Camping (2016)

Camping review

There's certainly a lot to savour about Camping if you're acclimated to the peculiar worldview of Julia Davis, and can laugh at other people struggling through excruciating situations. However, it did feel like Camping had loftier ambitions as a study of grotesques stuck together on a campsite, but in some ways it takes the easier option of just being as socially unpleasant and strange as possible.

Julia Davis's sublime comedy concludes with a painfully awkward double bill, as Robin's birthday finally arrives and the camping trip from hell comes to a shuddering, regretful end. Frustrations boil over between recovering alcoholic Adam and the painfully cowed Kerry over his increasingly blatant flirtations with Fay. But it's when Fay's secret stash of drugs comes into play that things get out of hand, with home truths and sexual experimentation emerging.

The final two episodes of this horrifying, uncomfortable, but utterly brilliant sitcom go out tonight. The previous four have produced flinches, cringes and desperately awkward moments but tonight's go completely off the scale! It lurches into violently bleak territory this evening, so be warned: if you already found Camping painful, tonight you might actually require some Ibuprofen.

Robin and Fi host a party in the barn to celebrate his birthday and mark the end of the camping holiday. Despite the innocent cake, pop music and party hats, it descends into utter depravity, becoming like a drugged-up version of The League of Gentlemen.

And there's a surprising amount of full-frontal nudity involved, though not from the hunky Adam or good-looking Fay. It's from the creepy and nameless little man who owns the campsite: he bursts out of the shadows tonight in his perverted, naked, gasping glory when Fay's drug supply loosens everyone's inhibitions and unleashes an animalistic chaos. I felt wonderfully shocked and shaken by the time the credits rolled. Bravo!

Preview: Camping, Sky Atlantic, episodes 5 & 6

Don't be fooled by the jaunty sub-Mumfords music at the start of episode 5. Julia Davis' comedy-drama comes to a head in all sorts of horrendous ways in these last two instalments.

Camping review

It's an indisputable fact that you need a very strong stomach to watch anything written by Julia Davis.

Review: Camping, Sky Atlantic, eps 3 & 4

I was probably a bit unfair to dub this series Nighty Night On Holiday when I first heard about Camping].

Camping is a comic treat that's being unfairly rushed

This is becoming my favourite show currently on TV. It's almost a shame that Sky Atlantic have compressed the series, showing a double-bill of episodes each Tuesday night.

Camping is only two episodes in and it already has me squirming uncomfortably in my seat, unable to look away as she and a superb cast of improvising comedy whizzes take us to a very dark place indeed.

A group of friends and family go for a short break under canvas and all their hidden, and not so hidden, unpleasantnesses start to emerge. Davis seems to inspire absolute trust from the folk she works with and there's nothing more thrilling than watching actors squeezing their emotional spots on screen and really going for it. Catch up if you haven't seen it. It's horrible.

The new Julia Davis comedy, Camping, about a group holiday on a camping site, hit the sodden grass running with two episodes that simultaneously amused and (deliciously) horrified.

Steve Pemberton played decent, resigned Robin, who was celebrating his 50th birthday, if "celebrating" is the right word, considering his wife Fiona's (Vicki Pepperdine) attempts at psychological castration via the medium of nagging malevolence (Fiona is the first great television monster of 2016). They and their son, Archie (banned by his mother from eating any foods "that could be vaguely homosexual"), were joined by Jonathan Cake's Adam, a recovering alcoholic, his son (a teenage masturbator), and wrung-out dishcloth of a wife, Kerry (Elizabeth Berrington). We also met recently separated Tom (Rufus Jones), cutting a tragic figure in his Topman finery and attempting to recapture his virility with "dubstep DJ" Fay (Davis), a woman determined to turn pretentious vacuity into an art form.

Camping managed to be wickedly funny while also serving as a compelling argument for losing all faith in humankind. Anyone familiar with Davis's oeuvre (Nighty Night, Hunderby) will know what I mean when I describe the characters as either wildly stressed, intrinsically damaged, irredeemably horrible or all three at once. At one point, Tom was caught in flagrante with Fay in a cubicle in a bric-a-brac shop. "Big apols!" he drawled. Priceless.

An interview with Julia Davis

Certain words come up when you talk about the kinds of comedy Julia Davis stars in, or writes, or sometimes both: goth-diary words like dark, twisted, macabre.