THE ROYLE FAMILY
By Caroline Aherne, Craig Cash and Carmel Morgan
With Caroline Aherne, Craig Cash, Ricky Tomlinson,
Sue Johnston and Ralf Little
Granada Television

I live with my parents. It's a great arrangement, because I get free room and board, in return for the minimum of culinary obligations.

My parents are fairly old-fashioned as things go. My Dad is a retired blue-collar worker, having once been a bus driver in Glasgow, and later a button pusher at the local power station. These days, he sits in his comfy chair in the front room, arguing with the television.

My Mum is a domestic goddess, although I would submit that the phrase is an oxymoron. Mum works a lot harder than anyone of her age should, stopping only for a well-earned fag break, or a soap opera or three.

We watch a lot of television, we Craigs. We have four televisions between the three of us. I think we log about thirty hours of television every day.

Out of this mammoth amount of square-eyed nonsense, The Royle Family is easily the most disturbing program of all.

Because it's us. Only funny.

Jim Royle is my Dad. He's opinionated, territorial over the front room and the television set, and mercilessly cynical.

Barbara Royle is my Mum. She's the only person in the house who does any work. The house is her work, and she has precious little time for anything other than a gossip and a chain-smoked fag, between scrubbing toilets and cooking the dinner.

And the Royle children, Denise and Anthony, and Dave, the son-in-law…

Well, they're lazy, adolescent, and a bit gormless. I don't recognize anyone from my house in these characters.

It says here.

The power of The Royle Family is in its ordinariness. The characters are recognisable and familiar, without falling into the trap of being cartoonish. They are a step closer to reality than the term "archetype" would suggest. They are brilliantly observed, and expertly written.

This understated characterisation sets the Royles apart from practically every other sitcom family in the history of the genre. Most other television families are driven by one or two outrageous personalities (Homer Simpson, Will Smith, Desmond Ambrose), with the rest of the cast limited to stock reactions and personality traits (frustrated middle child, eternally patient and understanding mother). Not so with the Royles: while Dad Jim is the loudest member of the cast, it's in keeping with his view of himself as the king of the castle. It's his front room, his telly, and his word be heard.

The plots, such as they are, also set the Royle Family apart from most other programmes in the genre. In fact, there are only three stories in the series, and two sets (!): Getting Ready for the Wedding, Getting Ready for Baby, and Series Three. And while other things do happen, like Christmas, Anthony's Birthday, and Nana's Operation, the individual shows remain fairly static. It's just the family, with the odd friend, neighbour or relation, sat around the telly for a half-hour.

This is refreshing, compared to the standard sitcom formula:

· Cast Member tries to Change Life Completely with New Job / Wacky Wedding / Get Rich Quick Scheme
· Rest of Cast Respond
· Things End Up Back Where They Started
· Roll Credits.

And it leaves the cast free to do some real acting, because they're not spending half the show arseing about in chicken costumes.

The Royle Family is unrelentingly Northern, and working-class to boot. In fact, they're probably the first such family since the Boswells, of Carla Lane's saccharine comedy drama Bread. And, once again, this flies in the face of British Sitcom Scripture: after all, even the Scottish Meldrews lived in bloody Surbiton.

When other commentators have watched this show, they've found it almost impenetrable. They don't recognise the characters, or any of the things that they talk about. And perhaps they have a point: I grew up with a family like the Royles. I could tell you what they have in their fridge, what their street looks like at night, where they do their shopping, and even what the house smells like.

Someone who's grown up in Surbiton, with wide leafy streets, soft water, a thriving Conservative Party and a Waitrose five minutes away by Volvo may not necessarily be in the best position to understand Denise and her friend Cheryl's fascination with the pay-by-the-week home shopping catalogue.

But for all the potential alienation of Middle England, the Royle Family remains a powerfully funny piece of television.

The cast are amazing, from neighbour Joe, and his wife Mary, to the ever-so-slightly daft Nana (played by the incomparable Liz Smith). The Royles themselves are perfectly cast. The writer-creators play the lazy Denise and the amiable, if slightly dopey, Dave Best, and they pitch their performance perfectly.

Ralf Little is fantastic as the downtrodden youngest child, Anthony Royle. Sulky and downright funny in turns, Anthony is as close to a real teenager as I've seen on British television. In what a writer with more class might call "metafiction," he even engages in that most typical of habits for a young British lad: quoting from television shows.

There's a smart bit of cultural counter-programming in the casting of Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston as Jim and Barbara Royle: some fifteen years earlier, they played union man Bobby Grant and his wife Sheila, on the Channel Four soap opera, Brookside. Certainly, for people of my generation and above, there's a bit of a frisson in seeing them together again (especially when Eddie Yates from Coronation Street guest-stars, hawking knock-off gear from a hold-all).

Jim and Barbara Royle aren't too far from Booby and Sheila Grant. Well, if Bobby had been made redundant, instead of shop steward, and if Sheila hadn't found her way out of a confining marriage. And a bad perm.

Tomlinson is superb. The popular face of the show, appearing on all the t-shirts and alarm clocks and novelty toilet rolls, his preparation for filming is nothing short of Stanislavskian. In order to get the right look for the show, he stops showering and shaving for six weeks before filming. And during filming, he wears the same clothes, over and over. You can see them in the picture above. They don't get washed.

If nothing else, you have to admire the rest of the cast for their ability to sit in the same room as him for the duration of the series.

Sue Johnston is similarly brilliant. She has the air of a headmistress or other senior manager in "real life" (I've never met her, but I've seen her on a lot of daytime TV), but she transforms, like an anti-butterfly, into a haggard, over-worked, menopausal housewife on screen. She's like my friend's mums. She's like my Mum. She's like a real mum.

Together, the cast look like a real family. They look utterly comfortable in their roles, which makes watching them perform as an ensemble all the more easy, and all the more appealing.

And this is where the show becomes truly sublime.

Because it's only when people are this used to each other, to knowing each other in the ways that only a family can, that they can talk to each other this freely.

A lot of the humour is verbal, of course, and comes out of the way the characters relate to each other. A lot of the time, the characters don't quite realise the irony of their own words. The casual cruelty of some of the dialogue - that mild, two-faced nastiness that one reserves solely for the people closest to us - is made all the more hilarious by our complicit and silent role as an invisible member of the family. By filming the show in such a way as to essentially turn the audience into part of the furniture, we get to be in on the jokes, without being the butt of them.

Now that's comedy.

The ease with which the central cast fit together, especially around the secondary characters, works to the show's advantage. The silent to-ing and fro-ing of arched eyebrows and rolled eyes in response to something one of the guests has said or done is gutbustingly funny. There can be more humour in a meaningful glance between Jim Royle and his son, or in a pregnant pause between the Royles and the mad woman next door, than in an entire episode of My Family or Friends. And, again, it's that sense of familiarity - among the cast, and with the characters - that makes the humour work. Without it, the show would be flat and humourless.

There are moments of great, almost surprising warmth in the series. Some moments where you wonder when you stopped thinking of these people as actors. And an awful lot of laughs.

In short, The Royle Family is the funniest, smartest and most realistic piece of fiction on British television for the last ten years.

Whether you already live with them or not.

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Review text (C) Matthew Craig

Previously unpublished essay;
reprinted in the pop culture magazine Robot FIST!