It’s been three years since the pilot but The Other One has finally made it to our screens as a series. And it was worth the wait. The show is a comedy about the family Walcott, whose neat and ordered middle-class existence is thrown into uproar when its patriarch Colin dies and it is revealed he had a whole other family Walcott on the council estate across the way.
The first episode picks up where the pilot left off. Cathy is played by Ellie White – eternally Princess Beatrice from The Windsors, but with practice you become able to set that aside for half an hour. She and her mother Tess (Rebecca Front) are the “official” family, still reeling from the news of Colin’s 30-year betrayal. Cathy’s GP fiance Marcus (Amit Shah, perfect in a potentially unforgiving part) is still trying to make up for sending dick pics (“Just two! But one of them was on burst, so – 16”) to his receptionist.
The sanguine second family, meanwhile, are keen to be friends. They include mistress Marilyn (the ever-excellent Siobhan Finneran) and daughter Cat (Lauren Socha, nailing a part literally made for her, according to creators Holly Walsh and Pippa Brown). While the pilot leaned a little heavily on simple class differences for laughs, often coming perilously close to punching down, the series is much better-weighted: a very funny, oddly tender and moving exploration of love, grief, forgiveness and family.
The idea for the sitcom came from a story Walsh was told by a friend about a man with two families who called both his sons Tom, to minimise the chances of slipping up. And so we have Cathy and Cat, whose relationship is at first awkward, then matures into real friendship, and finally becomes a family-like bond.
They are opposites in every way: Cathy, an uptight overachiever forever reining in her feelings, is eventually forced to take compassionate leave from work when she, in her half-sister’s summation, goes “fully Nutella” over her missing office chair; Cat is a Deliveroo driver who has more time on her hands than usual thanks to an unresolved issue over a missing naan and “since they introduced driver ratings”. They gradually come to have each other’s backs – and Cat ends up with Cathy’s old Soda Stream (“Can I get you a cup of tea while you’re waiting? Still or sparkling.”) If I had a tear in my eye by the close of play, judge me not til you too have walked the six half-hours in sensible shoes or designer trainers.
Tess’s main preoccupation is finding a way to exorcise her fury and find peace. A conflagration of Colin’s belongings, internet dating, absorption in Cathy’s upcoming wedding and Nordic walking all fail (the last introduces us to quite the most misguided cameo I have ever seen, with Stephen Tompkinson as Cathy’s climate-denying former geography teacher speaking for some unfathomable reason with a Loyd Grossman accent). She will get there in the end.
It’s a show with a loving heart that nevertheless manages to remain witty and fleet, doing a lot with every scene and never wasting a minute. It also sets things up nicely for a second series. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another three years.
