Graham Duff builds comedies in one room and sends the world through the door. Ideal did it for seven series with a hash dealer who never went out: dark, slow, thick with wordplay and funnier than it needs to be.
Fi1m perspective
The bell rings. Moz, on the sofa, does not get up. Someone comes in, buys what they came for, and then does not leave, and the half hour is whatever happens next. That is the whole of Graham Duff's method in Ideal, and he has been open about it: "Ideal isn't about drugs, it's about people. The drugs are just a device to get the characters in the same place, at the same time." The device held from 10 January 2005 for seven series, which is longer than most sitcoms with three sets and a plot manage.
He came to television the long way round. There was performance art and fringe theatre in the mid-1980s, then radio, where he has said he learnt his craft because ideas cost nothing to try. Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001), written with Steve Coogan and Henry Normal, was a comedy-horror homage; Nebulous (2005) was a science fiction sitcom for Radio 4 with Mark Gatiss. Then Ideal, which he created and wrote and turned up in as Brian. Afterwards came Hebburn (2012), written with Jason Cook, and The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells (2016), which he wrote and directed for Sky Arts. Horror keeps coming back, and so does the single set.
What works is the flat. Duff writes large casts of people who talk past each other and only connect by accident, and a single set forces the collisions. Nicola Reynolds's Nicki wants out and knows she will not get there. Tom Goodman-Hill's PC buys his own supply and talks shop while he rolls it, played dead straight, which is the one properly satirical idea in the programme and the best. Ryan Pope's Psycho Paul barely speaks and everyone else rearranges themselves around him. What got us was Johnny Vegas. Moz is a man who has arranged his life so he never has to leave a room, and Vegas plays him with a sadness most sitcoms would not risk; we laughed at him for twenty minutes and then, without warning, felt for him.
What does not work is the same thing from the other side. Nothing moves, because nothing can. The lack of plot is the point, and for a long while it is a good point, and then the door opening becomes the only event and you notice how many times you have watched it. That is the cost of the method, and Duff has never pretended otherwise. It is also why his work has stayed cult rather than crossed over: a programme that will not leave the flat does not go looking for an audience either.
Watch Ideal at home, in the dark, one episode at a time. It was built for a flat and it plays best in one.
Biography
Graham Duff is an English writer, actor and producer. He created and wrote all 53 episodes of the BBC sitcom Ideal (2005–2011), in which he also appeared as the character Brian.
His other writing credits include co-writing Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001) and Hebburn (2012–2013). As an actor he has appeared in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011) as a Death Eater, as a waiter in the Doctor Who episode "Deep Breath" (2014), and in High-Rise (2015).
Duff was born in Blackburn in 1964 and studied at the University of Brighton.
