Don't Forget The Driver

Euan Ferguson's best TV of 2019

Fleabag, of course, but also GameFace, Aisling Bea's This Way Up, Motherland - and that lovely, short sweet run, State Of The Union. Black Mirror as well, although too few episodes. There was sadcom too - don't forget Don't Forget The Driver, Defending The Guilty. And with Stath Lets Flats and Flack, we were laughing all the way until we suddenly stopped.

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This has been the apotheosis of the modern sadcom: delicate and bereft, but with an undertow of hope that its characters will find their place. Embodying that bittersweet balance is the show's co-writer, Toby Jones, as the titular coach driver, for whom redemption may - in this season finale - be near.

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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.