Gimme Gimme Gimme

Jonathan Harvey, who wrote Beautiful Thing for the stage before anyone filmed it, created and wrote this one, and what he wants is plain from the first minute: a sitcom built like a pantomime, with two monsters in a flat and a studio audience there to be shocked. Linda La Hughes (Kathy Burke) is unemployed, ginger and certain she is irresistible. Tom Farrell (James Dreyfus) is an actor nobody will cast, and he is certain of the same thing about himself. They share a London flat and each believes the other is lucky to have them. It is loud, it is crude, and about half of it is funny, which is a better ratio than the reviews so far would have you believe.

Burke is the reason to watch and we will not pretend otherwise. Linda has no self-doubt at all, which is hard to play without playing contempt for her, and Burke never does. She gives Linda a strut, hips first, a laugh like a blocked drain, and a habit of lowering her voice to a purr for any man who has wandered within range, and the gap between what Linda thinks she is doing and what we can see is where the best laughs live. Burke also does the one thing the script does not: she lets you see, for a second at a time, that Linda knows. Then the moment passes and she asks a stranger about his arse.

Dreyfus is the lighter half of the act, all hands and offended vowels, and he is good at it. Tom’s vanity is smaller and sadder than Linda’s, because he has the evidence of his own career in front of him and chooses not to look at it. The two of them work best when they are on the sofa insulting each other, and the show knows this and keeps sending them there. Beth Goddard’s Suze gets the sane-neighbour role and plays it as a woman who is slightly thrilled by what she disapproves of, and Rosalind Knight’s Beryl is handed the filthiest lines in the building and delivers them like a reading of the minutes, which is the right way. Su Pollard, Mark Benton and Frances Barber turn up along the way and are used, by and large, as targets.

The trouble is Harvey’s writing, and it is the trouble the one notice we have read, in the Guardian in 2001, lays at his door. We think that review goes too far, but it is not wrong about the method. Every joke is about sex, weight or somebody’s face, and every joke is announced before it arrives, so that the audience is laughing at the set-up and the punchline has nowhere to go. The same insult is made of Linda’s looks four or five times an episode, with the same pause, and Mykola Pawluk and Graham Carr’s cutting holds on the laugh each time as though it were a new one. Tristram Shapeero and Liddy Oldroyd direct it as a stage play seen from the stalls, three cameras and a wide shot, and James Dillon’s flat looks like what it is, a set with a sofa in it. Philip Pope’s stings between scenes are the only thing in the show that is ever quiet.

We laughed, loudly, at things we would not repeat at a dinner table, and we were not ashamed of it, because Burke earns those laughs with her body and her timing rather than with the words. We were bored, though, by the third episode in a row, and the boredom came from repetition: the one joke, told again, with the drum roll in the same place. Watched a week apart, as it first went out, that would matter less. Watched in a run, it is the thing you notice.

Watch the first episode of the first series. If Burke’s strut across the living room makes you laugh, carry on, and you will have a decent fortnight of evenings. If it does not, nothing in the next seventeen episodes will change your mind, and the script is not going to help.