Drop the Dead Donkey

Drop the Dead Donkey is a good workplace comedy whose characters are its strongest reason to watch. Created and written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, it uses a newsroom to bring a sizeable ensemble into regular contact. That setting is useful for comedy: the work is important, which gives personal shortcomings plenty of opportunity to become somebody else’s problem. We recommend it for the company, with a reservation about how much pleasure there is in returning to yesterday’s topical material.

Its first series began in 1990 and its sixth in 1998, so those topical ambitions come with an obvious difficulty. News stories lose their urgency, and a reference can need explaining before a joke has a chance to land. We would not choose this programme chiefly for its relationship with the headlines; reconstructing why something once mattered is not how we generally want to spend an evening. The attention to character is what makes the recommendation possible without requiring an enthusiasm for that period’s news.

Neil Pearson’s Dave Charnley, Victoria Wicks’s Sally Smedley and Jeff Rawle’s George Dent give the ensemble much of its appeal. David Swift as Henry Davenport and Stephen Tompkinson as Damien Day make the casting feel equally well considered beyond those central names. We warmed to these people more than we expected, because the care given to their individual personalities makes them worth following beyond a topical gag. There is pleasure in having several performers worth attending to, without needing one favourite to justify the next episode.

Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin deserve credit for giving the cast characters with enough definition to support that interest. A newsroom sitcom could easily reduce its staff to competing opinions about the news, with somebody assigned to deliver each side of a debate. Their writing gives us a better reason to pay attention to the people involved. We would still be cautious about recommending the programme chiefly as satire: the strength of the ensemble should not be used to wave away the limitations of topical humour.

Liddy Oldroyd’s direction deserves a share of the praise for that ensemble. Keeping performances compatible without making the characters interchangeable is a substantial part of directing comedy, and the balance here serves the programme well. The 24-minute episode length is also an advantage for an evening’s viewing, allowing an introduction to the company without demanding a large commitment. The modest length suits a comedy whose principal attraction is spending time with its cast.

Measured against workplace comedy, character and casting are sound reasons to give this a try. Our caveat matters more for anyone attracted primarily by the promise of topical jokes, especially if revisiting old headlines already sounds like homework. We would take it an episode at a time, allowing the ensemble to establish itself without treating six series as a task to be completed. Give the staff an episode before committing to the archive.