The five comedy series to get to know me

If we laugh at the same things, there's a good chance we'll get along.

Comedy is subjective. Aside from videos of cats getting tangled in window blinds—which is universally funny—no two things will make people laugh in the same way. Sometimes, comedy isn’t even intentional, and yet it has it’s own fuel that powers a joke across multiple generations. I’m thinking of comedy that isn’t even meant to be comedy, like the wizard’s chess game from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. ‘NOT me, NOT Hermione, YOU.’ Iconic.

Seemingly, my baby has a personal ambition to smear food onto every single surface within arm’s reach, so when she’s in bed (and after we’ve spent twice as long cleaning up after dinner as it took to prepare it), there’s an hour of down time before I start slurring from tiredness. Before I had a baby, my tolerance for dark and depressing TV was pretty low. I tried to watch Triangle of Sadness recently and had a good time with it up until the poo part (if you know, you know). Thus, comedies are pretty much the only thing I can handle now. I’ll laugh my way to bed, thank you very much!

There’s a pattern to comedies I like. The laughs aren’t ‘set up’, there’s no studio audience, the characters are the kind of people you’d bump into at the bus stop, and there’s a dry humour that underpins proper, hug-your-knees-in tenderness. My books are like this too, so it figures.

Here we go. My biography of laughs.

This Way Up

Aisling Bea writes and stars in this Channel 4 comedy about Aine, a smart and brilliantly sharp teacher who is getting her life back together in London after a ‘teeny little nervous breakdown.’ I love a comedy that includes a teacher who isn’t an uptight drag. I love an Irish written comedy, as well. It’s light and dark and all the shades in between, sometimes in the same sentence. As the series goes on, the sibling relationship between Aine and Shona (Sharon Horgan) is celebrated as an anchor point full of in-jokes, bleak conversations, and pure silliness, despite them being ‘proper’ adults.

There’s a scene in the first series where she goes for a cycle late at night and falls off her bike. When she gets back to her flat, she stands in the doorway with her crash helmet still on, on the verge of tears, not because she’s hurt but because she feels silly and childlike and small. I’ve never seen that kind of nuance so clearly depicted outside of my own head. It reminds me of the time I tried to paint a stupid little watercolour in the park by my flat, immediately sat in fox poo, and wanted to cry with the patheticness of it all.

I can’t favourite scene, so here’s an example:

Gavin and Stacey

Obviously, this one is far from being little known unless you lived under a rock for duration of the noughties. We watched it as a family before my brother went to university and last December I rewatched every single episode in an attempt to release enough oxytocin to tempt the baby out. It didn’t work, but at least she got used to the sound of my laughter. In fact, a shared love of Gavin and Stacey is what my agent and I bonded over right before I signed. Is it the reason she signed me? Who knows!

In short, Gavin and Stacey meet on the phone and after seeing each other in real life, their engagement sends them back and forth from Barry to Essex, quite often with their juxtaposing families in tow.

Every other line has become quotable. Some of them are quotes of quotes. In 2009, my family and I took a day out of our summer holiday to drive across Wales for the sole purpose of visiting Barry Island. I paid a quid to sit in the booth at Nessa’s slots. I squealed when I overheard a local say ‘What’s occurin',’ in the local Co-op. We had fully lost our minds (and hearts) to that tiny, kind-of-ropey, speck of Wales. It’s a total mash up of nineties British culture. If any of the characters sat next to you on the train, you’d inwardly groan, but you would fiercely love them by the time you pull into the station. Every character steals a scene. Dorris and the salad. Dorris and the drum. Dorris and her toy-boys. Again, iconic.

My favourite scene:

Spaced

Okay, this one has the most cult-like following, because it’s a bit weird, a bit arty, a bit abstract, and a bit chaotic. It’s from the nineties, I think? Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are literal babies, I know that much for sure. It’s directed by Edgar Wright, who directed pretty much all of their subsequent films, so expect OG hump cuts, rapid zoom ins, and many a nod to eighties and nineties pop culture.

The first time that I recognised someone I knew was on speed is because they were behaving exactly like Tyres, cycle shorts and rave hands included. I viscerally related to Daisy, an aspiring writer who actively avoids doing writing of any kind. Mainly, I love the total, unashamed love of geek culture. If I was into something as a teenager, I was into it. It wasn’t enough just to watch a film, I’d watch it three times, illegally download the script, and act it out with my friends. This show embraces that kind of nerdery.

Basically, Spaced is a cultural touchstone for the late nineties, down to the skinny scarves and heated debates about the inclusion of Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars episode 1-3.

My favourite scene:

Lovesick

Is there a more wholesome tale to be told via the medium of tracing sexual partners that you may or may not have given chlamydia to? I think not! Lovesick stars my first husband*, Johnny Flynn, is based in Glasgow, and is unbelievably wholesome. It flicks between the present and the past as Dylan maps his romantic fuck-ups alongside his quest for a soul-mate. Dylan is a soft boy. His friend, Luke, is the rugby lad from your uni, without the cancellable social media footprint. Evie is cool, sarcastic, and rocks a floppy beanie hat better than anyone in 2015.

It stars the Millennial version of a Richard Curtis cast, aka the best British comedy actors from the last decade. It’s so underrated, possibly because when it first came out, it was called Scrotal Recall, which is inspired, if not particularly palatable.

The roommates to soulmates vibe is what I was hoping to capture in The Wedding Crasher and Antonia Thomas, the actor who plays Evie, is exactly who appears in my head of when I think of Elissa Evans from The Lonely Fajita.

*not my first husband

My favourite scene:

Starstruck

I haven’t met a single person who has watched Starstruck and didn’t think it was anything other than absolutely delightful. It’s like a series length version of Notting Hill, except without the inherited wealth, fatphobic jokes, and foppish quiff of Hugh Grant.

Jessie (“a little rat nobody”) works in a cinema. Tom is an actor. When Jessie has a one-night-stand with Tom, she is now in the realm of ‘dating a famous.’ Let’s not lie, we’ve all wondered what that’s like. I once had a dream that Jude Law asked me to be his wife, but I found out he kept a genetically modified gorilla in his basement, so ultimately the relationship was doomed to fail. Y’know, that classic dealbreaker.

It’s written by and stars Rose Matafeo and a lot of her real life friends make the cast, so it has an incredibly genuine, unscripted quality to it. Their interactions are ascerbic and funny in that ‘can’t put your finger on one line, but you’re smiling throughout’ kind of way. It’s sweet, without being sickly. It’s the Kinder Bueno of television comedy.

My favourite scene:

Honourable mentions:

• Detectorists

• Derry Girls

• Big Boys

• The Change

• Man Like Mobeen

• Fleabag

• The Thick of It

• Afterlife

• Motherland

• Catastrophe

And with that said, I have genuinely run out of comedies to watch. Actually, tell a lie, I have five episodes of The Great left, but then I’m all out of content because—as we have ascertained—I cannot watch any more ‘chop their thumb off with a bolt cutter’ dramas, In just can’t! I’m all good for the swearing and sex of an 18, but the violence of a 12A.

Please, indulge this lil’ comedy nerd. What are you favourite comedy series to watch?