It’s a real cult hit!

EVERYONE ELSE BURNS

MONDAY, CHANNEL 4 hhhh

I love an offbeat comedy, and Simon Bird, star of this one, has made a career of it. He was superb in the iconic Inbetweeners, one of the best sitcoms of the Noughties which I watched open-mouthed, unaware then that I was witnessing my own future as the mother of teenagers. After that he was Adam, aspiring musician and hapless pursuer of ‘females’ entirely indifferent to his charms in the equally iconic Friday Night Dinner. He specialises in playing the kind of overbearing,

Simon Bird’s a master at playing pompous men without making the audience hate him

pompous, un-self-aware male that drives one bonkers with irritation, but who at the end of the day you can’t help feeling quite fond of because fundamentally they’re not bad, just a bit useless.

That’s his role here. He plays David Lewis, stern family patriarch and wannabe Elder of an end-ofdays cult in Manchester. Except, of course, he isn’t really. His wife Fiona (Kate O’flynn), like him a lifelong member of the order, is at the end of her marital tether, and his two children alternately fear and loathe (but mostly loathe) him. He’s like the David Brent of apocalyptic cult members: certain he’s destined for greatness but actually a sad, tragic clown.

It’s a character that has long had pride of place in the history of British sitcom, from Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army to Basil in

Fawlty Towers, and as such it’s both reassuringly familiar yet endlessly entertaining. The skill in playing such a role is to do so without making the audience also hate you, and Bird is a master at this. It’s like his whole face and body, his mannerisms and movements, were designed specifically for that purpose. In the great tradition of sitcom antiheroes, he’s as loveable as he is loathsome, and that’s his brilliance.

The show opens with David waking his family up with news of the apocalypse. Terrified, the children follow him and Fiona to the middle of a field, only to discover that it was all a drill (right). They respond with illdisguised venom. Later, son Aaron (Harry Connor) – a talented artist and budding psychopath – draws a picture of him in an acid bath.

By contrast, David’s daughter Rachel (above, right, with Aaron, Fiona and David), played by Amy James-kelly, is adorable. Obedient, biddable, loyal to her mad parents. Much to her father’s horror, she is very bright, a straighta student (‘how much time did you waste revising?’) with ambitions to go to uni and

become a doctor instead of a compliant cult home-maker. She has a love interest who’s a former cult member, and a mentor in the form of her teacher Miss Simmons, played by the wonderful Lolly Adefope (Kitty in Ghosts, another one of my favourite British sitcoms).

If you like very British comedy with a warm heart, I’ll wager you will enjoy this. The cast is great, including Morgana Robinson and Kadiff Kirwan as antagonists and Arsher Ali as the shallow cult leader Elder Samson (‘Cover your mouth when you yawn because that’s how the devil gets in’), and the writing is sharp. A cult show about a show cult? We’ll see.