Everyday family life, with its unexpected truths and shocking outcomes, will always reduce you to tears.
Outnumbered
BBC1, 9.05pm (Saturday)
The Fallen
BBC2, 9.05pm (Saturday)
Everyday family life, with its unexpected truths and shocking outcomes, will always reduce you to tears. Outnumbered is a frank middle-class sitcom gem, acutely crafted by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, creators of Drop the Dead Donkey, which works authentic comedy magic in prompting tears of laughter.
Outnumbered's core parental partnership, mild-mannered Pete and frazzled Sue (deftly played by Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner), live a life of well-upholstered suburban chaos, hovering between saintly tolerance, hysterical bafflement and enraged frustration. It's their three free-spirited young children, you see. In particular, five-year-old Ben resembles a cherub, but pursues a path of psychedelic logic with cruel and articulate rigour sufficient to confound a holy man. Certainly, Ben's musings on Christ's life - "Why couldn't Jesus shape-shift?" - tested Outnumbered's comforting vicar.
The only stereotype on view, the comforting vicar was officiating at society's most dangerous gathering, a wedding. Naturally, the happy day gave vent to recrimination, bitter dismay, hatred and vengeful childishness between Sue and her sibling Angela. As Sue hissed on spotting her lifelong rival: "Here it comes, the attention-seeking missile."
En route to its violent climax - Sue kicking Angela up the bahookey - Outnumbered proffered an exquisite delight: Pete and Sue's discovery that the bride had been appraised of the duo's sniggering summary of her pre-marital sexual history. The unwitting stoolpigeon was their six-year-old daughter, a prima-donna bridesmaid.
Subtly hilarious, Outnumbered is all the better for its unspoken central tenet: family love. In terrible contrast, The Fallen was a meticulous memorial to family love that moved you to tears of sympathetic mourning.
It constituted a graphic three-hour-long reminder that, to date, some 300 young British servicemen and women have died during the past seven years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Their names unfurled on screen with an awful guarantee of more to come: more grief-stricken parents, wives, children, sisters, brothers. All those we met struggled, differently, to show a brave face, whether inner-city working class or rural upper crust. It was uniformly heartbreaking.
A study in stiff-upper-lipped containment, an ex-officer father apologised for the state of his officer son's turfed graveyard plot, browned around the headstone by a cemetery worker's weedkiller. Another proud dad delivered three lunchtime cheers down the pub for his dead lad. Yet another stood before his car with its personalised number plate, Y6 RMP.
Its significance? The man's son was one of half a dozen royal military police killed at Majar al-Kabir police station in Iraq. His number plate voiced a memorial query: "Why did six military policemen have to die?"
Other testimonies sought to voice inexpressible loss, incomprehension, disbelief. "This is the shirt he proposed to me in - it sleeps under my pillow"; "If you cut him, he'd bleed green - Army through and through."
A mother recalled her farewell to her son in his coffin: "We gave him a rose - kissed it and put it in his hands. And a teddy bear he'd had from a baby."
Another relative lamented the manner in which many Brits greet news of further fatalities: "People don't care. That's a shame - what's for breakfast?' "
To watch The Fallen was to grow more aware that there's a war on; one which demands an extraordinary and grievous sacrifice from gloriously ordinary young folk.
david.belcher@theherald.co.uk
