Sunshine

The Stage Review

That Sunshine succeeds so effectively as both comedy and drama is down to a witty and original script by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey combined with a very impressive performance from Coogan, who manages to strike just the right note between amiable and infuriating, amusing and appalling.

Indeed, Sunshine is so well done that it is almost too painful to watch, and it's going to require something of an act of will from me to return for a further helping of Bob's wilful self-destruction. The jokes and great lines certainly come thick and fast, but the underlying mood is one of despair with just a hint of impending doom.

Sunshine was a feel-good north country drama co-written by Craig Cash. It was The Royle Family drenched in syrup, but with a feel-bad central character. This was an uneasy mixture. Steve Coogan was Bing, a father with a gambling habit who gets stitched up in an illegal gambling club, having blown his partner's holiday savings in an attempt to pay back the mortgage arrears. Playing the part with a convincing mixture of bumptious charm and desperate vulnerability, Coogan is a pretty good character actor if you can ever forget that this is Steve Coogan. By the end I had just about managed it.

Blog Review

Writers Craig Cash and Phil Mealey are perfectly aware of the situation they've created and they're perfectly aware of the audience's expectations of that situation. They know what they're up to, those two. They're having a ball, with a script littered with double-takes and surprises.

Guardian Review

I don't really know what to think about Sunshine, if I'm honest. It starts off all warm and cosy, like sunshine. Then, suddenly, we've shunted forward a generation.

Sunshine is a comedy drama drawn from the same Northern roots as Early Doors. Filled with gentle humour, lovable characters and laugh-out-loud jokes, it should have been easy to warm to Sunshine. But the clouds kept rolling in.

It depended on whether Bing, a happy-go-lucky gambler, came across as one of life's charmers or a bit of an idiot. Unfortunately, Steve Coogan's cartoonish mugging meant Bing see-sawed between the two, shredding our sympathy every time he'd won it back; you wanted to put an end to the showboating. Still, Sunshine's pleasures are worth sticking with to see, now Bing's lost the lot, whether it turns out fine again.

The Times Review

It is cleverer than it seems and, while the easy criticism of comedy dramas is that they are neither one thing nor the other, nor, you could say, is life. This squirrel is not charmed yet but will keep watching, not least because Sunshine, like a comical version of Jimmy McGovern's The Street, deals with something approximating life as it is lived beyond the M25.

Independent Review

He's not afraid of sentiment, Craig Cash. Indeed, he's not even nervous about painfully cute, judging from the opening of Sunshine, BBC1's new comedy-drama.

Steve Coogan plays a character - called Bing Crosby - who spends half the time goofing around like a poor man's Alan Partridge; the other half living up to his wife's declaration that he's a selfish bastard. Should we laugh at his exuberance? Should we feel for him, being lad astray by his jolly mates? Should we hate him for being a selfish compulsive gambler ? In the end, we decided we'd simply rather avoid him.

This is the latest series from Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, who wrote BBC2's quietly brilliant Early Doors. Cash also co-wrote (and played Dave in) The Royle Family, so there's pedigree here. You'd expect wry Mancunian wit and warm character comedy - and that's exactly what you get.

The story centres on Steve Coogan as Bing, a lovable but hopeless chancer given to joking his way out of trouble. He leads not so much a hand-to-mouth existence as hand-to-bookies, and so spends much of the time in the doghouse with girlfriend Bernadette (beautifully played by Lisa Millett). There's quality support from Bernard Hill as Bing's dad, whose idea of babysitting is to wake his grandson up for an evening of tall stories about how he gave Hitler a Chinese burn. And Cash and Mealey turn up as bin-men. It's gently amusing, with a loving attention to detail, but don't expect belly laughs - it's classed as a comedy drama.

Sunshine is wonderful stuff. This particular type of sunshine, written by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey (the team behind Early Doors and The Royle Family: Queen of Sheba), tells the story of three generations of a family from the 1970s. Steve Coogan plays a likeable young man who married his childhood sweetheart; he is funny, cheerful and optimistic, someone capable - according to Grandad (Bernard Hill) - of charming the nuts off a squirrel. Sadly he is also a compulsive gambler who squanders what little money the family has and risks losing everything that matters to him. Sunshine doesn't have the fly-on-the-wall naturalism of The Royle Family, but it does share its warmth and its humanity.