Graham Duff’s sitcom locks a small-time hash dealer in his flat and lets the world come to him. It is dark, slow and frequently very funny, and Johnny Vegas gives it a sadness most sitcoms would not risk. The lack of plot is the point, until it is not.
Graham Duff’s Ideal has one idea and it is a good one. Moz (Johnny Vegas) deals hash from his flat, and because he never goes out, everyone comes to him. Customers ring the bell, buy what they came for, and then fail to leave, so each half hour is a procession of people through one room. That premise held for seven series and 52 episodes from 10 January 2005, which is longer than most sitcoms with three sets and a plot manage. It is a small, dark, well-made programme, and it is worth your evening if you can stand the company.
Vegas is the reason it works. He plays Moz as a man whose ambitions end at the edge of the sofa: slow to move, quick to take offence, and shrewder than anyone on his sofa gives him credit for. He listens more than he talks, and the laughs come from his face while someone else is speaking. What he adds, and what a lesser comic would not, is that Moz is plainly a lonely, frightened man in a dressing gown, and the show never pretends otherwise. We liked him and we would not have wanted to sit next to him.
The regulars are the material. Nicola Reynolds’s Nicki wants more than the flat and knows she is unlikely to get it. Ben Crompton’s Colin arrives twitching, every visit a new crisis. Sinéad Matthews gives Jenny a flat, unbothered delivery that makes every question she asks sound like an accusation. Tom Goodman-Hill’s PC, a policeman who buys his own supply and talks shop while he rolls it, is the show’s one properly satirical idea, and it is played entirely straight. Ryan Pope’s Psycho Paul says little, and everyone else rearranges themselves around him. Duff and Tony Burgess write them all as people who talk past each other and only occasionally, by accident, connect.
The directors, Dan Zeff, Ben Gosling Fuller, Ben Wheatley and Ben Gregor among them, keep the flat dim and the camera at sitting height, so we are on the sofa with Moz and the visitors loom. Nobody tidies the place between episodes. Thirty minutes is the right length; the show knows when a scene has said its one thing and gets the person out of the door. It carries a 15 certificate, which is the drugs and the language, and it earns both without leaning on them.
We laughed a good deal, and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because most of what we were laughing at was a fat man being insulted in his own front room by people who owed him money. What stayed with us was quieter. There is a moment in the first series where Moz is alone between callers, the flat silent, and he simply sits, and Vegas does nothing at all with it. We were sadder than a sitcom about a stoner has any business making us, and it was the stillness that did it.
The faults are the ones you would predict. Nothing builds. An episode ends because the half hour is up, not because anything has been settled, and after a run of them the single room stops being a joke and starts to feel like a cell. The dialect and the mumbling are part of the texture but they cost us lines, more than once. And as the series go on the visitors get stranger and the show starts to chase its own grotesques, which is funny in single doses and wearing across a season.
The British sitcom has always liked a room nobody can leave, from the Trotters’ flat to the Royles’ sofa. Ideal belongs in that company, meaner and stranger than either, and it is honest about the fact that its hero is going nowhere because he has chosen not to. Watch two episodes at a time, not a whole series; the flat is best visited, not lived in, which is a lesson everybody in it could have done with learning.
