As the Brockman family returns for a fifth and final series of Outnumbered, some viewers will find their hackles standing to attention at the family's extraordinary distillation of middle-class characterstics. There’s the enviable middle-class London home they live in, absurdly beyond the means of a family that seems to subsist on a single teacher’s income. There’s the tameness of their problems, this week's revolving around angst-ridden secondary school choice and the horror provoked by the eldest child Jake's (Tyger Drew-Honey) tattoo. And there's the mother’s relentless anxiety about whether her children are making the right impression on their classmates. Recycling the empty houmous pots seems classless by comparison.
And yet it works. The first episode of its fifth series in less than seven years was genuinely funny, a couple of scenes wickedly so. The children enable Outnumbered to change, yet stay the same, their growth refreshing the characterisation automatically. The two younger ones, Karen (Ramona Marquez) and Ben (Daniel Roche) have changed a lot, though in both cases, surprisingly, for the better.
It's the razor edges and Swiss Railways timing of Andy Hamilton's and Guy Jenkin's script that make it workKaren’s pert yet baby-voiced precociousness was one of the show’s trademark features, but it’s bettered by the dry, sly quality to Karen’s interventions now. (The ice cream scene was beautifully cruel.) Ben, meanwhile, is still as rambunctious as before, but there’s a self-awareness about his character now which gives him a more complex and enjoyable role. He contributes knowingly to the jokes now in a way he couldn’t before.
The secret of its success is partly, of course, the writers’ laser focus on the neuroses, hypocrisies and absurdities of that most socially anxious tranche of English life, but it's also the tightness of the structure and plotting. It’s well known that the best comedy tends to have a tightly constrained fictional setting, be it Slade prison, a Torquay hotel, or a Slough paper merchant. In the bizarre rites of middle-class life, the creators of Outnumbered have found a world just as full of suffocating absurdity as the aristocratic salon of an Enlightenment theatrical farce.
Much is made of the semi-improvised nature of the performances, and the documentary-style camera work. There’s undoubtedly a refreshing quality to the unexpected angles (the children’s scenes are shot with two cameras to give a range of options) and jerky movement from shot to shot. This is, though, very much a writers’ comedy. It’s the razor edges and Swiss Railways timing of Andy Hamilton’s and Guy Jenkin’s script that make it work, both verbally and at plot level: Ben’s casting as the lead in his school’s production of the musical Spartacus (pictured above) is a stroke of genius that will be harvested for jokes throughout the series.
Compared to other popular comedy, the characters are, in themselves, fairly mundane. Viewers won’t stick around out of affection for Pete Brockman and his unruly crew when the jokes have run out, as they did with Del Boy in the increasingly bizarre and sentimental final years of Only Fools and Horses. Lucky, then, that for the next few weeks, we can enjoy some of the sharpest comic writing on TV.
