A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Actor (10 June 2001)

 David Tennant plays a young actor (Rob Harker) spending a day around Soho, who manages to cock up a voice-over, an interview and an audition within the space of a few hours.

 Although the comedy of this piece - mainly concerned with escalating misunderstandings played in a minor key - does raise genuine laughs, I get left with a sense of melancholia and unease after watching it, rather than mirth. In its muted way, it’s very skillfully constructed with each scene showing a new aspect of this young man's flaws, traumas and neuroses. The viewer is given particular empathetic insight through an interview with his uncomprehending parents, and the unexpected appearance of an ex at what appears to be the one moment's grace that he gets.

 The mood of unease is perhaps magnified a little by 17 years' historical distance, with the actor spending his day in the part of Central London that I knew best when I was young. I'm struck in the Soho street scenes by the presence of more ordinary life and less conspicuous wealth. Always interesting to see theatre (or cinema) fronts in West End scenes, as you can date what you're seeing precisely by what's on. Rob Harker walks outside the Wyndham's and Albery several times, where respectively Art (already in its fourth year) and the bold transfer from the Royal Court Upstairs of Caryl Churchill's Far Away are playing.

A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Journalist (3 June 2001)

 Watching from a distance of seventeen years, I sense a particular note of unhappiness in this episode that the others don't have. It's because while, say, vicars or pilots are still with us the subject of this week's investigation - the Long Ashton Gazette, a local paper for a small East Midlands town with a staff of four - is an institution that wouldn't exist by now. Even though a lot of the comedy stems from the moribund nature of the paper, its a bit less funny watching something that's gone than it is watching something that hasn't got long to go at the time. The crumpled old editor is Tim Preece, the ambitious, thrusting (but sadly inept and desperate) unpleasant young journalist is Nicola Walker (amusingly described recently as "simultaneously luminous and miserable-looking" by Peter Hitchens in the Mail On Sunday).

 Even by the modest standards of tiny local papers, the Long Ashton Gazette is peculiarly terrible and the attentive viewer can have fun picking up the details of its low quality. I'm particularly taken by the front page story, "MIRACLE FOR JANICE - IT'S TWINS!" illustrated by a photo of a mother with only one baby.

A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Mother (27 May 2001)

 The way this mockumentary programme is structured means that three types of comedy are always simultaneously in operation; the lives that the documentary is recording, the relationship between (unseen) presenter/ journalist Roy Mallard and his subjects at the time of recording, and Mallard's retrospective voiceover. The three forms, overlaid over each other like a palimpsest, provoke different types of response from the viewer.
 

 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.