When it arrived in early 2011, Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner felt like a homely hybrid of the era’s biggest comedies. Built on a simple premise – embarrassing parents Jackie and Martin Goodman (Tamsin Greig and Paul Ritter), and their embarrassed adult sons Adam and Jonny (Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal) enduring Shabbat dinner together every week – it is rooted in the relatable, often claustrophobic, suburban mundanity of Peep Show, mixed with a hefty dollop of immaturity, a la The Inbetweeners.
Those references are unsurprising, given creator Robert Popper worked on both comedies, while an undercurrent of Green Wing’s surrealism is fostered by one of that show’s stars, Mark Heap, as awkward neighbour Jim, who, along with his dog Wilson, manages to constantly interrupt the family meal, or “lovely bit of squirrel”, as dad-joke incarnate Martin would have it.
While series one took its time to wriggle out of its slippers-only comfort zone, eking humour out of a man coming to collect a sofa-bed, or fallouts over “piss yellow” curtains, by series two the squirm-inducing, familial battlegrounds carried more of an edge. Adam and Jonny’s constant pranking of each other moved from schoolboy stuff – nail clippings in water glasses, for example – to elaborate humiliations, including one involving Adam’s new girlfriend, an inappropriate crush and a room full of porn. Series two and three also found more to do with the supporting cast, including the late Frances Cuka as Jackie’s mum Nelly, a straight-talking, yoghurt-loving free spirit with a penchant for badboys, including the trilby-sporting Mr Morris. Jim also progressed from sideshow nuisance to central figure, be it trying to ingratiate himself with Jewish traditions by fashioning a yarmulke out of the shirt on his back, or upsetting the family’s weekly “crimble crumble” dessert time by accidentally dousing himself in bright red paint (“So much blood!”).
It was constructed so tightly around the family’s detached north London house, problems started to creep in once they ventured outside. Even a trip to the local pub felt as if it was disturbing the equilibrium, with the comedy becoming less about subverting cosy familiarity and more about broader slapstick. Once able to give as good as she got, Jackie has now been reduced to essentially one massive eye-roll with accompanying sigh. A particular nadir was series four’s The Funeral in which the hapless Martin gives a long forgotten uncle a ludicrous eulogy before the coffin is dropped and Wilson starts gnawing on the corpse. Even Nelly and Mr Morris’s big day is ruined, and not just because one of them leaves the shambolic wedding in an ambulance.
While series five had its high points – a mix-up involving the menopause, the surprisingly moving death of Jim’s only real friend – it also seemed to be running out of new, absurdist dinner-ruining setups. By the time you’ve sat through a whole episode based round whether or not to eat a tin of expired “lucky” meat, actually leaving the house on a Friday night feels like an option after all.
