It would take a hard heart not to fall for Changing Ends. It is a steamroller of a comedy, open, welcoming and beaming with easy charm. Written by Alan Carr and Two Doors Down’s Simon Carlyle, it tells the story of Carr’s early life in Northampton, joining him on the precipice of “big school” in 1986. Carr is not your everyday 11-year-old, with his penchant for scarves, earmuffs and Murder, She Wrote; that he ends up as a confidant of the dinner ladies, and not the football lads, is no great surprise to anyone. Still, it isn’t easy being different in the east Midlands in the 80s and young Alan has issues to deal with on all sides.
Carr himself appears as a sort of ghost of Christmas yet to come, albeit a more cheerful one, dropping in to scenes to narrate for a while, or crack jokes about the star he would become. But the show belongs to Oliver Savell, who is remarkable as the young Alan. Sometimes, on screen, you can tell when a child actor is just doing their best, but Savell is fantastic and manages to embody the real Carr without it seeming like an impersonation. He is camp, he is cheeky and he gets it just right. He deserves all the acclaim that will inevitably come.
From family to friends, from school to home, young Alan has a lot to contend with. He has “the voice of an elderly grandmother”, his teeth and glasses provide the regular punchlines you might expect, and even as a child, his busybody neighbour Ange suggests he might be, so to speak, “half rice, half chips”. His mother, Christine (Nancy Sullivan), supports him all the way, but he has a more complicated relationship with his father, Graham (Shaun Dooley), a gruff man’s man who manages Northampton Town football club – languishing at the bottom of the fourth division.
The first episode sets up Alan as the perpetual outsider. Graham is embarrassed by his un-sporty son – “Everything this family has is down to sport,” he says, though it looks as if the family line might stop with his eldest – and Ange won’t let her son Charlie play with Alan any more. Less self-possessed children may have crumbled when faced with such disapproval, but what makes this series so lovely is that Alan is absolutely certain of who he is, and he refuses to be “normal” for anyone, whatever that means. He gives it a good go with football, not to please his dad, but to win back the friendship of Charlie. As an over-dramatic and not entirely graceful boy, it doesn’t quite go to plan.
Football’s loss is a comedy audience’s gain, however, and this is relentlessly funny. In a clever twist, Alan is also embarrassed by Graham, particularly when he starts big school and he desperately attempts to cover up the fact that his dad is the Cobblers’ maligned and unpopular manager. Both of them, it seems, are used to getting grief, but oddly enough, Alan seems much more capable of carrying it than his father. “To think my dad got his knickers in a twist because I liked country dancing,” he says, as the footballers of Northampton Town share cigarettes in the communal bath.
Still, whenever you think it might start to dip into schmaltz, it swerves it, preferring a light, self-deprecating touch instead. Its recreation of the mid-80s is so faithfully unglamorous that you can practically smell the Old Spice and the pies radiating off the screen, and it hits that sweet spot of nostalgia that is unsparing while allowing itself to be just a little bit fond of those days, too. Episode two deals with the horrors of enforced showers after PE, the horrors of PE and post-divorce PE teachers, while episode three sees Alan finding his true calling in the form of drama lessons, with a fantastically over-the-top teacher who sees him for who he really is. “Alan, you’re a one-off,” she tells him, “That’s why they don’t like you.”
Crucially, young Alan doesn’t much care about being liked. He loves Prince, shell suits and Angela Lansbury and seems unbothered by whether he is “bloody embarrassing” or not. The Carr family’s rivalry with their uptight neighbours is great and that aspect has the feel of a classic British sitcom to it. Changing Ends emerges as a sillier, warmer cross between Ladhood, Liam Williams’ own fourth-wall-breaking comedy about his youth, and Keeping Up Appearances. That might sound about as appealing as a Frazzle dipped in Tizer, but when he raids the bag of clothes that Ange has donated to charity, young Alan makes it clear that sometimes, clashing patterns just work.
• Changing Ends is on ITVX.
