The Orbital’s Mr TV, Chris Pritchard, lets us know what we should be tuning into this month.
What was hot?
Outnumbered
Outnumbered
This show wasn’t just hot, it was smouldering with heat and creating almost enough smoke to cause a UK flight ban. Now in its third award-winning series, Outnumbered is a hilarious part written – part improvised comedy that focuses of the trials and tribulations of two parents coping with three children, a forgetful Grandfather and a poker-addicted Grandmother.
The children are undoubtedly the best part of the show; in particular Ramona Marquez as bouncy seven-year-old Karen who comes out with the most amazing innocent one-liners such as ‘why does God tell them [Muslims] to blow up planes … God could do it much easily-er than them.’
Many of you will also recognise the father played by Hugh Dennis; a comedian who delivers a fantastic impersonation of Prince Phillip in the Newsreel segment of Mock the Week, and also played the heroically annoying Piers Crispin on the old-school sitcom; My Hero.
Despite having experience in scriptwriting, Dennis doesn’t venture into the writing process of Outnumbered, but instead leaves those duties to Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin who collaborated on the nineties comedy Drop the Dead Donkey. For those who don’t know, Hamilton is a dwarf-like comedian and regular guest on QI who was apparently born with ‘one and a half thumbs on one hand and half a thumb on the other’. I wonder if that’s the secret to writing great comedy, or maybe just the secret to winning thumb-wars.
Outnumbered is almost written as if it were a documentary – there are simple fading blackouts between scenes, there’s no cheesy My Family style theme tune, and thank god, there is no pre-recorded applause or laughter. Yes, Outnumbered is an effortless low-key comedy that anchors itself in the same realm of humour prevalent on brilliant shows such as The Royle Family, where the everyday banality of family life is exposed for maximum giggles.
You can see new episodes of Outnumbered on BBC1, Thursdays at 9:30.
Don’t Miss:
The Pacific
The Pacific
The Pacific is Steven Spielberg’s and Tom Hank’s cinematic 10-part re-telling of America’s war against Japan; a war fought over tempestuous oceans and unchartered islands. The Pacific keeps as closely to history and fact as it possibly can. It is based on the accounts of two U.S. Marines, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge and Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie – and it is these two authors that are used as the main characters in a series that is estimated to have cost a massive 150 million US dollars.
It has been said that The Pacific has the potential to be the most complex psychological examination of war in film and television history, however, based on Episode One I have to dispute this claim especially when there are incredible films such as Apocalypse Now that make The Pacific look less complex than Kerry Katona playing bingo. The initial boarding scenes capture the soldier’s anxiety and the fight scenes capture their fear at such brutality but the first episode seems to lack an emotional depth as the introduction of main characters is sloppy, disjointed and slightly cliché.
However, I recall Spielberg’s and Hank’s 2001 collaboration Band of Brothers working in a similar slow burning way of gradually revealing three-dimensional characters as they were shaped by the menace of war. Band of Brothers was a worldwide phenomenon that told real-life story of Easy Company, part of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division, as they fought across Nazi-occupied Europe. It demonstrated the slight positivity of war in that men regained their humanity by bonding and supporting and fighting as a band of brothers, and this made it a truly moving television experience.
We’ll have to wait and see if The Pacific follows the same formula on Mondays, 9 PM on Sky Movies.
