Spending My Inheritance

Gillian Reynolds Review

The point of comedy like this is to see ourselves but at just enough of a distance to make it bearable, with just enough of a twist to make us laugh. I smiled a bit but was otherwise too busy feeling the pain. I think, though, once I've stopped worrying about whether I did the right thing about equity release, it may grow on me.

Clive Coleman's generation gap sitcom stars Kris Marshall (you know, the stepdad from the BT ads) as Harry, a forty-something who's somewhat alarmed by his father's spending habits, his father Brian (Kenneth Cranham), being rich and unencumbered by school fees, mortgage, etc. And there's prosperous brother Richard (Chris Pavlo) to reckon with too, the one who buys Dad expensive golf clubs. The brothers take Dad out while the womenfolk set up his surprise 65th birthday party. Back in the kitchen, control freak wars erupt.

If you were to come across Clive Coleman's six-part drama cold, you might think it was a comedy - particularly as that is how it's billed. But there are dark days ahead for amiable nonentity Harry who is shrivelling in the shadow cast by his more successful elder brother Richard. When not jetting out of and back into Bahrain on the company jet, Richard is lavishing rare and precious gifts on their father, Brian. All Harry can offer is his house as a setting for Brian's 65th birthday party - and even then Brian's wife Liz shoulders Harry's wife Jo out of the way when it comes to setting up things properly. But Harry has a chance to reclaim a spark of dignity - the speech he has been preparing for a year, one that will make him the golden boy, if only for an hour. A top cast - Kris Marshall and Raquel Cassidy to the fore - does justice to a fine script.

Clive Coleman's six-parter Spending My Inheritance was clearly intended to address the impolite notion that 30 and 40-somethings are casting covetous eyes at their parents' final salary pensions and the sky is the limit value of their mortgage-free properties.

Somewhere between Coleman typing 'The end' and transmission of the first episode, the credit crunch storm blew in. So the idea of a senior member of the golf-playing classes and his wife releasing equity on their house for a grey pound-splurging spree while their debt and responsibility-ridden middle-aged son looks on in horror, seems merely fanciful.

Now, perhaps I'm jumping the gun here. So far, Brian and Liz (Kenneth Cranham and Judy Parfitt) haven't actually got round to the equity release, but they are showing a superhuman dedication to the good life and their son Harry (Kris Marshall) is tearing his hair out as he attempts to live up to the expectations created by their other, careerist, son. So maybe later on we'll find out if a bit of crunchy credit has been written into this scream of inter-generational angst.

In the meantime, Marshall jumps around jabbering so hyperactively as Harry that I can hardly blame his parents if they do go on a spend, spend, spend mission destined to leave him nothing. I can be laughed into submission over most things, but another five weeks of far from hilarious Harry might have me contemplating hara-kiri.