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It was a pleasant surprise to see that Not Going Out would be returning after a successful third series. Despite the show being essentially a dramatised vehicle for Lee Mack’s stand-up routine, the writing is often sharp and funny, and sometimes the comedians can even act. A bit. But was the fourth series worth the sudden re-commission?
Fortunately, it’s easy to start watching Not Going Out from any episode – in terms of characterisation and plot development, nothing much has changed since the second series. The show still revolves around the fictional life of Lee (played by Lee Mack) and his relationship, or rather non-relationship, with Lucy, his beautiful landlady (Sally Bretton). Tim (Tim Vine), Lee’s best friend and Lucy’s brother, also remains, delivering one-liners in very much the same way as his real-life stand-up persona.
As a Miranda Hart fan, it was disappointing for me to see that her character hadn’t returned (cue panicked cries of “B-B-BUT WHERE’S BARBARA?!!!” during the opening credits), but Katy Wix as Tim’s girlfriend Daisy still does glorious justice to the farcical, idiotic female role. Watching her take out a murderous butcher with a nail gun in the first episode was a magnificent thing to behold. Even Lucy was given funnier lines this series, although the premise of an exasperated Southern woman versus a cheeky Northern bloke does start to grate eventually, as do the regular cutaways to scenes of glitzy, glamorous London. We can’t have the viewer forgetting just how London-y this show is! I’m sick of the Thames and Canary Wharf; if you’re going to show “real” London, show clips of grumpy commuters. Or a pigeon.
For the first couple of episodes, series four seemed to be off to a good start. You often wonder how Mack and his team of writers continue to come up with such quick-witted material each time, as there’s always at least one line that completely kills the audience. However, I couldn’t help feeling that towards the middle of the series, the quality began to dip. ‘Movie’, an episode about recording a dodgy film in Lee’s flat, suggested that there was a great deal of barrel scraping going on during those brainstorming sessions for episode ideas, and ‘Dancing’ was also a bit dreary. ‘Fireworks’ was possibly the strongest episode, where the characters finally ventured out of the flat and into the real world to help an old lady find her way home. A sappy rooftop scene, swamped with a gooey Take That soundtrack, was redeemed by Lee being beaten up by the aforementioned old lady.
However, I enjoyed the last episode, ‘Life on Mars Bars’, a clever pastiche of that other rather popular TV series. Lee’s comatose dream sequences – his marriage to Lucy, and the return of Bobby Ball as his father – were completely and utterly ludicrous, and the plotline was obviously too embarrassed to make an appearance, but at last, it looked like Lee and Lucy would be Going Out. And once again, it was Daisy who made the episode, especially with her attempts to find the corner pieces of a round jigsaw puzzle.
I sense that Not Going Out won’t be returning for a fifth series, but good sitcoms know when to stop, and this is probably the perfect moment to do so; it would be sad to see the jokes lose their momentum and the characters lose their charm. And in any case, it probably won’t be too long before we see Katy Wix’s inevitable semi-autobiographical sitcom appearing in the TV schedules.
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