Crashing

Hidden gem British TV comedies on Netflix

Fill your Netflix watchlist full of these critically acclaimed British comedies.

Crashing: watching Phoebe Waller-Bridge's first series

It never got the same exposure as Fleabag, but the short, bingeable show is streaming in Australia - and now is the perfect time to watch it.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sitcom rewarded those who made it past a challenging premise (the protagonists live in a condemned hospital as property guardians) with dark LOLs as middle-class jobs met sub-student lifestyles, and Kathy Burke as you've never seen her before. The whole series is available to watch now on All4.

Starting things as they mean to go on, Anthony bears witness to uptight fiancee Kate "following through" during a moment of intimacy, while Lulu finds herself grappling with an ill-thought-out denim onesie in order to relieve herself mid-interview for her place at the hospital guardianship. It's a theme of sorts. Later, Kate bonds with artist Melody while sitting as a life model, and is soon - thanks to wine and some tubes of acrylic - letting loose her inhibitions, leading to much merriment but also some unexpected truths.

Crashing review: a noisy, sweary, fast-paced show

Anthony's curries bubbled away throughout the episode as the uncomfortableness ramped up.

Review: Crashing, Channel 4

New flatshare comedy drama is a slow burn.

Crashing review: frank, filthy, sad and weird

This modern sitcom follows young property guardians in a disused hospital, using tonal flips to great effect.

Episode two of the sitcom following a group of property guardians. Free-spirited Lulu (played by the show's creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge) continues to drive a wedge between Anthony and his fiancee. Not content with moving into the old hospital alongside them, she's soon working with Kate, and failing to get the hang of just about everything. Elsewhere, Melody homes in on Crying Colin. Despite a peculiar premise, this latest addition to the millennials-behaving-badly genre is yet to hit any kind of stride.

In Crashing six disparate, oddball people are not squatting but "protecting" unoccupied premises, in this case a mothballed hospital. So far, so much the reflection of our loopy property values, and plenty were the nods to Fresh Meat and This Life, neither of which this is at all. Yet. Do give it time. There are great moments of comic timing - not least from Kate (Louise Ford) - and, actually, not a little to get excited about, and the second episode's even better.

In many ways Crashing is like a traditional house share sitcom with plenty of mismatched characters having little in common other than the space they live in. However what separates Crashing from the plethora of past flatshare sitcoms is that the characters are all living as property guardians in a disused hospital. I did find the way that Phoebe Waller-Bridge introduced this concept was quite heavy-handed in some respects as the strait-laced Kate (Louise Ford) and obnoxious estate agent Sam (Jonathan Bailey) attempted to explain their situation in one of the opening scenes. Meanwhile Waller-Bridge's Lulu arrived at the hospital as an old friend of Kate's fiancée Anthony (Damian Molony) and was presented as a possible threat to their future together. Of the characters my initial favourite has to be the uninhibited French artist Melody (Julie Dray) whose one-liners provided some of the only highlights of this first episode. Rounding up the group were nervous diabetic Fred (Amit Shah) and Kate's recently divorced colleague Colin (Adrian Scarborough) who has already formed an odd bond with Melody. I did feel that Waller-Bridge was fighting somewhat of a losing battle with the first episode of Crashing primarily as she had so much plot to get through and so many characters to introduce. As the opening episode was only about twenty-three minutes long I don't think I really got to know any of the leads and therefore I wasn't as invested as I possibly should have been. That being said there were flashes of greatness layered within the patchy first episode as Waller-Bridge revealed the complexities that lay behind the seemingly annoying Sam and the highly strung Kate. I personally feel that Crashing deserved a longer amount of time for its opening instalment as it suffered from rushed storytelling and under-developed characters. I think that Waller-Bridge's script showed flashes of promise and that's why I'm going to give Crashing a second go however it feels that if her show had a longer running time then the characters and story would be given more room to breathe.