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There’s a certain Gavin and Stacey feel to Craig Cash’s The Café as the opening scene pans over the picturesque seaside image of Weston-Super-Mare. Sadly, while the latter appealed to a multitude of audiences with laugh-out-loud humour, the former has all the lacklustre family-based dialogue of The Royle Family, but none of the Jim Royle.
We open to an interaction between a trio of the show’s most prominent characters, Mary (June Watson), Carol (Ellie Haddington) and Sarah (Michelle Terry) - three generations of women who spend their days whining about men, or lack thereof. While failed writer Sarah is free and single, and not a lesbian, she has to assure mother Carol, who is racked with her own financial problems, that she is content without a man. Grandmother Mary, on the other hand, does little other than attempt humour by repeating herself every two minutes.
Cue the appearance of Richard (Ralf Little), who, riding off the success of The Royle Family, we would expect to provide a few laughs. Little falls short of this, however, and comes across as a highly desperate, failed rockstar-despite apparently having turned down a gig as a Meat Loaf backing vocalist. What Richard fails to provide in the humour department is somewhat compensated for by the endearing sexual tension between him and Sarah, who, we are informed, used to ‘date’ twelve years ago. Furthermore, one of The Café’s more redeeming features is Chloe (Phoebe Waller), who, despite coming off as achingly annoying at first, does muster a few giggles later on by her blatant lack of tact.
As the show progresses we become more and more aware of the café's residents’ lack of prospects in life, which is exemplified by the introduction of John, who turns up in a Porsche looking for the nursing home in which his mother resides. Of course this is ensued by Carol’s predictable attempts to goad her daughter into asking him out, despite the fact the two had known each other years previously while doing their A-levels.
In the penultimate scene, we see Sarah questioning why she had ended up stuck in the café, which is tactfully retorted by her grandmother with a reminder that she lost her boyfriend, job and all her money. In the final scene, we see John (Daniel Ings) come to blows with Richard, who berates him for not visiting his mother often enough. Just as it looks as though something remotely exciting may happen, the show comes to an abrupt end, having made quite frankly, not much of an impression.
While The Café does have its fair share of endearing, if not a little desperate, characters, it’s fair to say this is not Cash’s best work. Where The Royle Family benefitted from a fine balance of geriatric giggles and louder, cruder humour, The Café has not yet achieved the balance, and can come across a little dull. While it might be a non-offensive twenty minutes that you could happily play to your nan, it’s definitely not worth Sky plussing.
The Café continues Wednesday at 9pm on Sky1.
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