Ralf Little

Sky1's latest sitcom offering comes from the team who helped make The Royle Family what it was. Shame it seems the magic has gone.

The Café is set in a... well you can guess where, but this particular establishment is located in Weston-Super-Mare and is called "Cyril's". Despite this, there's no-one called Cyril in the show. The main characters are the owner of the café, Carol (Ellie Haddington), her daughter and wannabe writer Sarah (Michelle Terry, who co-writes the series with Ralf Little, who also stars in the series), and Carol's mother Mary (June Watson).

However, this is just the start. There are 13 main characters.

Now, I don't mind there being lots of characters in a sitcom. Green Wing, for example, had a minimum of 14 regular characters in it at any one time. However, you can't make the characters fully rounded if the episodes are just half-an-hour (minus advertising time), compared to the hour-long episodes Green Wing had. There are some interesting characters, like Kieran the living statue (Kevin Trainor), but it's a bit of a mess.

But the main problem with this show is that it just isn't funny enough. It comes across as overtly sentimental, and while this programme does have the odd laugh now and then, what this show really needs is less characters and less drama.

I was once too rude and frankly wrong about a Craig Cash thing, Early Doors, which in the subsequent year I grew to love, once I'd got the pacing and the gentle humour into my head. The Cafe, directed by Cash and written by Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, who co-star, is a terribly similar vehicle, based this time not in a pub but, yes, a cafe, in Weston-super-Mare, and none the less warming for its derivation.

Already now we have the characters - the apparently dotty gran who's still a techno-whizz, the single mum running the cafe and trying desperately to marry off her pretty daughter, Sarah. Sarah's various possible suitors, her nice ex, Ralf, and the pompous rich homecoming whizz-kid. The pace is... slow. Delightfully so. The humour is... slow. Delightfully so. As in when Ralf's character asks for an "egg mayo baguette, but no mayo. And on a roll". Long pause. "Egg roll, then?" "Yes."

Oh, you have to see it to get it, and I really wish they hadn't so directly lifted, from Blackadder, the phrase "thick as a whale omelette", but, trust me, there's a lot of slow-cooked delight here.

You knew from the first wispy chords of The Café where we were headed. A breathy female voice, the type that suffers sensitively over many a US drama, was squeezing every last drop of maritime melancholy from Bobby Darin's swing classic Beyond The Sea.

It wasn't unpleasant - not the massacre The Smiths' Please Please Please suffers on the sickly middle-class fantasy that is the John Lewis Christmas ad - but as a cover version, it couldn't have got more whimsical.

And whimsical is The Café's default mode. As seaside postcard characters lapped over each other in the picture perfect Weston-Super-Mare café, the quirkiness built like a rising tide: failed rock stars, human statues, tarty crimpers and dreamy writers eddied around like flotsam and jetsam, playing to the idea that, well, you don't have to be mad to live at the seaside, but it probably helps.

It was hard to escape the feeling that these were characters working a little too hard to be, you know, 'characters', rather than breathing in the salty sea air and being actual people. Yet every now and again Ralf Little and Michelle Terry's script would stub its toe on a bitter rock lurking beneath the soft sand of these lost souls and yelp with a cutting wit that pulled you up short, hinting at how good The Café could be if it dug its heels into the shingle.

Marcia Warren, a brilliant actress who could play 'madcap pensioner' in her sleep, was in mid-perm at the local hairdressers when the conversation turned to children. 'Can't live with them...' she snarled from beneath her tangled mop of hair. 'Can't kill 'em!' Put that in your wish fulfilment pipe and smoke it, John Lewis.

The Cafe review - Royle male strikes

You can get a long way on charm alone. After several hundred years of snoozing through Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Ralf Little appears to be getting his act back together.

Sky 1's latest sitcom The Cafe, written by and starring Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, is set in a family run cafe on the Weston-super-Mare seafront. "This really is the arse end of nowhere" observes one visitor into his mobile phone, all within the hearing of the diners and staff (frequently one and the same thing).
That may be so, but the unprepossessing location is home to a truly fresh, funny, romantic and charming show, populated by believable, likeable characters. Terry plays Sarah, recently returned from London nursing a broken heart, bruised ego and ambitions as a writer of children's books. Little is Richard, care home assistant by day, putative rock star by night. Former childhood sweethearts, the pair have settled into a comfortable platonic friendship. As if.

Director Craig Cash imposes his trademark naturalism and attention to detail to the proceedings whilst terrific dialogue, always funny but never forced, pings around the walls of the cafe like a demented squash ball. I sat through the first two episodes sporting a delighted grin, disturbed only by the occasional guffaw. Comparisons with Gavin & Stacey are inevitable, but favourable. The Cafe might just prove a similar comedy classic.

Is it wrong to judge a show by its theme tune? The folky version of Somewhere Beyond The Sea which opens The Cafe is sung by Kathryn Williams in a voice so wistfully fairy-like she makes Janet Devlin off The X Factor sound like Joe Cocker.

The second impression you'll get of The Cafe is that it's a bit Early Doors On Sea because it's directed by Craig Cash and is set, as you could probably guess, in and around a pretty beach-front cafe in Weston-super-Mare called Cyril's.

It's written by and stars Ralf Little and Michelle Terry (who is actually from Weston) and it makes a nice change to see Somerset getting a bit of a look-in, instead of the North West.

Having said that, many of the eccentrics who frequent the cafe run by Carol (Ellie Haddington) could have just stepped off the bus from Doc Martin territory. One of them, Kieran, who works as a living statue, is actually a different colour every day (a bit like Gold Guy in the short-lived sitcom Angelo's). Michelle Terry plays Carol's daughter Sarah, who's reluctantly living back home after a stint in London and is trying to become a writer.

Little plays her ex-boyfriend Richard who works in a care-home.

But a potential new relationship arrives tonight in the shape of an old school friend who has just zoomed down from the capital in a Porsche.

John is played by Daniel Ings from Pete Versus Life, who now seems in danger of being type-cast as the handsomest man for miles around. Poor thing. Must be tough for him.

This is the kind of show for which the word "bittersweet" could have been invented. A social hub, wry chitchat among the regulars and the occasional ripple of pathos - it's all here in this new seaside-set sitcom written by and starring Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, and directed by Craig Cash.

Yet while The Café does, at times, capture the loneliness that people can experience when everything around them is all-too-familiar, it's not as subtle as the best of the genre, such as Cash's understated Early Doors. In fact, the programme it most resembles is the short-lived Angelo's, a 2007 comedy set in a greasy spoon that, oddly enough, also featured a living-statue among its patrons. As for whether The Café will disappear as quickly, there's a danger that viewers will find it all a little bit too inconsequential.

Ralf Little: "I'd love to play a serious baddie"

The actor and writer talks about The Royle Family, The Café - and his dream role.

If you've yet to visit the Victorian seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, now's your chance: it's home to the debut sitcom from Ralf Little and stage actress Michelle Terry, and yes, its precinct is a café in which Terry's struggling writer Sarah and her loveable mum, Carol, banter with dotty grandmas, schoolboy sweethearts and sexy visitors from the capital. Gentle but endearing.

Ralf Little on following Royle Family with own creation

"When this was commissioned, my mother was text-book brilliant and supportive. She said, 'Oh, well done, I'm so proud of you'... Eight seconds later, the phone rang again and she added, 'Make sure it's good, won't you?'"