‘Chewing Gum,’ ‘Catastrophe’ And The Rise Of UK TV Comedy

“Fleabag”
Into the top ten with a bullet on our Best TV of 2016 feature, Phoebe Waller-Bridge‘s crossover hit “Fleabag” took us by surprise in part because we hadn’t been so very keen on her previous sitcom “Crashing” (not to be confused with the Judd Apatow comedy of the same name). “Fleabag” marks a massive leap up: Based on Waller-Bridge’s award-winning one-woman play, it’s a hilarious, sexually explicit confessional, complete with fourth-wall-breaking and to-camera asides, that nonetheless has a dark undertow of sadness and melancholy. As such, it provides a terrific showcase not just for Waller-Bridge the writer, but also as an actress, and Hollywood took immediate notice, casting her in the upcoming Han Solo movie. Another coup for Amazon (where you can find it now, and who co-produced the show along with BBC Three), it also features Best Actress™ Olivia Colman, Sian Clifford and Brett Gelman in wonderful supporting roles, but there’s no doubt this is Waller-Bridge’s show, running the gamut from witty, acid commentary on modern, 20-something single life in London to surprisingly moving and haunting examination of depression, grief and guilt.

“Lovesick”
First airing in 2014, “Lovesick” is a prime example of the sort of thing we’ve been talking about here. It’s a show that was rather overlooked when it aired on the UK on Channel 4, and indeed the network cancelled it after the first season. But it became a sleeper success on Netflix in the U.S. when it debuted there in 2015, and the streaming service commissioned a second season without the involvement of the UK broadcaster. It perhaps didn’t help that initially, the show was called “Scrotal Recall,” a funny but slightly unpalatable title, and one rather out of step with the sweet tone of the show. Created by writer Tom Edge, it stars Johnny Flynn as Dylan, an incurable romantic in semi-requited love with his best friend Evie (Antonia Thomas), who is diagnosed with chlamydia, and must go round his previous partners in order to let them know. It’s more Nora Ephron than Judd Apatow in tone, despite the eyebrow-raising set-up, and while rarely laugh-out-loud hilarious, is so enormously likable (Daniel Ings is particularly good as the shallow, commitment-phobic third flatmate, somehow finding new territory in a familiar archetype) that it goes down as one of the easiest and most enjoyable binges on Netflix. Catch up before the third series arrives this year.

“Flowers”
There’s the comedy of recognition, in which you relate to people and situations you see as analogous to your own, and there’s the comedy of the grotesque, in which the humor derives from a kind of “there but for the grace of God” schadenfreude. And marching to the beat of its own peculiar drum right down the line between the two is Will Sharpe‘s Channel 4 show “Flowers” (available in the U.S. to those brave enough to venture onto new comedy streaming specialist Seeso). Not so much black comedy as loam-brown, for once the shooting style and even the costume and set design of this dysfunctional family sitcom is as atmospheric and specific as the writing: If Roald Dahl had spent the weekend with Raymond Briggs in Uncle Monty’s house from “Withnail & I,” you might be somewhere in the territory. Mixing the Gothic, the baroque and the simply muddy, it follows the Flowers family: suicidal children’s author father (Julian Barratt), grown-up weirdo twin kids, sexually frisky mother-on-the-edge-of-a-breakdown (Olivia Colman, yet again the best thing ever) and Sharpe himself as a Japanese illustrator friend of the family. Weird, perversely beautiful and highly recommended.

“Uncle”
The premise for “Uncle” is the sort of thing that could be the basis for a million sub-standard Sundance/Tribeca comedies (we’re honestly surprised there hasn’t been a Danny McBride-starring remake yet) or bland network show: a boozy, unemployed musician (gravel-voiced comedian Nick Helm) is on the verge of suicide when his sister (Daisy Haggard) asks him to help look after her son (Elliot Speller-Gillott), bringing him increasingly into their lives and giving him a reason to go on. It would have been easy for it to be familiar or forgettable, but the execution is really strong from the off: it’s both consistently funny and unexpectedly emotionally nuanced. It’s a lot more auteur-ish than some British comedy: every episode is written by one or both of Oliver Refson and Lilah Vandenburgh and directed by Refson, and there’s a consistency and assuredness of vision and tone that really makes it feel like a rarity. The pair build out a really enjoyable and rich world full of strong supporting players, and while it has a sentimental side, the sentimentality is almost always earned, and often undercut with a little sharpness.

