Personally, I find the voiceover less interesting and funny than the rest of
it, because it's usually repetitive variants of the same lexical joke where a
pontifical sentence will fall in on itself and become banal. It’s perhaps a
holdover from the programme's radio origins, when this verbal humour didn't
have to compete for the listener's attention with interesting visual stuff
going on at the same time.
The other two elements are great, though. The subjective style means that Roy Mallard's interaction with his subjects (in this episode, Tamsin Greig as a fatigued mother) creates a rare complicity between the character and the viewer, which can be quite muted and subtle. Most of the problematic actions in this story stem from Mallard noticing (at the same time as the viewer) a mistake that Jenny is making and momentarily hesitating out of tact, or what he says being slightly misunderstood and not getting an opportunity to correct himself. It feels lifelike to me, but in a way more often encountered in literature than comedy or drama.
Maybe the cleverest moment is when Jenny is pushing her son's pram past a lake in which ducks are swimming. "Quack quack! Quack quack!" the mother says aloud, in a way that you only get given the leeway to do when a small child accompanies you. A dog, walked by a woman, passes by. "Woof woof" says Roy Mallard, less enthusiastically. "Fuck off!" snaps the woman. It took me a couple of seconds to register what the misunderstanding actually was...
Something that's always under-represented on screen, even in domestic dramas and comedies, is the actual business of housework - its repetitive and relentless nature, and intermittent difficulty. So a cardinal virtue of this episode lies in one of its main plots. The mother overloads the washing machine, which then breaks down. Because the machine is under guarantee she arranges for someone to come and fix it in a few days. Her mother arrives in the afternoon to look after the baby, and is told by Jenny as she leaves the house in a hurry not to do anything about it because someone is already coming in a few days. When Jenny returns home she is infuriated to discover that her mother has got an unhelpful handyman to visit, who hasn't fixed the machine but has managed to flood the kitchen. A particular reason why Jenny is upset about this turn of events is because she didn't want her husband to know that she overloaded the machine in the first place. There's a causality to this storyline that rings particularly true to me, and which I don't think could have been achieved through a conventional sitcom form.
The other two elements are great, though. The subjective style means that Roy Mallard's interaction with his subjects (in this episode, Tamsin Greig as a fatigued mother) creates a rare complicity between the character and the viewer, which can be quite muted and subtle. Most of the problematic actions in this story stem from Mallard noticing (at the same time as the viewer) a mistake that Jenny is making and momentarily hesitating out of tact, or what he says being slightly misunderstood and not getting an opportunity to correct himself. It feels lifelike to me, but in a way more often encountered in literature than comedy or drama.
Maybe the cleverest moment is when Jenny is pushing her son's pram past a lake in which ducks are swimming. "Quack quack! Quack quack!" the mother says aloud, in a way that you only get given the leeway to do when a small child accompanies you. A dog, walked by a woman, passes by. "Woof woof" says Roy Mallard, less enthusiastically. "Fuck off!" snaps the woman. It took me a couple of seconds to register what the misunderstanding actually was...
Something that's always under-represented on screen, even in domestic dramas and comedies, is the actual business of housework - its repetitive and relentless nature, and intermittent difficulty. So a cardinal virtue of this episode lies in one of its main plots. The mother overloads the washing machine, which then breaks down. Because the machine is under guarantee she arranges for someone to come and fix it in a few days. Her mother arrives in the afternoon to look after the baby, and is told by Jenny as she leaves the house in a hurry not to do anything about it because someone is already coming in a few days. When Jenny returns home she is infuriated to discover that her mother has got an unhelpful handyman to visit, who hasn't fixed the machine but has managed to flood the kitchen. A particular reason why Jenny is upset about this turn of events is because she didn't want her husband to know that she overloaded the machine in the first place. There's a causality to this storyline that rings particularly true to me, and which I don't think could have been achieved through a conventional sitcom form.
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