and the meal spirals towards disaster via poo jokes, a stolen wedding cake, pratfalls and vomit.

Why do so many comics find their voice on the radio?

As Jason Byrne swaps radio for TV with his new BBC1 sitcom Father Figure, Radio Times asks why so many comedies start off on the radio waves...

Do you find it hilarious when small children say cheeky things like "poo!"? Do you shriek with delight when a grown man is unable to cook a meal without resorting to ironing the steak?

Do you find it wholly plausible that someone would steal a massive tiered wedding cake and bring it to a dinner party as their contribution to dessert? Do you find that watching people being repeatedly covered in food, falling over, or falling over into food makes you roll on the floor laughing? Then, just like the studio audience who go into paroxysms at every scene, you'll love Father Figure.

A sort of combination of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and those kids' shows where adults are constantly being gunked, Jason Byrne's sitcom is a transfer from Radio 2. His amiable stand-up persona is replicated as hapless but well-meaning dad to smart-arse kids, husband to past-caring just-open-the-wine wife, son to overbearing parents (Pauline McLynn as his mum is more glamorous than her Father Ted character Mrs Doyle but no less a nag), friend to a wasted Michael Smiley and neighbour to some cardboard people who are only there to react in horror to his gaffes.

The show is relentlessly middle-of-the-road, determinedly populist and wholly idiotic. Were it not for the sweary-words and a few double entendres, it would be pitched firmly as family entertainment and has clearly been commissioned to try to cash in on the unexpected success of Mrs Brown's Boys.

In its favour, I suppose it's a bit better than 
Ben Elton's megaflop 
The Wright Way. It will no doubt run 
for years.

TV Preview: Father Figure

Father Figure is certainly not The Wright Way-bad, it's just that I expected something, if not more subtle, certainly more inventive from Jason Byrne.