When Catastrophe debuted back in 2015, I could barely stand it. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it – I really did – but the first episode aired a week before my wife had our first child, and I found that the whole thing hit so excruciatingly close to home that I ducked out for a year, and only caught up once I’d managed to properly brace myself.
Clearly, this is down to nothing but coincidence. If I hadn’t been going through a very particular set of life experiences at the exact time Catastrophe launched, it wouldn’t have struck such an uncomfortable nerve with me. I’ve tried to explain this sensation to people over the last couple of years, but never really managed it. And now I don’t have to, because this series of Catastrophe is shaping up to be its Brexit series, which means that everyone else can feel the close-to-home horror just as sharply as I did.
Brexit is the monster that lurks around the corner of every scene of Catastrophe’s third series. In the opening episode, it was used as a flimsy excuse for a personal indiscretion. It crops up again in later episodes too, offhandedly lobbed into the mix to explain away one full-pelt disaster or another.
Used like this, Brexit is a dramatist’s dream come true. You have two characters. You need to hurl obstacles in front of them. Why not Brexit? It’s big and it’s stupid and it’s scary – plus, helpfully, nobody really knows what it actually is yet – so it’s the perfect catch-all baddie. Character loses a job? Brexit. Decreasing house prices? Brexit. Any form of foreign travel whatsoever? Chuck a bit of Brexit in and it automatically becomes a thousand times meatier.
This works so well with Catastrophe – along with its ongoing subtle nods to Breaking Bad – that it can only be a matter of time before every other show on television drafts in a little bit of Brexit to up their game, too.
We’ll be drowning in the stuff before long. Gritty BBC dramas where John Simm plays a put-upon immigration officer unspooling in the wake of Brexit. Episodes of Casualty about old ladies falling off wonky stepladders that no longer have to conform to EU safety standards. Channel 5 factual entertainment shows called things like All New Celebrity Can You Go Broke On Brexit? It’s inevitable. It’s too juicy not to be.
If everyone starts mining Brexit for dramatic horror, the risk is that it’ll be declawed to the extent that it simply becomes another overused TV trope, like rape and dead people who are only visible to lead characters. But Catastrophe has got in ahead of the pack, so its horror is incredibly real. Every time it looms up out of nowhere to smack Sharon and Rob down a couple of pegs, it’s a nasty portent of things to come in real life for everyone else.
It’s a brilliant move, both ripe and necessary, but it doesn’t half make Catastrophe difficult to watch. Again. Just when I thought it was safe to go back.
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