Andy Hamilton's comedies are worth an evening for their characters. With Guy Jenkin, he gives us parents and newsroom colleagues we recognise, though Outnumbered has thin plots and Drop the Dead Donkey asks for an appetite for old news.
Fi1m perspective
In Outnumbered (2007), the parents have lines to deliver and the children have permission to say something else. Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin write the adults' dialogue, give the children the rough shape of a scene and let them talk. We laughed at the parents' efforts to cope because the children's contributions did not sound as though an adult had tidied them up first. For its first three series, the programme finds a convincing way to show family life without making everyone sound like a sitcom writer.
That willingness to leave room in a script had an earlier use in Drop the Dead Donkey (1990), which Hamilton co-created and wrote with Jenkin. Here the gaps were for last-minute topical jokes, within a newsroom where one employee's shortcomings could become everyone else's problem. The ensemble remains the reason to watch: Hamilton and Jenkin give the staff enough individual definition that their company matters more than the news they discuss. We would recommend it as a workplace comedy before recommending it as satire; some of the topical material requires more interest in yesterday's news than we can reasonably expect.
The move from the newsroom to the home made that interest in people less dependent on the headlines. In Outnumbered, however, the freedom given to the children leaves the half-hours short of shape. A dinner party or a meeting with the headmaster supplies somewhere for them to talk, rather than much of a story, and the comfortable London household is a narrow sample of family life. The ease of recognition is part of the pleasure, but the programme only occasionally notices how secure this family's circumstances are.
Hamilton and Jenkin took their domestic comedy into cinema with What We Did on Our Holiday (2014), which they co-wrote and directed. The later Outnumbered series expose how much depended on children young enough to be unpredictable. By the fourth and fifth series, they are teenagers delivering written lines, leaving the adults with a more familiar sitcom to perform, and the programme grows tamer. Start with the first three series, and do not feel obliged to stay until everyone has grown up.
Biography
Andy Hamilton is a British comedy writer, director and producer. With Guy Jenkin he co-created the Channel 4 series Drop the Dead Donkey (1990), on which he also wrote and produced, and the BBC series Outnumbered (2007), on which he wrote, directed and produced.
He studied English at Downing College, Cambridge. His other credits include the screenplay for the film What We Did on Our Holiday (2014). He has written and performed in radio comedy, including voicing Satan in Old Harry's Game, and has been a regular panellist on Have I Got News for You and QI.
