Meet The Richardsons

Meet The Richardsons At Christmas review

Curb your cynicism, it's the festive season.

Review: Meet The Richardsons

Jon Richardson seems to treat this as a time for re-gifting, or recycling, his old jokes. One about a 'sad-vent calendar', with depressing messages behind the 24 doors, was reused from an old episode of C4's Eight Out Of Ten Cats Does Countdown. He didn't even try to pretend it was new. That's hardly entering into the spirit of things.

Meet The Richardsons At Christmas, Dave, review

Actual Christmas nuts watching might have felt a little twinge of recognition in his grating enthusiasm.

Meet The Richardsons At Christmas, review

This curmudgeonly festive comedy was a downbeat delight.

Comedian Jon Richardson and his wife Lucy are doing their darndest to squeeze entertainment out of domestic life with their three-year-old daughter in the Yorkshire market town of Hebden Bridge.

Their mock reality-show Meet The Richardsons (Dave) started last month, pretending to be a fly-on-the-lounge-wall show where Jon and Lucy sat on their sofa and bickered about their marriage.

If they'd stuck with that concept, it might have worked better: the couple are obviously close but one can't say a word without rubbing the other up the wrong way.

Lucy spent several minutes criticising her husband for the way he says 'hello'.

And millions of wives will sympathise with her frustration that Jon can go into rhapsodies about a flash of football skill in a Sky Sports game, but fails to notice when she's spent an hour doing her face and make-up before a night out: 'You just say: "Come on then, let's go."'

But the show falls apart when it descends to scripted hijinks. Jon got stuck on the stairs moving a sofa and had to phone for help ... even though the camera crew was in the house. Are they professionally bound never to intervene, like wildlife photographers?

Jason Donovan made a cameo appearance as a guest at a celebrity Halloween party, sending himself up rotten when Lucy mistook him for Bros.

He was great in Dial M For Middlesbrough last year, too. Top chap.

Meet The Richardsons purports to be a portrait of Jon's married life with fellow comic Lucy Beaumont. In fact, it's a drearily laboured sitcom that tries to ape Lee Mack's Not Going Out -- and fails. There's even a bit-part for a veteran comic. Lee has Bobby Ball, Jon ropes in Bernie Clifton. Good to see that ostrich is still doing the business.

Jon Richardson extends his misanthropic persona to a Curb-ish mockumentary, satirising his married domestic life with fellow comedian Lucy Beaumont. There are good gags about Richardson's eccentricities, but the cringeworthy comeuppances are underpowered.

Preview: Meet The Richardsons, Dave

No need to curb your enthusiasm here, there is plenty to be enthusiastic about.