Have I Got News For You lives on, My Family needs a quick death

Posted by Remote Control on April 26, 2008 2:56 PM | Permalink

SAT in front of my computer last Saturday night, I was all set to muse about the possible need to knock Have I Got News For You on the head.

In theory, Jack Dee as as presenter, and the excellent Labour rebel Bob Marshall-Andrews as one of the guests should have made for an excellent edition - even more so the extended version aired on a Saturday night.

Wrong! Jack Dee didn't see interested, Bob Marshall-Andrews didn't seem to want to rebel, and not even the wit of Ian Hislop and instant humour of Paul Merton could get the programme going.

Was it, I thought at the end, time for the programme to move on? In hindsight, and with the benefit of Friday night's episode with Julian Clary, the obvious answer is no. Perhaps, in hindsight, the 40 minute version was just a little bit too windy.

Last night's, however, was simply excellent. Julian Clary's use of silence to get one over the one's around him, was brilliant. Andrew Neil was subdued but chimed in at the right points, and comedian Ed Byrne played perfectly alongside Ian Hislop.

HIGNFY works best when the regulars - Hislop and Merton - are caught a bit unawares of what is happening around them. The superb "let's pop to the shops" round where they had to guess spiralling prices - topical - was proof of that.

The extended version is on tonight at 9.05pm on BBC 2, or on the iplayer all week. One to check out, unlike the "comedy" which follows it on BBC 1 on a Friday, My Family.

In its early days, My Family was excellent, and proved that sitcoms set in scenarios people can relate to, do still work. But like most sitcoms, it has a shelf-life. And the BBC needs to be prosecuted for putting something back on the shelf that is way past its sell-by date.

The fact is this: When it started, it was about how the family dealt with often unexpected situations the three teenage children put the family in. Now, a decade on, two of the teens are now in their 20s - and no longer in the series - and the third is still playing the role of a 15 year old (or so it seems) when he is probably nearer 20.

In a nutshell, sitcoms which are set in quite realistic circumstances only work when they stick to that realism. Others, such as Red Dwarf, have to have a great script so we will suspend all sense of reality. My Family is drifting listlessly from realism to fantasy, without a good script, or a real sense of purpose other than to fill up time before the News.

It's threatening to become a Last of the Summer Wine of the 21st century. In the same way almost every episode of Last of The Summer Wine ended with three men in a bath-tub going down a hill (or so it felt,) every episode of My Family seems to end with Ben Harper (Robert Lindsay) in an awkward situation, with wife Susan (Zoe Wanamaker) taking the upper hand. Two greating acting names mentioned in that last sentence, what are they still doing in this?

If the BBC are daft enough to keep ordering more of My Family, surely Lindsay and Wanamaker can just start saying no? There's so many other scripts out there that they can take on, without having to resort to My Family.