One comedy pet peeve of mine – and I’m not naming any names, but you know them – is the strange trend in recent years where a standup writes themselves a sitcom but bizarrely is the only non-funny character in the damn thing. Why is this? When did it start and why does it keep happening? Is this all Tim from The Office’s fault? How many more times will I watch a Live at the Apollo graduate look quizzically around in a set-piece scene where a shopkeeper is being weird to them? How many more times can I watch a comedian, eschewing their natural talent for timing and wit to instead “act”, pretend to sob at the emotional crescendo of a night out? I don’t want your emotions, I want your jokes! Dance for me, jester!
Good, then, that Rose Matafeo’s new series, Starstruck (Sunday, BBC Three), does not fall into that trap. You know Matafeo already from “everything”, and so it stands to reason she would get a Matafeo-led and Matafeo-created sitcom to play with and really cement her Matafeoness on to the wider psyche. Here, the New Zealand comic plays Jessie, and it is likely that you have a Jessie or a Jessie-adjacent person in your life – always gets off the bus at the wrong stop, never has any charge left in their phone – and it’s fun to watch her bounce around, gig job to gig job, shag to shag, minor flatmate emergency to minor flatmate emergency.
The rough premise is Jessie has inadvertently slept with megastar actor Tom (Nikesh Patel), a frankly annoyingly handsome man, and now she has to try to balance her good personality, her terrible defence mechanisms and the looming dread of turning 29, all while dodging paparazzi and getting texts from someone she’s only saved on her phone as “Tom Famous’”. She has a heartwarmingly strange housemate (Emma Sidi), an intense boss at one job (Sindhu Vee) and another intense boss at another job (Joe Barnes) to keep her in various states of check.
No, we’re not breaking new ground here. Starstruck has, at its core, the push-pull near-miss lovefest beats of a good romcom, pulled out over six episodes, but it’s done with an extra sheen of polish – Minnie Driver is in it for exactly one scene for some reason – and gemstone one-liners litter each episode (“He’s a famous actor, and you’re a little rat nobody”). The show also deals with the end-of-20s panic attack of being alive – “Hey, why don’t I have that job, partner, house and solid sense of reality I was promised?” – more adroitly than a lot of other shows that have attempted to do ever since Girls happened.
It’s this messy-20s-existential-prang that makes it a nice fit for the sleeker, more mature current guise of BBC Three – the difficult and moody second album to Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps’ raw and raucous debut. Maybe this is what BBC Three needed all along, you know: a year away to sort its life out, move out of that houseshare where the door doesn’t really lock, stop doing ketamine on a school night, download a mindfulness app but never really use it. If Starstruck is anything to go on, the all-new, slightly smarter BBC Three is something I could get used to.
