Robert Bathurst

Fool If You Think It's Over

Off The Telly reports on the struggle to bring Joking Apart out on DVD in this excellent article. Includes interviews with Robert Bathurst, Steven Moffat and Craig Robins, the man who organised the DVD release.

It took me a while to get into this comedy series. It's sort of an English Seinfeld, the mishaps and accidents and emotional morasses of a stand-up comic with layers of slapstick added.

The star, Robert Bathurst is less convincing as the comic, better at the slapstick. Like the programme itself, he's better at frolicking the half hour away in comedies of embarrassment and farce than he is at being all moody and deep.

I don't want to get prematurely excited, but BBC2's Joking Apart is distinctly promising as 'a new adult comedy series'.

In other words, this is middle-class sitcom with sex and mild swear-words. Gosh! It took the trenchant Drop the Dead Donkey to show what really happened after office parties (you wake up with your face in a curry at a railway station).

Steven Moffat's Joking Apart hardly aspires to the standard of the divine DTDD, but as an analysis of modern divorce it's quite funny and acute so far. Robert Bathurst and Fiona Gillies are much too pretty and clean to be entirely true to life, but maybe separation will roughen them up.

I've virtually given up looking for a good new British sitcom; they're all too bland, heavy-handed and frankly unfunny. Joking Apart has its problems but possesses a certain dark, mordant wit. But the show has a huge casting problem. Robert Bathurst, as Mark, is a conventionally handsome actor, but not one who can successfully convey the frustration of being a creative writer.