As the most frivolous TV format, sitcoms often have a unique license to explore the most serious matters. How they use that opportunity is up for grabs, but the levity of the quickfire comedy form allows for a surprising amount of light and shade. Consider, for example, the evolution of UK race relations as expressed in the gap between the attitudes and perspectives seen in Love Thy Neighbour (1972) and Desmond’s (1989). In the 17 years between these two shows, Britain changed, the TV commissioning process changed – and notions of representation changed along with them.
Transaction has been at least five years in the making, and even in that time, its context has become much more contested. A version of the show first saw the light of day in 2020 as a series of five-minute shorts on Comedy Central. Its creator, Jordan Gray, (a transgender woman), has now expanded the idea into a six-part sitcom for ITV, and credit is due to the broadcaster for what shouldn’t be a brave move but, in the current cultural and political climate, somehow is. Placing a trans character at the heart of their own sitcom – and indeed, placing their gender identity at the heart of the comedy – feels admirably bold and gutsy.
Of course, for a sitcom to even get a hearing, it has to be funny. Transaction is a workplace comedy and as such, sinks comfortably into a familiar set of tropes. There’s a highly strung, amiable but essentially useless boss (Nick Frost’s Simon); a handful of employees who range from eye-rollingly apathetic (Kayla Meikle’s Linda) to absurdly eager (Francesca Mills’s Millie); and a setting (fictional supermarket Pellocks) that feels like a closed loop. Inescapability is a huge part of any sitcom. It’s important that at the end of every episode, everyone ends up back more or less exactly where they started. At Pellocks, our heroes are stacking shelves, mopping floors, and working the night shift. They never even see any customers. The repetition is endless; the isolation is total.
However, Simon has made a blunder. He’s launched an accidentally transphobic advertising campaign and provoked a minor firestorm with trans rights demonstrators occupying the streets outside his shop. When he remembers that employee Tom (Thomas Gray) has a trans housemate Olivia (Jordan Gray), a solution occurs to him: could Olivia be persuaded to come work at Pellocks as a Get Out Of Jail Free card for clumsy Simon? “We want you to be as loud and as proud as you like,” he assures her.
Be careful what you wish for: the key to Transaction is Olivia’s character. For the most part, Gray plays her as a manipulative, narcissistic, and snarky nightmare – although, as we get to know Olivia better, it’s easy to see this hard external shell is brittle, too, and a response to certain life experiences. Her total lack of interest in taking the job quickly translates to a total lack of interest in doing the job. Olivia immediately realises that she is essentially unsackable – one word from her and Simon’s reputation as a monstrous bigot is set in stone.
And so, Olivia finds herself granted carte blanche to torment her workmates. She deliberately smashes jars to see if they will clean up her mess. She even tries to get one of them sacked. Speaking to Gay Star News, Gray explained her desire to write Olivia as “a regular tit-for-brains, not some tragic hero”, adding that she was bored of seeing trans people “represented as either poor suffering saints or hypersexualised villains”. In Olivia, she has certainly managed that – the character is as far from saintly as you can imagine, and all the more relatable for it.
Instead of preachy polemics, the worthiness and piety surrounding trans issues are treated as comedy fuel. Jokes about “having some extra meat to get rid of”, which conflate gender reassignment surgery with a surplus at the delicatessen counter, somehow give old tropes a pointed new twist – the comedy is refreshed by the situation. When Millie guilelessly enthuses about the Harry Potter books (does this in itself count as a micro-aggression these days?) Olivia’s thought bubble isn’t even filled in – although, in the context of his part in the new Harry Potter HBO series, the presence of Nick Frost in Transaction feels notable.
Transaction isn’t perfect. Plenty about it feels generic, and certain characters are underwritten. But sometimes, a show fits a particular moment – and often, that show is a sitcom. Transaction takes the increasingly grim persecution of a sexual minority and turns it into comedic fodder. Recent political and legal events have resulted in a trans community whose very existence is now contested. So, if Olivia takes both transphobic prejudice and liberal sanctimony and uses them equally to her advantage, who can really blame her?
