Craig Cash writes comedy that refuses to hurry: a front room, a pub, talk that lasts as long as it would in life. With Caroline Aherne he made The Royle Family, one of the best British sitcoms we know, and has kept his worlds small since.
Fi1m perspective
Dave Best sits on the Royles' settee and says almost nothing. Jim starts a story, and Dave's face does the reviewing: a slow settling, eyes drifting back to the telly, a man who has heard this one before and will hear it again. Craig Cash wrote himself the quietest part in his own programme, and that tells you most of what you need to know about how he works. He and Caroline Aherne had an idea so plain it sounds like a bet: put a Manchester family in their front room, point a camera at them while they watch television, and never cut away to anything more interesting. No studio audience, no laughter track, no plot to speak of; half an hour at a time, first shown on 14 September 1998, three series by the autumn of 2000.
The Royle Family came out of Manchester radio, where Cash and Aherne had been DJs together on KFM, and out of writing for The Mrs Merton Show and The Fast Show. After the Royles he found a second partner in Phil Mealey. Early Doors (2003–04) moved the method from a front room to a pub and let the regulars talk; Sunshine (2008) was a comedy-drama about a family and gambling, filmed in Greater Manchester. He then went behind the camera to direct The Café (2011), written by and starring Ralf Little, and since 2016 he has narrated Gogglebox. The shape is consistent: the same corner of the country, the same refusal to go big.
What he does well is timing at the scale of a real house. Jim asks who was on the phone, Barbara tells him, he says something unkind about them, and that is the scene. There are almost no punchlines, so the laugh has to come from recognition, and it does. We laughed at Jim out loud and often, felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, and laughed again, because the shame was the joke and Cash and Aherne knew it. Ricky Tomlinson's Jim and Sue Johnston's Barbara carry the noise; the men Cash writes for himself are slow, affable, a little dim and delivered with a long face, and they give everyone else something to talk over.
The case against him is that it is all so small. His work has been called not edgy enough for what commissioners now want, and Early Doors went out with little promotion and modest audiences. He has answered that himself: "I like to keep things small and observe little things. You don't have to go big on big stories, you don't have to make things over-complicated." We are mostly on his side. A form that refuses plot can only go where the characters go, and it lives or dies on how exactly they are heard; across twenty half-hours of the Royles we cannot find a wasted one.
Start there, in order, at home, with a brew. Then consider that the man who made a sitcom about a family watching television has spent his recent years narrating a programme about families watching television. Jim would have had something to say about the price of that.
Biography
Craig Cash (born 11 September 1960) is an English comedian, actor, writer, producer and director. He grew up in Stockport, Greater Manchester, where his father worked as a joiner. He began his career in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a music radio DJ on Manchester station KFM, where he worked with Caroline Aherne.
Cash is best known for playing Dave Best in the BBC sitcom The Royle Family (1998–2012), which he co-created and co-wrote with Aherne. He also served as producer on the series. He won two BAFTA Television Awards for Best Situation Comedy for his work on the show, in 2000 and 2007.
His other television credits include writing for The Fast Show and The Mrs Merton Show, co-writing and starring in Early Doors (2003–2004) with Phil Mealey, and writing the drama Sunshine (2008). Since 2016 he has been the narrator of Channel 4's Gogglebox, taking over after Aherne's death.
