“Outnumbered” - the Christmas special 2024, BBC 1 Boxing Day at 9.40pm, in which the Brockmans return and this year the children are all grown up.
In case you haven't ever seen this series from back in the day when it first hit our screens in 2007, a brief reminder. It began as a part-improvised comedy in which a harassed husband and wife attempt to bring up their three young children armed only with the basic tools made for herding cats, were cat herding a thing.
According to the newspapers who invariably use impeccable tabloid speak, viewers have widely “slammed” it. Mostly this is supposed to be because dad, Pete Brockman, reveals he's got prostate cancer. Frankly I wouldn't have bothered catching that at all, since it added nothing to the plot. That sort of thing is liable to put a dampener on the comedy apparently, but since there wasn't much evidence of anything laugh worthy then any complaints in that direction might as well have fallen on deaf ears.
Outnumbered never sat perfectly for me. It wasn't something I'd ever have rushed home to watch, but as far as cosy family comedy went what set it apart was its nice line in plotting. Once involved you were pulled in. The junior characters were its schtick. There was firstly Jake, doing the superior sarcastic big brother thing, always with a secretive plan and full of disdain for everyone else while he chased the girls. Next down in juniority was reckless Ben, always ready with the sort of question liable to put a stick in the spokes of any metaphorical bicycle and relentlessly hyperactive to boot. Little controlling Karen was the sassy monster whose awkwardly directed honesty and implacable desire to get her own way led the family into many a cringe worthy disaster. She'd be the one if you upset her who was liable to quietly make her point by getting you a car sticker saying, “Be nice to your kids. Remember they're the ones who choose your nursing home.”
There's a fine distinction between lovable on-screen brat and annoying brat, and back when it began the kids did a great job of running rings around their hapless parents, outnumbering them with ease. Each week we witnessed a slow burn story in which the wheel was made to wobble gently and innocuously at first until by the end the wheel had come off completely, leading to the inevitable car crash. Tension was ramped up nicely in much the same way as Friday Night Dinner did so too in its day.
But wasn't there always something annoying about that family? It was a thing of its time with its normative aspirations and social hang ups. The Brockmans were perhaps thought of as a normal everyday realistic portrayal of a modern British family back then, but they were never my sort of people. They reflected the concerns of the era and leant to the left politically, natch. They were believers in a Britain nurtured by Prime Ministers Blair and Cameron and you could even imagine Pete and Sue voting Clegg had they lived in his constituency.
Despite the unruly children, Pete's equally unruly school class and the general chaos caused by interfering others, there existed no real rebels in this series. These people inhabited the tidy domain of the centrist dad where I doubted no actual rules to do with approved life of the period were ever likely to get broken.
And so to the problems of 2024. Its lumbering premise, its pedestrian script and wooden characters signified nothing. We learned from the outset that there was a character called Jane who had for some reason inhabited the Brockmans' household like some sort of parasite for several weeks previously and was much to the relief of Pete and Sue about to leave before she drove them into the mad house.
Sadly, Jane was supposed to be the antagonist of the piece, but she came nowhere near the truly obnoxious Aunt Angela of old, of whom you could reliably observe I'd say that if you didn't feel moved to administer a good slap to her by the end of an episode it meant you weren't paying attention. Either that or you're made of granite. Jane on the other hand was just a niggling forgettable neurotic of the sort who gets her comfort from stepping over others and whose outlook upon life is maintained by keeping up with the latest self-help fad. A tired pointless character then, whose only role appeared to be to express surprise and to be both disapproving of the family's attitudes, and sympathetic of Pete's cancer diagnosis in equal measure.
Pete himself had by this episode since the days of his children's youth, morphed into that variety of bog standard grumpy old man who was given not very comically to dumping next door's Amazon parcel “safe place” deliveries over the garden fence in a fit of pique. I feel that Richard Wilson's characterising of Victor Meldrew would have got more mileage out of this trope. Sue on the other hand was a sort of watery incompetent seemingly lacking in initiative who quickly falls apart just because she dropped a tray and broke stuff.
The dialogue was dire and the actors didn't really have much to get their teeth into. Even the odd formulaic mention in the general service of left leaning comedy, such as Trump being framed as idiot, (as any fool surely must realise), just felt like a lame box ticking exercise in poor political invective.
There was no tension, no real purpose to the plot either, but most of all and worst of all the children had grown up. What we had always suspected would happen had at last come to pass. They had emerged like dull versions of beautiful imagoes into the sort of late 2010s adults that the likes of Blair, Cameron and Clegg would have thoroughly approved of. Suburban types they had become and of a stripe eager to be normal who were firmly set on that weary path leading to becoming their parents.
The sparse humour such as it existed was for the infant school classroom, lacking punch and well, much humour at all. The family's current schtick is a bore fest of cosy middle-class values: the sort of family I imagine Blair thought everyone in Britain ought to grow into. The parents were never outnumbered. It looked like life and duty had successfully brought their recalcitrant individualist family to heel. It was a family which was unremarkable back in its own time, but which now that it is revealed in our own time was nothing more than an anachronism.