Middle-class family life is back under a microscope as the BBC One sitcom returns after eight years
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One of the clichés often trotted out about television shows is that the characters “start to feel like family”. After all, as we grow up, become more atomised, spread out across the world, it’s easy to find yourself spending more time with the cast of your favourite TV show than with your own kith and kin. But while it’s a trite observation, it’s also quite true of the BBC’s Outnumbered, which puts middle-class British family life under a microscope, revealing its facts and follies for all to see.
As it makes its long-awaited return this Christmas, Sue and Pete Brockman (Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis) have some news. Some big, scary – whisper it – cancer news. But they aren’t going to let that derail their Christmas plans, as the three Brockman children – Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey), Ben (Daniel Roche), and Karen (Ramona Marquez) – descend upon the family home for the festive period. Oh, and then there’s Jane (Hattie Morahan), the local irritant the Brockmans can never shrug off, who becomes an extended interloper for the holidays. “This place is so much smaller than the last place,” says Sue, as the brood arrives at the new digs, “and they’re so much bigger.” And so they are: eight years have passed since the last Outnumbered special, and the kids are now in their mid-twenties.
Adulthood brings new challenges. “Are you going to stop paying for our mobile phones?” the children ask, in unison, when their parents tell them that they have an announcement to make. But there is something bigger at stake here: Pete, the world-weary Brockman clan patriarch, has prostate cancer. It’s a revelation that breaks the children out of their own crises: Jake has relationship issues, Ben is about to backpack across the Andes, and Karen has left another job after falling out with her colleagues. But does the dynamic with your children ever really change? However old they get, aren’t they always children to their parents?
Outnumbered has always been typified by a quiet sense of farce. Dennis, a master of dry British comedy, is a straight man whose visible self-repression always builds towards a frenzied release (here, he ends up, as the kids would say, yeeting the neighbour’s Christmas parcels over the fence). Skinner, meanwhile, is a ball of anxious energy, desperate for this fudged Christmas gathering to be a success. But while Dennis and Skinner are pros, the actors playing their children – who have been part of the cast since they were 11, 7 and 5, respectively – have lost something of the natural comedic instinct they displayed as kids. The rambunctious chaos of the Brockman household has given way to a gentleness that could be mistaken for blandness.
Of course, a Christmas special ought to be mellow. Outnumbered has always been a show for the whole family. Parents will sigh along with that feeling that their children will never get out from under their feet; kids will chime with that creeping recognition that their parents are mere mortals. “We’ll know they’re OK when they start taking the piss,” Pete reckons, after delivering his cancer bombshell. It is a show to be watched as a family, in a turkey fugue, before, or between, arguments about politics or football or who was the least-favoured child growing up.
An Outnumbered Christmas special is like a very simple two-act play. The cast assembles and a dramatic revelation is made. Curtain, go get a £5 tub of ice cream. Then, in the second act, everyone speeds towards a sense of acceptance with this new reality, demonstrating that blood is thicker than eggnog (figuratively, it’s actually not), and we’re all bound to our families by more than mere proximity. It’s a simple proposition, and a harmless one, and ought to provide 45 minutes of square-eyed communion over the fractious yuletide period.
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