TV Comedy Review Warren

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BBC – 2019 – Spoiler alerts The new BBC TV sit-com Warren, starring the usually reliable and excellent Martin Clunes as the eponymous hero, is the most unfunny comedy I have ever sat through. Warren is a miserly middle-aged driving instructor who lives in my home city, Preston. He is an intensely disagreeable buffoon. He shouts and swears at shop-keepers, flytip-dumps litter outside farms, refuses to upgrade his family from dial-up internet connection to broadband, and engages in petty one-upmanship struggles with the neighbours. Though a driving instructor, he won’t let anyone drive his car, even his own step-son, who he manipulates into working at a garden centre just so he can exploit the promised staff discounts. TV comedy has created some memorable monstrous characters, the bigoted Alf Garnet, the manic control freak, Basil Fawlty, the appalling jobsworth, Gordon Brittas, and Ricky Gervais’s egotistical David Brent, all of who are enjoyable to watch. Warren is just annoying, smug, mean, rude, unsympathetic and generally horrible. That his schemes go wrong should be pleasing but it was all terribly predictable, and we are even told how the episode will end half way through when Warren’s wife visits an obviously insincere pub psychic who predicts the arrest that comes at the end (Warren mistaken for a murderer through his arrogance). Oddly, the writers included Paul McKenna, a real TV psychic and hypnotist (of somewhat questionable motives). All the characters are one-dimensional and contrived. Why Warren has not been divorced is a real mystery. His wife is a stereotypical dutiful, ditzy housewife and mother, given to random bursts of paranoia, as in her inexplicable demand that her husband prove it’s really him before she will let him in the house. At other times she shows no such distress. It was just a sketch wedged in to shore up the comedy, in which there was literally nothing to smile or laugh about at all. Arthur Chappell