The family bunch
Valuation: **
Waterloo Street
Valuation: ****
No matter how brilliant the idea or how big the company, a good product stuffed into the wrong packaging is bound to fail.
Think Google, literally the people with all the answers: They made a fool of themselves with a camera computer built into a pair of glasses, the Google Glass.
Like Google Glass, The Family Pile (ITV) is one of those brilliant concepts that is ruined by its format. The cast is great, the characters feel real and likeable — but the show just doesn’t work as a sitcom. It’s like putting a search engine in bifocals.
Amanda Abbington plays Nicole, the eldest of four sisters who inherit their childhood home after the death of their parents.
The Family Pile (ITV) is one of those brilliant concepts that is ruined by its format. The cast is great, the characters feel real and likeable — but the show just doesn’t work as a sitcom. It’s like putting a search engine in bifocals
Nicole doesn’t want to be the matriarch now her mother is gone but she has no choice – the other three are no help to anyone. If they were dwarves in a Disney fairy tale, their names would be Selfish, Feckless, and Immature.
Everyone is afraid of Ursula (Claire Keelan), who is so bossy and self-centered that she doesn’t even realize her husband is having an affair with Yvette (Clare Calbraith). And even though Gaynor (Alexandra Mardell) has a baby daughter, she still acts like a snotty toddler.
Nicole’s decision to sell the house, despite resistance from her sisters and the tangle of secrets they keep from each other, should make this great, layered family drama – the kind of thing Kay Mellor did so well with The Syndicate , or Abi Morgan in The Split.
But author Brian Dooley’s decision to turn this story into a six-part comedy in half-hour episodes shatters it. The jokes feel completely out of place, like they were added after the fact.
At best, they’re not funny; at worst, they disrupt the flow so much that it’s difficult to follow all the different threads. The humor alternates between slapstick and sex farce – one minute Gaynor’s little girl is eating her dinner out of a dog bowl, the next Nicole is showing shoppers a bedroom where Yvette’s husband has been left tied to the bed.
There’s a running gag about a sponsored silence that ends in a predictable burst of swearing. And everyone does Scouse accents like it’s a Brookside parody.
Woven into all of this are more moving themes, most notably grief. “Grief affects people in different ways,” says Yvette, trying to explain why she sleeps with her brother-in-law.
Waterloo Road is packed with melodrama, but that’s exactly what we’d expect from a school soap
Nicole tries to channel her sense of loss into something practical by cleaning up her parents’ stuff. Gaynor does the opposite and acts like nothing has changed. There is so much good, dramatic material here. Why it’s being tied into a sitcom is unclear.
Waterloo Road (BBC1) is also packed with melodrama, but that’s what we’d expect from a school soap opera. Corrie veteran Kym Marsh is in control as beautician and dinner lady Nicky, who is homeless with her two teenagers after being evicted from the apartment above the store.
Whether she’s locking a teacher in the kitchen freezer or weaving her way around the headteacher, Mrs Campbell (Angela Griffin), Kym dominates every scene she appears in. There’s also the hint of flirting with Adam Thomas as recently widowed father Donte.
The show has wisely left behind the left-wing political playground protests and gone back to basics with its overheated emotional breakdowns. Teacher Valerie (Shauna Shim) has taken in a stray student as a lodger, the manager of the basketball team has panic attacks and Nicky has called her sister Deb “a sour cow”.
Waterloo Road is back at its best.
Rapid change of night: Directors prefer to have people wear the same clothes when filming for continuity. Cross-dressing sculptor DNA ignored that rule on New Lives In The Wild (C5). Hot pants, miniskirt, leggings, little black dress… he wore something different for almost every recording.