Comedy

An affectionate portrayal of family life is a rare thing to find on the small screen. For the paucity of times it crops up, you’d think it did your TV set as much good as a warm jug of soapy water down the back. Even though C4’s attempt to use ‘The Family’ to stop sneering at home life takes the participants’ deep-rooted love for each other as the grease on its observational axles, where its wheels come off is that the squawking of the Perspex-brittle subjects inspires despair at the state of humanity.

Thank heavens, then, for Craig Cash. Given the task of following up loving domestic sitcom ‘The Royle Family’, he’s opted for a mainstream
drama chronicling three generations of a northern working-class family, shot through with a depth of fondness for the characters and lifestyle it depicts.

‘I think warmth is what’s missing from telly, so it’s always on my agenda. It sounds clichéd and corny, but there’s so much misery around,’ offers Cash. ‘We thought: Let’s make something that the whole family might enjoy.’ Feature continues

Ponderous ‘Amélie’-style music accompanies the lives of childhood sweethearts Bing and Bernadette, as they grow up under the watchful eye of Bing’s father George (Bernard Hill) and go on to make a home together with the arrival of baby Joe. Steve Coogan (see end of article for an exciting Time Out revelation) stars as incorrigibly warm-hearted joker Bing, as his son narrates the ups and downs of his father’s relationship, providing a sugar coating to even the darker moments. Of which there are a fair few, because ironically, even though Cash’s affectionate human portrayals of characters dominate, this ‘drama with comedy rather than a comedy drama’ is primarily a tale of Bing’s gambling addiction and the devastating effect it has on his family.

‘We thought that having a central character as a gambler would let us create turmoil from his addiction, but he could still be a warm and funny man in hiding all that stuff,’ Cash explains. ‘If we’d chosen alcohol it would have been almost too dark, whereas a gambler offers more scope for us empathising with the character.’

For Cash, in fact, it’s in these characters’ flaws that their empathetic strengths lie. Bing might lie to and steal from his wife, but he’s acting out of a misplaced love for her. Grandad George may have been an absentee father during Bing’s infancy, but it’s the resulting sense of guilt that leads him into a misty-eyed adoration for his grandson. As long as they steer clear of being people ‘you wouldn’t want to be in a room with’, for Cash, ‘the more flaws the characters have, the more likeable they are’.

Clearly the words of a man who shuns the prime source of depictions of families on TV, then. Because if there’s one thing reality TV’s not short of, it’s flawed characters. ‘They should just leave it to us, and let us write about families, then. I suppose that’s why we’re allowed a gap in the schedules: to write about families being a little bit funnier than they are in real life.’ You said it, Craig.

Sunshine, Tuesday October 2, 9pm, BBC2

Steve Coogan fans rejoice! Next week Time Out magazine will be guest-edited by none other than the man himself, in various guises.