The cancellation in 2011 of My Family – which had been for more than a decade the successor to Terry and June as a family sitcom bland enough for all generations of relatives to watch – raised the question of whether the domestic comedy (or dom-com) was dead or just resting.
The answer turns out to be the latter, as a new group of shows set in homes offers viewers the mirror vision experience of sitting down in the living room to watch fictional families sitting down in the living room. There are two tonight within an hour on BBC1, as Citizen Khan (8.30pm) returns for a fourth series and The Kennedys (9.30pm) reaches the fifth episode of its opening run.
With Cradle to Grave having just finished an eight-part run on the same network – and the 4-store offering a choice of jokes about folks on Tuesday nights in Catastrophe (Channel 4, 10pm) and Chewing Gum (E4, 10pm) – autumn 2015 television is again approaching the 1970s saturation levels of there always being at least 4.2 comedies about families in the schedules.
These series, though, demonstrate that, in order to survive, the dom-com now has to come with a twist of either time (period detail), type (racial diversity) or tone (sexual content), with various overlaps between the programmes. Citizen Khan and Chewing Gum take the home-based show respectively into the Asian and African/Caribbean communities of Britain. Chewing Gum, The Kennedys and Cradle to Grave are all based on anecdotes from the growing-up years of their authors – Michaela Coel, Emma Kennedy and Danny Baker – and so belong to the suddenly popular genre of the sit-comemoir, in which can also be included Caitlin Moran’s Raised by Wolves, which will have a second season on Channel 4 next year.
Creating another overlap on the Venn diagram, Raised by Wolves has a parental advisory warning on the Channel 4 website, as do Catastrophe and Chewing Gum, resulting in a paradoxical cluster of dom-coms that are considered unsuitable for family viewing. And Cradle to Crave and The Kennedys form another sub-set as comedies set in the 1970s, in which Lenny Henry’s recent Danny and the Human Zoo can be given an honorary place, even though it was a 90-minute film rather than a half-hour laugh piece. Based on his childhood experience, Henry’s film also forms, with Citizen Khan and Raised by Wolves, a trilogy of Midlands reminiscences.
But, within these various makeovers of the dom-com, the basic division is between the warmly silly – Citizen Khan, The Kennedys and Cradle to Grave – and the boldly filthy: Catastrophe, Chewing Gum and Raised by Wolves.
In the slapstick category, even the one show that isn’t actually set in the 70s – Citizen Khan – is so obviously influenced by comedies of that era that tonight’s episode has a guest appearance by Peter Bowles, playing a variation on his toff from To the Manor Born. Indeed, the entire series can be seen as an experiment from Adil Ray in whether, as a British Asian, he has licence to explore some of the stereotypes of accent and lifestyle that got white writers into trouble in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Mind Your Language, which are now literally never to be repeated. Characteristically, Citizen Khan tonight has a running gag about an antique potty, while The Kennedys is based around a chaotic wedding.
Contrastingly, the targets of humour in the returning Catastrophe included sex during pregnancy, postnatal depression and postnatal incontinence, and Alzheimer’s, while Chewing Gum – in which a typical episode title is “Sex and Violence”, one never used by Terry and June – has included riffs on cunnilingus and this week’s episode has an online content warning – “contains very strong language, adult humour, scenes of a sexual nature and dangerous experimentation” – which seems almost designed to tempt under-18s into ticking the box that confirms they are 18 or over.
One exception to this silly-filthy division in the dom-com is Mrs Brown’s Boys, currently on a cinematic sabbatical from TV, which, using the form of farce but having to be broadcast after the watershed, straddles the two slots without quite fitting into either, as Brendan O’Carroll’s drag-act title character might well put it herself.
Across both categories, there is the historical oddity of dom-coms – spectacularly redressed by The Royle Family – that the characters rarely indulge in that frequent family activity of watching television. Because Moran and Baker are popular culture specialists, we do have a sense in Raised by Wolves and Cradle to Crave of what’s on the box, but other clans – the Kennedys, the Khans, the Norris-Morrises in Catastrophe and Tracey and Conor in Chewing Gum – could do with spending more time in front of the box while on it.