“People Just Do Nothing”
“The Office,” the original Ricky Gervais one, was a titanic achievement, and something close to a perfect comedy run. But it had a pretty horrible effect on British comedy: for over a decade, it was full of performers whose speech patterns and sense of humor increasingly seemed stuck on “David Brent,” and with endless variations on the mockumentary form with ever-diminishing returns (not least from Gervais himself). But more recently, there’s been a brace of shows that, while undeniably owing enormous debts to “The Office,” have truly built on its strengths to find something new, and along with the very new “This Country” (a sort of rural take on the mockumentary), “People Just Do Nothing” is the very best example (in fact, it comes from original “Office” producer Ash Atalla). Originally beginning as a YouTube series called “Wasteman TV,” it’s created and performed by Allan Mustafa, Steve Stamp, Asim Chaudhry and Hugo Chegwin, who play emcees and DJs at Kurupt FM, a pirate radio station in West London. It’s very much in the shape of “This Is Spinal Tap,” with a cast almost entirely of dimwits and idiots, beautifully performed (Chaudhry’s Chabuddy G is an all-timer of a comic character), but with real pathos and some unexpected character turns. We’d be interested to know how it played in the U.S. — it’s so specific to UK garage and grime culture that it might not travel. But frankly, it’s funny even if you don’t know anything about that world.

And if you exhaust the above, there’s lots more you could look at. 2017’s already brought a gem with Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s “This Country,” a mockumentary about two rural kids in the Cotswolds that essentially does for countryside Britain what “Chewing Gum” does for housing estates. Also playing with that format is YouTuber satire “Pls Like,” and inside-the-BBC comedy “W1A” with Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes, which sometimes plays like a slightly gentler “Thick Of It.” Much sillier is “Toast Of London,” in which the great, honey-voiced Matt Berry plays a ridiculous actor; and “Yonderland,” a bonkers, puppet-filled fantasy that plays like a meld of Monty Python and “Labyrinth.” Plus, U.S. fans of “The Trip,” whose third edition “The Trip To Spain” is out in the U.K. now, should really seek out the TV-show versions, which have scenes and sequences not included in the theatrically released U.S. cuts.

For cultier stuff, we’d recommend the absolutely mad, almost inexplicable “Murder In Successville,” a cop-show parody where real celebrities improvise alongside celebrity impersonators in a murder mystery; and the Vimeo series “Year Friends,” a sort of sketch-show/sitcom hybrid that released episodes once a month last year, and which proved a great showcase for some of the best young comedy talent around (you can watch it all here). “Stag,” a three-episode horror-comedy oddity about a bachelor party being picked off one-by-one in the Highlands, was really well done.

And for mainstream fare, you might enjoy “Cuckoo” (which starred Andy Samberg in the first season, and, uh, Taylor Lautner in the second and third), Tom Hollander/Olivia Colman vehicle “Rev,” long-runner “Friday Night Dinner,” Chris O’Dowd’s “Moone Boy,” Jess Knappett’s “Drifters” (a sort of “Inbetweeners”/“Girls” hybrid), student comedy “Fresh Meat” and Christopher Guest’s sadly short-lived “Family Tree.” And, while we adore the show, cop procedural dramedy “No Offence” (created by “Shameless” and “State Of Play” mastermind Paul Abbott) isn’t quite purely a comedy enough for our purposes here.

And we also didn’t include shows that were or are being, remade, successfully or otherwise, in the U.S. like “The Office,” ‘The Thick Of It” (which essentially became “Veep”), “The Inbetweeners,” “Peep Show” (whose remakes never made it past a pilot), HBO gem “Getting On,” and Caitlin Moran’s hugely enjoyable “Raised By Wolves,” which is currently being remade by Diablo Cody for this pilot season. Anything else from shores of Blighty that you’ve seen recently and made you laugh apart from the ongoing, very dark tragicomic farce that is Brexit? Shout it out below.