It is impossible to know why exactly – the heart wants what the heart wants – but my TV-watching habits lately have been leaning towards the suburban. Maybe, trapped in a small London flat in lockdown, my body craves the space and greenery of suburbia. “Maybe,” I think, watching Friday Night Dinner for the hundredth time, “I would be happier twitching behind a bay window and reprogramming my doorbell to play a fun tune. Maybe,” I ponder, mid-Inbetweeners episode, “I’d find peace if I had a garden large enough to put a trampoline in it. Who knows?”
Lee Mack knows, because he plays Stuart – a midlife crisis bulging out of a tired wedding DJ – in Semi-Detached (Thursday, BBC Two), a new real-time sitcom set firmly in the world of the cul-de-sac. There is no way of describing the show without it sounding quite naff: each episode follows an increasingly frenetic 20-minute segment of Stuart’s calamitous life, juggling the semi-detached house he lives in with his wafty younger girlfriend (Ellie White), his perma-shagging father (Clive Russell), outlaw brother (Neil Fitzmaurice) and new baby (just played by a baby), along with the complaints of the house opposite, where his brusque ex-wife (Samantha Spiro), her achingly smug new husband (Patrick Baladi) and his rebellious older daughter (Sarah Hoare) all live in real time.
Occasionally, the erratic neighbour (Geoffrey McGivern as a sort of elder Kramer) pops in to make things more difficult. Absurd things keep happening, and Lee Mack has to just stand there, take it, and occasionally allow himself a “What-is-life-like-eh!” big exhale.
This makes it sound bad, because every sitcom you’ve ever seen and forgotten has followed the structure of “weird things keep happening to a tired man”, but I assure you Semi-Detached is different. Firstly, the pace is frantic. Within the first six minutes of episode one, Mack has: i) turned down mid-labour sex with his screaming girlfriend; ii) had a polite conversation with his dad about the one-night stand the latter just had; iii) sprinted across the road to recruit his ex-wife to the increasingly urgent cause of getting his girlfriend to hospital; iv) had a minor tête-à-tête with her new husband; v) wished his newly bald daughter happy birthday; vi) said a cheery hello to his neighbour; vii) been surprised by his brother, over from the Isle of Man; and viii) watched a man take his own thumb off with a buzzsaw. All of this is done in a mad dash, the camera following as Mack runs from house to house, backed by a drums-and-timpani soundtrack that makes the whole thing feel like Birdman, if Birdman were set in a cream-carpeted sitting room in middle England.
Underpinning it always are the tea ceremony rules of semi-detached life, the grey foundation on which the absurdity is allowed to flourish. Suburbia for Stuart is a whirl of having constant favours to do, neighbours to talk to, chores looming like a timebomb. There is a scene that plays so deliciously on the real-time conceit – a squirming, semi-silent moment of small talk with a neighbour as the clock ticks behind him, 24-style – that it makes you uncomfortable by proxy. The appeal of cul-de-sac life is that it is sensible and boring. Semi-Detached is anything but.
