Family Tree

Christopher Guest: Characters that aren't so everyday

A lot of people have asked me what my role in Family Tree was. Actually, only one person has asked me and that was my wife.

In the new sitcom Family Tree, Eeyore-faced Chris O'Dowd plays Tom Chadwick, a recently cuckolded, jobless single who's inherited an old photo of someone he believes to be his great-grandfather. Tom embarks on a search to know more about his ancestors, discovering ever more exotic and esoteric branches of his genealogy. He's accompanied by his hapless pal Pete and sister Bea (the ventriloquist Nina Conti), who, due to a traumatic childhood incident in a zoo, now voices her more unorthodox opinions via a hand puppet called Monkey.

This is a very funny comedy and, watching preview episodes on my computer with headphones on, I chortled out loud about six times (a risky thing to do when colleagues all around are ploughing through an Ed Miliband speech). The series is a send-up of kin-hunting series such as Who Do You Think You Are? and Long Lost Family, and because tracking down one's forebears could lead to just about anything, both possibility and improbability are built in. As a documentary spoof, it's more farcical and less 'realistic' than, say, The Office. Nobody really questions the presence of Monkey.

Conscious of its own meta-ness, the show makes fun of different genres, often via its characters watching telly or DVDs, so we get treated to snippets of a mock BBC2 historical soap, or a cringe-inducing flashback to a 70s sitcom. One thing about these TV-within-TV moments, though. It's become increasingly the done thing, in our overly politically correct times, for hip, knowing comedies to get safe laughs by showing terribly un-PC things via the filter of a terribly un-PC character (in this case, Tom's dad). We're supposed to be laughing at, not with, the character. In reality, of course, we're doing both. I find the PC brigade tedious in the extreme, but it seems to me that, if you believe one shouldn't depict Indians with waggly heads, then don't depict them, full-stop. You can't poke fun by proxy. That's having your gluten-free cake and eating it too.

Co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, pioneer of the mock-documentary format, Family Tree stars Chris O'Dowd as a man intent on tracing his family history.

The performances are naturalistic, the pace leisurely, the humour gentle, the focus meandering and the format flexible enough to include mock-doc TV interviews - despite it not being set up as a documentary - and for Nina Conti, who plays O'Dowd's sister, to employ her ventriloquist puppet monkey as a co-star.

The show is amiable, entertaining, whimsical and intriguing, but - a terrific blind date scene notwithstanding - it doesn't seem that bothered about being funny.

Family Tree - TV review

Chris O'Dowd is very watchable in this BBC Two comedy, but there are no surprises here, or lols - or any sort of laughs

When it comes to top pedigree, Family Tree (BBC Two) is hanging off some high branches. Boasting Chris O'Dowd, a big (well, at least medium) Hollywood cheese these days, as the central character and Christopher (Best In Show) Guest on writing and creating duties, you might expect this to be a big deal movie release. Instead, it's an oddly understated sitcom.

O'Dowd is a fresh and engaging comic talent. He breathes believable life into Tom Chadwick, one of life's drifters, whose aimless existence takes a surprising turn when he's left a chest containing random bits and bobs by a long-forgotten great aunt. Among the bobs is an old photo of a military gent, which sets our Tom off on a Who Do You Think You Are?-style jaunt.

The trouble is, everyone else in Tom's life is mildly bonkers, from his ventriloquist sis to the crackpot in the corner shop. Tom Bennett is a notable exception, good value as best mate Pete, but he has to fight his way through the gaggle of eccentrics choking Family Tree at the roots. And that confessional speaking-to-camera trick? All too wearily familiar.

Family Tree is an odd kind of affair. It's been created by comedy aristocracy (it's co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, who created This Is Spinal Tap), but it came across in this first episode as amateurishly awkward, funny in a desultory kind of way at one moment, startlingly clunky at others.

Chris O'Dowd stars as Tom, an out-of-work risk assessor triggered to research his ancestral past by a bequest from a great-aunt, and Nina Conti plays his sister Bea, complete with the monkey vent doll, explained here as the result of childhood therapy for elective mutism ("she hadn't skoken in weeks," the monkey helpfully explains). The dialogue has the loose, bantering style of improvisation - which gives it a warmth and realism to counterbalance the slightly effortful zaniness - and the style (in a half-hearted way) is mock-documentary.

The format doesn't make much sense. Why would anyone be making a film about Tom and his family, particularly since the mission to explore the past hasn't even occurred to him at the beginning of the episode? Besides, there doesn't seem to be any real tension between the actuality sequences and the more formal talking-head interviews that occasionally pop up (in the style of Modern Family).

But it is Christopher Guest. Some of the character comedy, promisingly, is funny, in particular a sequence in which Tom went on a blind date with a very stupid girl ("There's been loads of sightings of dinosaurs in Africa," she assured him when he expressed polite doubt about their continued existence). Watch, in the hope of developments.

TV review - Family Tree, BBC2

I've just watched the first episode and I'm totally thrown. It is clearly intended to be a comedy, but so far the laughs are painfully thin on the ground.

Review: Family Tree, BBC Two

I wish I could say this opener was laugh-out-loud funny, but I can't.

Family Tree, BBC Two, review

It all felt a bit too random, too unconnected. All of which was fine, if not very funny, except when Guest's trademark style came into play and we were expected to believe a TV crew was following Tom around, interviewing him and his pals. Uh, why?

This show's got something for everyone... except laughs

This surgically engineered sitcom made just one slip in its pilot episode. It forgot to leave room for the jokes.