As much as I’m grateful to Lee Mack for saving Saturday night telly with The 1% Club, I am a little worried there may be a long-term downside.
If the game show hosting lark starts taking up too much of his time, he might end up being too busy to come up with another series of Not Going Out.
That would be a great loss for comedy fans – and a devastating blow for the BBC’s flagship channel, which would be left with no bankable returning sitcom for the first time in decades.
Ghosts has departed, Mrs Brown’s Boys is now just a Christmas treat, and I can’t imagine anyone is expecting to see Queen of Oz come back any time soon.
It looks like you’ll just have to enjoy Not Going Out while you can. Luckily, that shouldn’t prove too difficult.
I’ve watched all seven episodes of this new run and it’s in cracking form, with a couple of potential all-time greats amongst the seven.
This series began last Friday night in its usual understated fashion – they still hadn’t bothered to update the opening titles, and Lee (Mack) and Lucy’s (Sally Bretton) kids still had more screen time in said opening titles than they ever do in the show itself.
Not that you’d recognise them if they did appear in the show these days. What followed was classic Not Going Out, with a bog-standard sitcom set-up of Lee and Lucy mistakenly believing that Anna (Abigail Cruttenden) was cheating on Toby (Hugh Dennis) and Anna mistakenly thinking Toby was cheating on her.
This provided a platform for the cast to fire out the gags at a rate of almost three a minute, with Mack throwing in the odd bit of slapstick for good measure.
It’s difficult to pick a favourite gag, so I will go with the one that I laughed most loudly at.
Toby revealing that when he breaks bad news to his patients, he always likes to offer them a silver lining such as: “Good news! You won’t be in hospital much longer.”
Good to hear his bedside manner is as questionable at work as it is at home.
