From the – no doubt currently jubilant – production company behind The Inbetweeners comes this new sitcom about ‘the world’s worst brother and sister’: Hannah (Charlotte Ritchie, Fresh Meat) and Dan (Tom Stourton, Common Ground).
Over the course of the six episodes that make up this first series, we will see Hannah and Dan expose, often unwillingly, their selfishness, idiocy and general ineptitude as they muddle through life with seldom much effort at all. The first instalment served up pretty predictable sitcom fodder, with Hannah trying to impress her new boss (but, unlike in most sitcoms, actually managing it pretty well for a while) and involving her brother, who agrees to pretend to be disabled in order to portray his sister as a caring person with a difficult home life.
As I said, this is typical sitcom fodder – and even the seemingly novel plot of a character posing as someone in a wheelchair, leading to a very awkward social situation or two, will be familiar to fans of shows like Not Going Out, The IT Crowd and Seinfeld. This barely matters, however, as what writers Keith Akushie and Daran Johnson lacked in originality, they made up for in gags. Admittedly, Siblings only really hit its stride, joke-wise, about half way through the first episode, but once it did it was quite a joy, and Dan and Hannah were instantly likeable; he’s incompetent, and she’s only mildly competent, with an abundance of incompetence always threatening to burst out – and sometimes doing so. Their incompetence, laziness and slight depravity make them nothing particularly new on the sitcom scene but they do are potentially hilarious characters, and although this potential was only partially realised in tonight’s opening episode, I have no doubt that the more time we spend with Hannah and Dan, the more we’ll love them and the funnier we’ll find them.
So, Siblings may not have thrown up anything excitingly original but it did provide a good thirty minutes of the sort of enjoyable, cringe-worthy and often bawdy comedy that leaves the audience in no doubt that it’s the work of Bwark Productions. I’d say it’s been a pretty good week for them, wouldn’t you?
Image thanks to: BBC; Bwark; and Ed Miller – ©Bwark
Siblings is on Thursdays at 10:30pm on BBC3
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