The Scotts**
BBC1 Scotland, 10.35pm
CREATING a sitcom has to one of the toughest gigs in television, up there with being Piers Morgan’s co-host and Andrew Neil’s hair stylist. Even shows that have gone on to be classics, such as Only Fools and Horses, were given a rough ride on their first outing.
So it was a brave move for Burnistoun’s Iain Connell and Robert Florence to send their new arrival out into the world, all spindly legs and hope, like Bambi on ice. Even braver considering there was not a decent laugh to be had in the entire half hour.
The Scotts. See what they did there? They’re like the Scots, see? From Scotland, right? But they are only representative of Scotland if you regard your fellow citizens as quarrelsome, foul-mouthed, walking cliches who veer from being unbelievably thick to implausibly eloquent, sometimes in the same sentence.
The Scotts consisted of Henry (Connell), a scaffolder and salt of the earth type; his nice but lightweight wife Laura (Sharon Young); Henry’s dentist turned Botox merchant brother Vincent (Florence; and Vincent’s wife Vonny, a social media “influencer” who drinks a lot and wears a hat to dinner.
Then there was Henry and Vincent’s sister Colette (Louise McCarthy), a dame who put the GBH into gallus, and her fitness fanatic partner. Characters were either echoes of other creations (Vincent and his loadsamoney bragging) or, in the case of the women, so thinly drawn they must have been conjured up on the back of a postage stamp never mind a fag packet.
In this, a pilot episode, Henry was putting together a party for the clan’s matriarch (Barbara Rafferty). He wanted to invite Colette, despite bad blood between the siblings due to sis blowing a loan meant for a new kitchen on a holiday abroad. Could everyone play nice for the sake of dear old ma and her birthday bash? What do you think?
The show’s style, mock doc interspersed with interviews to camera, was reminiscent of Modern Family, with none of that show’s winning blend of edgy comedy smoothed out by warmer, softer material. In The Scotts, almost everyone was a grotesque. As for the humour, Vonny’s description of Colette’s boyfriend would have made Roy “Chubby” Brown blush. Seriously? It was a woman saying the lines, but it did not sound like anything a woman would say.
The pity is that buried under mounds of awfulness, Connell and Florence are still good together. Writing for themselves, they can still hack it. The spark remains. Looking wider, the Colette character, with a bit of work, might be salvageable from the wreck. It is about time McCarthy, a treat in Scot Squad, had her own show.
- READ MORE: Barry Didcock's TV review: The Trial Of Christine Keeler, BBC One, Sunday and Monday
As it is, the biggest, and most hollow, laugh comes at the end with a caption telling viewers that the preceding mince (my words, not theirs) was “supported with financial assistance from the Scottish Government and the National Lottery through Creative Scotland”.
So not only were we, the viewers, paying the licence fee for this, we were stumping up again through government funds and lottery punts. This is what state-sponsored comedy looks like, then. Someone clearly has a sense of humour. Maybe they should try their hand at the sitcom game.
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