The Café

More small things just barely happen in episode three of Ralf Little and Michelle Terry's watery comedy. The seaside caff has a fancy new menu nobody can understand ("Lapsang souchong! Lapsang souchong!"), and there's confusion over which of the love-struck young adults will attend a pub quiz.

In between are hints that the characters would be adorable if we only knew them. The Café wants to be warm and deft, a bit like The Royle Family or Gavin & Stacey, but it's a superficial copy. Craig Cash's lyrical direction tries to add depth and ends up pvercompensating - he's got a crane and by heck he's going to use it.

Like last week's first double bill, tonight's third episode of The Café also passes entirely without incident.

I think this is deliberate - a cunning way to deter grockles by making the British seaside appear so dull that townies will stay at home. But I'm not sure how it's meant to count as comedy.

Writers Ralf Little and Michelle Terry seems to rely on repeating the same phrases over and over again, perhaps in the hope that eventually you might laugh by mistake.

Last week we were beaten into submission by a weak joke about scones. Tonight's key words are "lapsang souchong" and "talk of the devil" which is what owner Carol says every time a customer comes in, even though she wasn't. Talking about them, that is. The humour, alas, is even weaker than the tea.

Sky1's latest sitcom offering comes from the team who helped make The Royle Family what it was. Shame it seems the magic has gone.

The Café is set in a... well you can guess where, but this particular establishment is located in Weston-Super-Mare and is called "Cyril's". Despite this, there's no-one called Cyril in the show. The main characters are the owner of the café, Carol (Ellie Haddington), her daughter and wannabe writer Sarah (Michelle Terry, who co-writes the series with Ralf Little, who also stars in the series), and Carol's mother Mary (June Watson).

However, this is just the start. There are 13 main characters.

Now, I don't mind there being lots of characters in a sitcom. Green Wing, for example, had a minimum of 14 regular characters in it at any one time. However, you can't make the characters fully rounded if the episodes are just half-an-hour (minus advertising time), compared to the hour-long episodes Green Wing had. There are some interesting characters, like Kieran the living statue (Kevin Trainor), but it's a bit of a mess.

But the main problem with this show is that it just isn't funny enough. It comes across as overtly sentimental, and while this programme does have the odd laugh now and then, what this show really needs is less characters and less drama.

I was once too rude and frankly wrong about a Craig Cash thing, Early Doors, which in the subsequent year I grew to love, once I'd got the pacing and the gentle humour into my head. The Cafe, directed by Cash and written by Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, who co-star, is a terribly similar vehicle, based this time not in a pub but, yes, a cafe, in Weston-super-Mare, and none the less warming for its derivation.

Already now we have the characters - the apparently dotty gran who's still a techno-whizz, the single mum running the cafe and trying desperately to marry off her pretty daughter, Sarah. Sarah's various possible suitors, her nice ex, Ralf, and the pompous rich homecoming whizz-kid. The pace is... slow. Delightfully so. The humour is... slow. Delightfully so. As in when Ralf's character asks for an "egg mayo baguette, but no mayo. And on a roll". Long pause. "Egg roll, then?" "Yes."

Oh, you have to see it to get it, and I really wish they hadn't so directly lifted, from Blackadder, the phrase "thick as a whale omelette", but, trust me, there's a lot of slow-cooked delight here.

You knew from the first wispy chords of The Café where we were headed. A breathy female voice, the type that suffers sensitively over many a US drama, was squeezing every last drop of maritime melancholy from Bobby Darin's swing classic Beyond The Sea.

It wasn't unpleasant - not the massacre The Smiths' Please Please Please suffers on the sickly middle-class fantasy that is the John Lewis Christmas ad - but as a cover version, it couldn't have got more whimsical.

And whimsical is The Café's default mode. As seaside postcard characters lapped over each other in the picture perfect Weston-Super-Mare café, the quirkiness built like a rising tide: failed rock stars, human statues, tarty crimpers and dreamy writers eddied around like flotsam and jetsam, playing to the idea that, well, you don't have to be mad to live at the seaside, but it probably helps.

It was hard to escape the feeling that these were characters working a little too hard to be, you know, 'characters', rather than breathing in the salty sea air and being actual people. Yet every now and again Ralf Little and Michelle Terry's script would stub its toe on a bitter rock lurking beneath the soft sand of these lost souls and yelp with a cutting wit that pulled you up short, hinting at how good The Café could be if it dug its heels into the shingle.

Marcia Warren, a brilliant actress who could play 'madcap pensioner' in her sleep, was in mid-perm at the local hairdressers when the conversation turned to children. 'Can't live with them...' she snarled from beneath her tangled mop of hair. 'Can't kill 'em!' Put that in your wish fulfilment pipe and smoke it, John Lewis.

The Cafe - review

Although the characters were undoubtedly larger than life, the laughs were not always as substantial. At times, things seemed to flip between jolly old people making worn-out jokes and having arduously kooky arguments about jam, and young people doing quick-fire dialogue about online dating and saying "laters" over and over and over again...

The Cafe review - Royle male strikes

You can get a long way on charm alone. After several hundred years of snoozing through Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Ralf Little appears to be getting his act back together.

The Café review

It might take a while, but these characters could become as lovable to us as they already clearly are to their creators.

Sky 1's latest sitcom The Cafe, written by and starring Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, is set in a family run cafe on the Weston-super-Mare seafront. "This really is the arse end of nowhere" observes one visitor into his mobile phone, all within the hearing of the diners and staff (frequently one and the same thing).
That may be so, but the unprepossessing location is home to a truly fresh, funny, romantic and charming show, populated by believable, likeable characters. Terry plays Sarah, recently returned from London nursing a broken heart, bruised ego and ambitions as a writer of children's books. Little is Richard, care home assistant by day, putative rock star by night. Former childhood sweethearts, the pair have settled into a comfortable platonic friendship. As if.

Director Craig Cash imposes his trademark naturalism and attention to detail to the proceedings whilst terrific dialogue, always funny but never forced, pings around the walls of the cafe like a demented squash ball. I sat through the first two episodes sporting a delighted grin, disturbed only by the occasional guffaw. Comparisons with Gavin & Stacey are inevitable, but favourable. The Cafe might just prove a similar comedy classic.

The Café review

If you're the kind of person who finds people-watching to be a most edifying pastime, and the richness of words a real tonic, then you are on safe ground here, just about four yards short of the shifting sands of Weston.