Fleabag, Catastrophe, This Country, Chewing Gum, People Just Do Nothing… you could probably name a few more of the highly original TV comedies that have helped to define the modern era of the British sitcom. But while all these have come and gone, and rightly left their mark, there is one sitcom that predates them and still endures. And that’s Not Going Out, starring Lee Mack as a wise-cracking layabout imaginatively named Lee.
First broadcast in 2006, it is now the second-longest-running British sitcom ever, after Last of the Summer Wine, another comedy whose appeal eluded many of the nation’s professional couch potatoes. With its rat-a-tat-tat of quickfire jokes, inclusive studio audience laughter and busy plots, Not Going Out may not be fashionable, but well over four million people tune in to each episode, which constitutes a hit in today’s dispersed TV viewership. And in an era where humour often errs towards the dark side, there is a refreshingly good-natured cheerfulness about the show.
What is even more remarkable than its longevity is that Not Going Out is so unapologetically old-school – harking back not just to the gag-heavy comedies of the 70s, but also to the theatrical farces of earlier decades. Indeed, each episode is a self-contained farce, the audience barely able to catch its breath between the jokes.
The new series, for example, begins with Lee following Anna, the wife of his best friend Toby (Hugh Dennis) to a hotel, where he suspects her of conducting an affair. After an inevitable mix-up, which sees him hiding in a cupboard, it is Lee who ends up in bed with Toby. The plot could have straight out of one of the so-called Whitehall farces popularised by Sir Brian Rix. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Not Going Out is produced by Rix’s son Jamie.
And given the quantity of jokes, it is impressive how many of them land. Mack and his team of gag writers have honed word play and the double entendre into a veritable art form. There aren’t many writers today who would include a gag about “bruschetta” being the Italian for an extramarital affair “because it means a bit on the side”. The lovely thing is that the audience groans at the brilliant awfulness of the pun – but groans affectionately.
For the benefit of oblivious readers who might actually go out on a Friday night (when the show is traditionally broadcast), Not Going Out began life in the mid-noughties. Initially written by Mack and Andrew Collins (later replaced by Daniel Peak), it was set in an apartment in London’s Docklands and starred Mack and Tim Vine as best friends Lee and Tim. Lee was also Tim’s lodger, occasionally stirring from the sofa to write inappropriate Christmas cracker jokes or try to impress his fellow lodger Kate (Megan Dodds). He was equally unsuccessful in both endeavours.
Dodds left the show after the first series, to be replaced by Sally Bretton as Tim’s quick-witted sister Lucy, who became the new object of Lee’s thwarted (for several series, at least) affections. Also joining the cast at this point were a pre-stardom Miranda Hart, as accident-prone cleaner Barbara, and Katy Wix as Tim’s nice-but-dim girlfriend Daisy.
And so the sitcom rolled on. And, like the current Conservative government, it has shown a remarkable ability to survive despite a turnover of leading personnel. Hart left after two series and Vine departed in 2012, although Daisy (Wix, by now a fan favourite) carried on for a further two. Deborah Grant and Geoffrey Whitehead, as Lucy’s parents Wendy and Geoffrey, and Bobby Ball as Lee’s father Frank, were promoted from recurring roles to the main cast in 2017, as the show was given a reboot.
Lee and Lucy having by then married and had their first child in the 2015 Christmas special, the sitcom’s timeline skipped forward seven years. The couple suddenly had three young children, while the spacious new family home was in the leafy Surrey suburb of Walton-on-Thames (close to Mack’s real home in leafy East Molesey). With the family finances somewhat opaque, it is not clear how they afford the mortgage.
It was perhaps this move to suburbia in 2017 – complete with a door chime reminiscent of such 70s sitcoms as Terry and June – that irked critics in an era when other comedy writers were busy redefining the genre.
Mack himself seems unconcerned. “I honestly never think about the audience,” he has said. “I wouldn’t know who’s watching, and frankly I don’t care, so long as enough people are.”
And they are. It seems that an awful lot of viewers still hanker after the communal experience provided by a live studio audience. Each episode is recorded at Teddington Studios (there are two main sets: the living room and the bar that Lee frequents).
There is little doubt that the humour has become broader and safer. I recently watched the very first episode from 2006 and was taken aback by some of its edgier themes – Lee, for example, dating an author who had suffered childhood sexual abuse. Or Tim returning from a nightclub wearing someone else’s coat, which contained a bag of cocaine. More recent series have veered towards family-friendly farce. Tonight’s includes a sequence worthy of Mr Bean as Lee, suspecting Anna, follows her to a hotel, disguised as a revolving book rack.
Bobby Ball’s casting also harked back to an earlier era of comedy – not least because it introduced some class antagonism between the in-laws. And class has long been a mainstay (some say a curse) of the British sitcom. Fans of the comedian, who died in October 2020, were much moved by Ball’s posthumous appearances in the already-recorded 12th series.
Dennis and Cruttenden have been welcome additions, and Bretton’s Lucy remains an effective sparring partner. But the departures of Vine, Hart and Wix have left Mack to do a lot of the comedic heavy lifting. And let’s face it, he isn’t the world’s most versatile actor. There isn’t a massive difference between the Mack we see as team captain on Would I Lie to You? and the character he plays in Not Going Out.
The taste these days is for more character-driven comedy such as This Country and Detectorists, or for shows that include a streak of pathos – so called “sad-coms” like Ricky Gervais’s After Life and Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life. The characters in Not Going Out are more like one-dimensional joke-delivery machines.
Some might sniff that the “aged formula of set-up, gag, set-up, gag” is running out of steam. But personally, I reckon that the gags remain consistently strong.
No external force will kill off Not Going Out. But perhaps its biggest threat comes from within. Mack is seemingly broadening his horizons, with ITV1’s The 1% Club proving his mettle as a game-show host, although another attempt at a sitcom, Semi-Detached (“too often relies on toilet humour and tired jokes”, opined Radio Times) was canned after one series.
Would I Lie to You?, on which Mack has been a team captain since 2007, shows no signs of flagging. In January, he reportedly said he would terminate Not Going Out after 100 episodes because “he liked round numbers”.
If this series ends on number 98, then a Christmas/New Year double episode would round off the requisite century. As Rob Brydon likes to say on the panel game he shares with Mack: was he telling the truth, or was it a lie?
Not Going Out returns to BBC One at 9pm tonight