Friday Night Dinner: A Poor Starter

For dinner last Friday night I had bacon-wrapped chicken breast stuffed with goat’s cheese and rosemary, served with mustard mash and assorted roasted vegetables. For you accomplished chefs, this is a fairly standard affair, but for me it was a small triumph. Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner on the other hand, despite featuring the seasoned talents of Tamsin Greig and Simon Bird, was decidedly less palatable.

The premise of Friday Night Dinner, two twentysomething sons Adam (Bird) and Jonny (newcomer Tom Rosenthal) returning to their parents’ (Greig and Paul Ritter) home for the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal, is a relatively simple one, yet provides the kind of foundations that The Royle Family and Grandma’s House have been built on. Sadly, however, this opening offering fails to mimic the success of its counterparts.

The main focus of this episode is the interruptions that the family’s dinner suffers - first of all by creepy neighbour Jim (Green Wing’s Mark Heap), who has broken his toilet and has to use the family’s, and secondly by a man who has come to buy an old sofa bed from hard-of-hearing dad Martin, a day earlier than he expected.

From the moment the credits started I feared for the show. A snap judgement maybe, but the titles and the accompanying music seemed completely ill at ease with the show’s premise: more suited to a Friday night out than a Friday night at your parent’s house. All of which would have been forgiven if this marriage of old and new didn’t continue throughout the show. While it attempted to be fresh and appeal to a young audience, casting Simon ‘Inbetweeners’ Bird and showcasing some of the latest Indie music (with Adam pouring salt into his brother’s mug oddly being set to drum and bass), its humour was often very stale and predictable.

It was all too obvious that Mum, obsessing over the Masterchef final, would inevitably find out the result; and that the man who came to pick up the sofa bed would get his tea in the salted mug. Similarly, some of the humour, such as Dad eating out of the bin and the sofa bed falling through the banister was reminiscent of the kind of humour that should be followed by a laughter track (and not in a knowing Miranda-esque way either). Despite the fact that creepy Jim offered something different, I couldn’t help but think the whole weird neighbour shtick has been done (more successfully) before, such as in BBC Three’s Him & Her.

The show just didn’t seem to know its audience, with its modern packaging not matching its largely dated content, as the comedy was often so safe and run-of-mill it was hard to notice it. Having said that, I have to admit to laughing on a few occasions: the pregnant pause when Jim didn’t say how he broke the toilet and when Martin didn’t know how to take a high five both earned a polite snigger. I also thought there were some charming, well observed moments, such as Martin starting the episode topless (“I’m boiling”) - classic Dad - but these glimpses of potential were lost amongst too many flat and funny moments in the show.

All in all, Friday Night Dinner was an unsatisfactory affair. Whilst typically you might give a sitcom an episode or two to ‘settle down’ or ‘hit its stride’, if I do watch the next episode, it will be out of hope rather than expectation, as I fear that Friday Night Dinner simply won’t have enough on the menu to keep me coming back for more.

The next episode of Friday Night Dinner airs this, erm, Friday at 10pm.

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