Toby Jones (I)

Seriously funny: why we fell in love with dramedies

From Toby Jones's Don't Forget the Driver to Ricky Gervais in After Life, a new breed of 'dark comedy' is wowing TV critics and audiences.

A pivotal, penultimate instalment of a series that's stealthily taking its place in 2019's comedy pantheon. Proving that star/co-writer Toby Jones and creator Tim Crouch can do taut episodes as well as artful longueurs, Pete's improvised family share a day of epiphanies ... at a model village.

There is still time to get caught up in this downbeat dramedy, which, with typical Toby Jones understatement, has quietly become one of the best things on television. In this fourth episode, coach driver Peter (Jones) comes a cropper explaining Shakespeare to a Japanese tourist, but he is soon back tackling more topical national anxieties, such as how much responsibility to take for the refugee crisis. It is an abstract problem made flesh by his house guest Rita (Luwam Teklizgi).

Problematic was the opener to Don't Forget the Driver. I'm sure we all love Toby Jones, star and co-writer with playwright Tim Crouch, but fear this is too soulful, too sharply now, to garner the audiences it truly deserves. Part of the problem is classification: for a "dark comedy" there are precious few outright laughs, especially once people-smuggling and drowned bodies intrude, and hence it also fails "gentle", as fans of Detectorists might have wished.

Instead, I urge you not to classify, and to forge further, to keep Jones's faith. You will be rewarded - not instantly, but well. This ambitiously sad drama succeeds, often despite itself, in clarifying the unclarifiable now, a now of left-behind seaside towns, unquantifiable regrets, the equal satisfactions and smugnesses which small island lives bring, the long, dark teatimes of the soul, the stuttered emergence into rain-dappled, crisp-bagged uplands. It might not yet ring funny. It always rings true.

Don't Forget the Driver review

This new dark-comedy has bags of promise and potential.

Toby Jones and Tim Crouch interview

It's hard to tell a story about people smuggling through the lens of humour, but if anyone can do it, it's Toby Jones and his writing sidekick Tim Crouch.

Review: Don't Forget the Driver

Toby Jones stars in a new comedy-drama about... oh, never mind. That's all we need to know: 'Toby Jones.' It's going to be a good 'un.

Don't Forget the Driver, BBC Two, review

Trying to beat the Bognor blues.

Don't Forget The Driver review

Right now it's difficult to be engaged by the show, despite it being beautifully directed and containing a lot of concepts and themes which deserve to be explored in detail given the state of the world right now.

Review: Don't Forget the Driver

Don't Forget The Driver sets out to portray both the beauty and ugliness of small-town Britain but in doing so separately can often feel like a mixed bag, when in real life, and in the series in its better moments, these things can overlap or even be one in the same.