Jaz Deol

Together is written by and stars Johnny Sweet; a performer who up to know I hadn't really rated which made this charming sitcom all the more surprising. Sweet plays Tom a rather kind-hearted if foolish guy whose sister (Katy Wix) is constantly setting him up on blind dates which go rather badly. During the episode Tom keeps encountering Ellen (Cara Theobold) a rather outspoken young woman whose ex-boyfriend Luke (Jaz Deol) is constantly trying to win her back. The problem with the first episode of a romantic comedy series is that we have to sit through a number of missed opportunities before the central couple hit it off. The missteps in the first episode of Together include Tom seeing Ellen naked at a life drawing class and later encountering a rather saucy couple as he tries to gatecrash a party she's attending. Although Sweet crafts several awkward moments during the episode they never feel embarrassing and rather surprisingly most of them ring true. Sweet is helped by the fact that the script has been edited by Tim Key and Jeremy Dyson who have obviously aided in the general flow of the comedy therefore no scene outstays its welcome and almost every moment is played for laughs but at the same time the central relationship is never forgotten. In their handful of scenes together I felt that Sweet and Theobold had natural chemistry and I found the final scene particularly touching. However the majority of the highlights in this first episode came courtesy of Vicki Pepperdine and Alex McQueen as Tom's well-meaning parents. McQueen's soliloquy about the right temperature in which to serve rhubarb yoghurt was especially hilarious as were Pepperdine's attempts to dispose of her on-screen husband's junk. Even though Together never blew me away, I found it to be a charming sitcom full of promise and one that I'm definitely going to stick with for the time being.